Payment & Checkout Optimization

1. Product Selection and Basket

Shopping car abandonment and a consequent drop in conversion rates is one of the most highly dreaded concerns of all ecommerce website owners. Regardless of the quality of the products and the services you provide, there are several instances wherein a potential customer simply adds a product to his cart and then leaves without completing the payment transaction. While In some cases the customer does return to go ahead with the purchase at a later time, at other times, the products just lie abandoned, never to be paid attention to.

However by keeping in mind a few important aspects of marketing while creating your product selection and shopping cart page, you can enhance the user experience manifold and optimize checkouts on your website.

Incorporate a visually appealing product selection page that not only lists the most attractive features of the product, but also highlights the discounts and offers that are being offered to the customer.
If there is a listed item that is out of stock, it is a good idea to offer a functionality that helps users to punch in their email ids and receive a reminder, once the product is available for sale again. It is both annoying and time consuming for a customer to go through a series of unnecessary steps, only to find out that the product they wish to buy is currently unavailable.
To err is human. And your customers are bound to make mistakes when they add the products to their shopping carts. You must provide them with a modification functionality that allows them to remove the wrong product and go ahead with selecting the one that they actually want.
Since your customer will most likely want to review the products added to their cart, your basket should provide them the links, specifications and also photos of products that have been added for purchase. This helps them ensure that they have finally got what they were looking for and can safely click the submit button to make the payment.
Integrate mini shopping carts on your product selection page to generate a small pop up window that keeps the customer within the purchase loop. The mini cart appears on the foreground of the product selection page and displays all the relevant information regarding the selected products including size, price, and color and so on for the customer to review it.
It is extremely important to ensure that your ‘add to cart’ or ‘proceed to checkout’ buttons are well placed both at the top and bottom of the production selection page and are clear and conspicuous to instantly capture the attention of the customer.
Also ensure that your shopping cart carries a functionality of ‘continue shopping’ that allows the user to go back to product selection and make multiple purchases in the same transaction, while also staying in the loop.

Product Customization

Personalizing the user experience by allowing them to customize a product as per their preference is a marketing strategy that most businesses today are making massive profits from. To cite an example, the leading bicycle maker Trek, allows his customers to design and build their own bikes from scratch. Product customization has also been a driving force behind the success of ecommerce giant Amazon. The concept not only ensures that the consumer gets exactly what he wants, but also stays happily loyal to your business.

Our expert marketing teams at Globibo Media, help you design excellent product selection and shopping cart pages to lure your potential customers into completing their purchases in one go, and increase your conversion rate multiple times over for greater profits over time.

2. Registration Process

While it might be a great way of gathering customer information and replenishing your database, the registration process must be designed in such a way that it does not end up annoying a potential customer who could have otherwise gone ahead with the checkout process and made a transaction. It is good idea to keep the fields in your registration form to a minimum. If possible you can also entirely skip the registration process and directly bring the customer to the payment website. This ensures a faster checkout for the customer and substantially reduces the chances of an abandoned shopping cart. Here are a few things that you must keep in mind while designing your registration page:

Keep it conspicuous

The navigation link or button that directs the customer to the registration page must be properly labeled and easy to find, so that the customer does not end up on a page he doesn’t expect. The user must be allowed to make a conscious decision of whether he wishes to register for a purchase on your site or not. You can also help your users understand the benefits of creating an account in simplifying their purchases from your site in the future.

Incorporate the facility of social media logins

Most ecommerce website nowadays offer their customers the provision of using their already existing Twitter, Facebook or Google accounts for registering on the former. Accepting logins from previously created social accounts help ecommerce websites pull the relevant data from other websites with minimum hassles to their customers.

Keep your forms short

Nobody likes to fill in hundreds of details about their personal self just to register on a website for a purchase. As a matter of fact, the length of your registration form can largely impact the user’s decision in going ahead with the transaction or abandoning his cart and leaving the site. The idea is to extract the most relevant pieces of information without annoying your customers with unnecessary details.

Provide clear instructions

You can make the registration process relatively stress free for your customers by offering them adequate instructions such as number of characters required, case sensitive or not, for filling out the different fields in the form. In case your customer makes a mistake in the form, the respective erroneous field must be highlighted to grab the attention of the user and prompt him to make the necessary correction.

