Increasing the checkout conversion rate in 5 steps

Imagine you’ve rigorously tweaked your website, bringing the user experience and design close to perfection. You’ve carefully analysed the target audience and slogged through marketing peculiarities to attract more visitors to your majestic website and nudge them to initiate a purchase. But all these efforts fell utterly flat as your customers reached the checkout. At this very last step of the sales funnel, some checkout or payment-related issues have stopped users from making a purchase, resulting in lost sales for you.

We sincerely hope that’s something your business has never faced, but such an unenviable situation is a reality for some merchants. That’s because many people associate the conversion with the website’s quality and, at best, with the effectiveness of marketing efforts. Although, as the fictional tale we started with supposes, forgetting about the payment experience can be very damaging to your checkout conversion rate.

In this article, you’ll learn how a bad checkout experience affects conversion rate, which solutions can help you avoid it, and how to get them to boost conversions. We’re sure you’ll want to have them on board once you know the benefits.

Cheatsheet

Conversion is when a user performs the desired action. In our case, it’s the purchase, but generally, it can be the download, registration, sign-up, etc.

Conversion rate is the percentage of users, or website visitors, who complete the desired action, i.e. a purchase.

Checkout is a page or a set of pages customers see as they proceed to the purchase. It is also the term for the purchasing process.

What is a checkout conversion rate?

Why checkout experience is essential for the conversion rate

For every online business, the usability of its website is the bedrock of its success. In this regard, it is crucial to think of a checkout page as the essential component of your website, which it truly is. However, some businesses still neglect it, resulting in consumers’ frustration and lost sales.

According to the survey of American consumers conducted by Hanover Research, more than half of consumers have experienced some technical issue at the checkout page. Across Europe, a significant number of consumers reported they had abandoned a complicated payment process in the past. For merchants, this is the right way to increase the shopping cart abandonment rate, but nobody in their right mind would want that for their project. As for the conversion rate, it rarely winds its way to growth. You should try and optimise your checkout process to boost conversions and make your success rates flourish. And don't forget about the checkout page design!

How to increase the checkout conversion rate

Here’s a checklist on how to increase the conversion rate by fixing the issues preventing customers from checking out:

• Design your checkout page carefully. If you’re developing the checkout page design by your own efforts, adjust it to the look and feel of your website. If you’re considering using a third-party solution, choose the one providing robust customisation opportunities. You must also ensure the checkout page is adapted to various screen sizes and easy to use on different devices.
• Optimise the user experience. Users want the checkout experience to be frictionless, fast, and smooth, and you’re capable of fulfilling their expectations. Consider enabling retries in one click, releasing a user from re-entering payment details if the transaction fails. With such a button, you can lower the decline rates. Still, sometimes the friction can be caused by the payment providers’ glitches or downtimes. For such cases, rely on smart routing and cascading, forwarding a transaction to the best fitting provider.
• Ensure personalisation. Personalisation is one of the hottest e-commerce trends. Odds are you’ve heard a lot about the personalised approach to marketing communications, but you can personalise the checkout experience, too. For instance, your checkout page design could allow returning users to save payment data, ending the routine and errors of manual re-entering. Sophisticated checkout solutions empower customers to save and manage payment details. It boosts customer loyalty and allows you to increase the conversion rate.
• Enable alternative payment methods. It expands the circle of your potential clients and makes you stand out from those providing one or two options. Before rushing into connecting as many payment methods as you can find, analyse your target audience and regions. It will help you focus on a few payment methods your customers would really use.
• Provide localisation options. When you’ve identified the top countries in which you want to sell, it’s easier to choose which payment methods to provide and into which languages you can translate your website and checkout.

How Corefy can help

Having over ten years of experience developing and promoting payment products, we’ve tested and learned what works best in terms of payments and how to increase the conversion rate. These insights and months of purposeful research helped us find the optimal balance and bring our own advanced сheckout solution to the market. Our clients have already reaped the benefits of having it on board, witnessing an average 10-25% checkout conversion rate increase.

With Checkout by Corefy, you can handle:

• instant and one-click payments;
• donations with arbitrary amounts;
• payment details capturing and delayed charge;
• recurring payments;
• dynamic 3DS/CVV enabling or disabling;
• authentication with one-time passwords.

We developed it with both consumers and merchants in mind and following conversion best practices. If the dismal conversion hits you in the gut, contact us for assistance. We would be delighted to help you with e-commerce checkout conversion rate optimisation and answer all your questions. You can also request a demo to see our checkout in action and learn more about how it works.