4 Common Mistakes That Complicate Your Checkout Process

Almost 70% of consumers abandon their shopping cart because of a complicated checkout process. But, designing a streamlined checkout process isn’t easy. Even fairly basic mistakes can drive away customers and steal revenue without you realizing it.

Fortunately, there are a few simple ways you can significantly improve your checkout process and reduce abandonment. Let’s take a look at some of the common mistakes that could be interfering with your process and how to fix them.

Requiring Account Creation Before Purchase
Does your checkout process require every new customer to create an account before they can make a purchase? If so, you are seriously undercutting your conversion rates. Forced registration can erode trust, frustrate customers, and end with cart abandonment. If you want to avoid this and ensure your checkout is conversion-friendly, make account creation (or registration) optional for customers.

Using an Interstitial Web page to Push Upsells
Using an interstitial page for upsells can create a horrible and frustrating user experience. These pages lengthen the checkout process, kill conversions before customers actually reach the cart, and cause major friction in your checkout flow. Once a customer clicks “Buy Now,” bring them straight to the shopping cart and make it as effortless as possible to complete their purchase.

Not Having Any Sort of Progress Indicator
A progress indicator is one of the best ways to provide clarity in the checkout process and encourage customers to complete their purchase. It can also improve the checkout experience for customers by allowing them to see exactly where they are in the process. There are several ways to create a progress indicator (a bar, numbered list, etc.) from a design perspective; however, we do recommend trying to fit all of the checkout stages onto a single web page.

Asking For Too Much Information
If your checkout process requires customers to fill out too many mandatory fields in the form, it could be costing you sales. Every extra field makes the checkout process longer and can create a frustrating user experience. Your goal should be the to make the checkout process as painless and fast as possible. Focus on asking just the essentials that you must have in order to process the payment.

Are any of these common mistakes complicating your checkout process? If so, it’s time to do something about it.

We know mistakes happen, and we are here to help. BMT Micro offers shopping carts with highly customized programming depending on your specific requirements. If you would like to learn more about our services or if you have questions, please feel free to contact our vendor services via email at vendors@bmtmicro.com or visit our website at www.bmtmicro.com.