3 Tips For Improving Ecommerce Checkout Performance

How to Optimise Your Ecommerce Checkout For Better Customer Satisfaction

Online customers today expect a seamless shopping experience from their chosen Ecommerce brands. They seek reliability, speed, and engagement.

For an Ecommerce manager or store owner, the checkout page is the critical point to showcase these qualities. Optimising your checkout experience impacts more than just cart abandonment rates; it also enhances retention, customer lifetime value (LTV), and long-term profit margins.

With 69% of online carts abandoned, many issues stem from backend processes that aren’t immediately obvious. Here are three backend optimisations used by successful stores that you can implement today.

Improving Checkout Experience and Operational Efficiency Key takeaways:

• Shipping Costs: No customer enjoys negative pricing surprises. Accurate and transparent shipping costs enhance customer satisfaction and reduce cart abandonment.

• On Time Fufillment: Ensure successful shipping fulfillment and reduce logistical errors by employing multi-faceted data verification on your Ecommerce store.

• Mobile Checkout Optimisation: Streamline the mobile shopping experience by removing barriers and limiting input required from the customer.

Transparent & Upfront Shipping Costs

Shoppers don’t like unexpected price increases or negative pricing surprises. In fact, the additional cost added to Ecommerce purchases due to shipping and associated fees is the number one cause of shopping cart abandonment and is still the second most common pain point for customers who shop online.

Today’s customers have come to expect free shipping - either completely, or atleast over certain price thresholds (e.g orders above $100). This isn’t feasible for all stores, so it’s critical for your store to state this clearly and accurately present shipping costs at the first opportunity. Offering the wrong shipping rate can also eat into your profit margin, so it’s important for the customer and the store to ensure the correct rates are presented.

Utilising integrations or plugins that precisely calculate the most affordable shipping rates based on customer address data can help immensely. Having the address data linked to shipping costs and shared upfront can enhance the customer’s trust in your store and reduce cart abandonment.

Optimisation: Ensure that your shipping is not overly generic or too expensive. Link address fields to your shipping estimator to verify details and calculate accurate prices as customers enter their addresses. Real time shipping plugins are available across Shopify, WooCommerce and other popular Ecommerce platforms.

Data Verification for Successful Shipping Fulfillment

Securing the first purchase is vital for e-commerce stores. It sets the tone for future interactions and can significantly influence customer lifetime value (LTV). A positive initial experience, driven by accurate data verification, builds customer trust and ensures a smooth checkout process.

In the short term, address & email verification in the checkout builds customer trust by ensuring the accuracy of information in the forms, which enhances the checkout experience. Customer’s feel confident that their details are correct when they are suggested to them correctly with metadata such as postal or unit codes, leading to a smoother transaction.

In the long term, verified data ensures a smooth purchasing experience by preventing delivery issues such as delays, misdelivery or even negative reviews. This results in positive sentiment towards the store and your ability to provide quality goods on time as promised - highly improving your chance at securing further purchases from that customer and extending the LTV of your customers.

Addressing a common challenge with point of entry data verification - Unit addresses

One common challenge with address verification tools is handling unit addresses, such as apartments or flats, which often include designations like “2A” or “2B.” Free tools frequently struggle with these specific addresses due to outdated databases that lack comprehensive coverage of new homes or the apartment style living present in Australia. When selecting a data validation software for your Ecommerce store, make sure to choose one that:

• Regularly updates its databases.

• Includes detailed address components to ensure accurate verification even for complex addresses.

• Is responsive and integrates seamlessly with your store.

• Ensure that your data quality platform integrates seamlessly with your existing systems, such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and other CRM systems.

• Implements real-time verification to catch errors at the point of entry, reducing the need for later corrections.

Optimisation: Accurate customer information is vital for timely deliveries, gaining trust and reducing costs associated with misdelivery. By using data verification services, such as the one offered by Addressfinder, online stores can ensure they meet delivery promises and improve checkout user experience.

Mobile Optimisation with Autocomplete and Fuzzy Matching

Mobile shopping is on the rise with current statistics suggesting 63% of online purchases are made via mobile devices. You likely already knew this, but optimising the mobile checkout experience is essential.

Speeding up the checkout experience and removing barriers or potential inputs required from mobile users will be the most successful in bringing up your conversion rate (allow for guest checkouts, quick add-to-carts, etc). A more under the radar optimisation is implementing autocomplete behaviour in checkout fields.

Small screens and keyboards can lead to typos and errors in customer data. By allowing autocompletion in your checkout for address fields, the data verification tool can utilise fuzzy matching to guess and suggest verified address results based on the inputs made so far. Addressfinder can accurately suggest verified results in as little as four keystrokes, dramatically reducing the demand on the mobile user to fumble through forms.

Implementing fuzzy matching address autocomplete tools reduces the amount of input required from mobile users, making their shopping experience smoother and more enjoyable. These tools help prevent errors and speed up the checkout process, contributing to higher conversion rates.

Optimisation: Shopify has natively embedded Google’s address autocomplete within their store checkouts as it has a proven impact on conversion and store success rates. If your store doesn’t already have this enabled, make sure to embed either a free or paid tool immediately. Take a look at your address requirements and current costs associated with misdeliveries to understand the level of data quality, and the address autocomplete tool that you need.

Conclusion

Optimising your Ecommerce checkout is essential for customer satisfaction and improving your store’s performance. This article covered 3 simple optimisations you can make to optimise your checkout experience.

Transparent Shipping Costs: Clear and accurate shipping costs build trust and reduce cart abandonment. Utilise integrations that link address data to shipping rates to provide precise costs upfront.

Data Verification: Ensure that addresses, emails, and phone numbers are verified for accuracy. This not only instills customer confidence during checkout but also guarantees successful deliveries.

Mobile Optimisation: These features reduce input errors and speed up the process, leading to higher conversion rates and better customer satisfaction.

By implementing these strategies, you can create a more seamless and enjoyable shopping experience for your customers.