Globibo Media offers you the necessary expertise to build the most effective registration process that instigates people to create their personal accounts on your website, and keep returning to take up your services in the future as well. The data that you extract from registered accounts of your customers helps you in personalizing their user experiences and monetizing your marketing efforts.

3. Payment Options

With the evolution of technology, it has become exceedingly simple to make your purchase payments on ecommerce websites. Most ecommerce websites are integrated with electronic payment systems such as credit cards, online banking and cheques which allow you to make cashless transactions for your online purchases. The customers can also make their complete payment in cash when they receive the product delivery at their doorstep. However it is extremely important to keep your payment gateway secure in order to establish your credibility with the customers. Let’s have a look at the various payment options that most ecommerce websites offer to their customers.

Credit Cards

About 90% of the people in North America employ the use of credit cards for making payments for their online purchases. In order to maintain the security of such transactions and keep them fraud-proof, the online merchants practice stringent rules that have been stipulated by the credit card issuing companies such as MasterCard and Visa. Although the actual internal process of credit card payments for online purchases is quite complex, the customer simply has to fill out a few of his credit card details on the payment page.

Online Payments

A payment processing website called the PayPal allows online payments and money transfers for ecommerce websites registered with it. In exchange for a fee, PayPal allows the users on its integrated ecommerce website to transfer the payment amount online for a purchase that they make.

Cheques

Users are also allowed to make online purchases by using post dated cheques filled out for the purchase amount to be paid to the vendor. The purchased items are locked away from the inventory until the cheque gets cleared by the online merchants’ bank.

Cash on Delivery

One of the commonest payment options that almost all ecommerce websites offer is the cash on delivery option, which requires the customer to make the full payment as and when he receives the delivery of the purchased products.

Globibo Media helps create a simplified and highly secure payment page that prevents your website against any fraudulent transactions and ensures successful completion of purchases made on your ecommerce website.

4. Shipping Options

One of the most important aspects of making the shipping of your products to the customers successful is providing them information on their expected delivery dates on the checkout page and then adhering to the stipulated schedule to enhance the credibility and reputation of your brand. A few things that you must consider while designing your shipping process are:

By offering free shipping of purchased products to the respective customers, you can make your offer extremely attractive yet cost effective for you. Just quote a minimum purchase amount that they need to buy the items for, to be eligible for the free shipping offer.
Along with your standard free delivery you can also provide an option of faster delivery at an additional fee. For instance, if a person wants to make an urgent buy, he will prefer paying a little extra to receive the products within a day’s time, rather than getting the product a week later free of cost.
You can offer address suggestions on the shopping cart page to prevent any unnecessary address corrections from your carrier later on. By verifying the addresses early in the checkout process, you can also offer any one day delivery options that the customer’s area of residence might be eligible for.

Our dedicated team of professional experts at the Globibo Media offer excellent solutions for designing shipping options for your merchant website. By ensuring secure shipping and delivery of your products on time, you can not only establish a reputation for your brand, but also increase your sales tremendously.

5. Terms and Conditions

For all ecommerce website owners, it is absolutely essential to have a well drafted agreement of Terms and Conditions that is linked to your store. The fundamental contents of your terms and conditions are designed to provide legal protection to your business with respect to the products and services that your customers avail from your website. It outlines your liability over a defect or damaged product and also stipulates the level of coverage that you are obligated to provide in case of a conflict with a customer. The basic content of T&C should be as follows:

All the additional billing charges including taxes, shipping and other fees should be properly described in your T&C.
It should stipulate your intellectual property rights over the design, logos, content and product names of the brands advertised on your online portal.
A well written clause and disclaimer for limitation of liability must be comprehensively mentioned on the terms and conditions page. It should clearly define the extent of liabilities in terms of product warranties of the items being sold.
A clause describing the way in which a dispute or conflict with a customer will be dealt with, must also be included in your T&C. It should also mention the jurisdiction in which your business is located, and that the law of that particular area will be upheld in case of a legal dispute with a customer.
In addition to this, your terms and conditions must also contain information regarding the general terms of service including return polices, out of stock items, special offers, shipping options and so on.

Globibo Media offers your expert assistance on designing a well written draft for your T&C agreement that encompasses all the major aspects of online businesses. We extend our complete support in safeguarding your business against illegal and unwarranted allegations by creating a set of T&C which comprehensively address every legal issue of your business that must be looked into.

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