Streamline Your Ecommerce Store's Checkout Process
Throughout my time working on carts, reading blogs and studies about carts and just in general learning about cart abandonment I have found some general rules of do's and don't's as far as your shopping cart checkout pages are concerned. These guidelines will hopefully decrease the cart abandonment in your store and drive sales.
First for the DON'T'S for your shopping cart checkout process
- DON'T use single word buttons like "continue," "apply," and "proceed." These words are ambiguous in meaning.
- DON'T display the credit card month name. On credit cards, the month is noted by the month number, not by the month name. You will want the customer to be able to easily match up the month number on their credit card with the month number in your pull down menu.
- DON'T use multiple columns for form fields. You do not want to put some credit card information fields in one column, and the rest in another, because customers will overlook the second column. This will throw up errors when the customer tries to checkout, which can deter customers from completing their order.
- DON'T have too many fields for the customer to fill in.
- DON'T require customer registration. People have enough usernames and passwords to keep track of as it is; you do not want them to be required to add another set just to order 2 or 3 products.
Now the DO's for your shopping cart checkout process
- DO note the steps in your checkout process. You will want to setup a linear checkout process.
- DO add descriptions to your checkout fields.
- DO ease customer's fears with security.
- DO explain why you are collecting personal information such as email addresses.
Streamline Your Ecommerce Store's Checkout Process Labels: Ecommerce Tools - Streamlined Checkout