The Seamless Checkout Experience
A seamless checkout experience is a key driver of your business’s success.
People live their lives in such a rush these days. There seems to be so much to do, and people are always surging towards the next thing. That’s why speed and efficiency are so valued by customers. If you are known for quick, low-fuss service and great customer care, you’ll probably get a lot more repeat business. This is especially true online, where lag time increases bounce rates.
If your website takes more than three seconds to load, your visitor will abandon the attempt and move on to the next Google listing. If this happened during a shopping experience, or after a would-be customer followed a promotional link to your page, you may never get a chance to recover that sale.
Here are a few other reasons why smooth purchase processes are important.
Greater customer confidence
Just like offline shopping excursions, the faster a customer can check out and leave your store, the happier that customer will be. Online, this process starts from an attractive shopping cart that is easy to load. Customers should be able to add their items with a single click, proceed to checkout, and be verified instantly. This lets them buy while their mood is still high. Before they begin to second-guess their purchases or get upset over your ‘slow cashier’. Fast checkout also reduces the window of time available for their transaction to be intercepted, so customers have less time to worry about card theft. Any delay in verification can potentially put them into panic mode.
Fewer abandoned carts
Even the least computer savvy buyer gets uneasy when the buffering icon stays on the screen to long. They imagine someone is typing away in a dark room, stealing their card details and the contents of their bank accounts. Some customers aren’t that concerned about theft, but they do get bored staring at a lagging screen. At this point, they are likely to abandon the purchase. They might close the web page or refresh it, which starts the whole process again. If they have to resubmit their data, there’s a good chance they’ll leave. Plus, reloading a cart may lead to double-charging, which could lead to chargeback–and worse: losing your customer’s trust.
More cross-selling opportunities
If you’ve shopped on any of the big sites, you’re familiar with ‘you may also like…’ or ‘frequently purchased with …’ These features allow you to cross-sell related products and services, but they only work if the customer is happy with you. If their earlier purchase took a few seconds, then they may have a few more minutes to spend on buying this extra item.
Of course this feature can only work if your checkout process is clean and not clunky. There would have to be a smooth transition from product listings to the card to the merchant processor to the purchase confirmation. Then the additional cross-sells need to be contextually positioned. It should feel like a natural follow-up, not an invasive sales pitch. Design is key.
For more information on seamless checkout, or to sign up for a merchant account, please call (888) 924-2743 or go to Charge.com.