Payment Form User Experience (UX): How to Reduce Checkout Abandonment
Companies can and do invest so much time and capital in creating online sales funnels with an intuitive, smooth, and personalized customer experience front of mind. For this reason, it can be incredibly frustrating when customers abandon purchase at the checkout stage. Companies quite rightly focus on improving their cart abandonment rates. But they don’t apply this update to checkout abandonment too.
Checkout abandonment versus cart abandonment explained. Hang on, there’s a difference?
Yes, there sure is. An important one at that. Cart abandonment is when a customer drops their virtual shopping bags at any point across your sales funnel while on site and leaves your virtual store. Meanwhile, checkout abandonment is when a customer decides not to complete a purchase exclusively at the payment stage of the transaction. It is critical to distinguish between both issues in order to take appropriate action to remedy the customer abandonment across the sales funnel from start to completion. After all, a cart abandonment strategy can be the best of the best, but if checkout abandonment remains an afterthought, much of your hard work can be undone at the payment stage if something puts a customer off from completing purchase.
Studies show that by focusing on improving checkout design, companies can increase checkout conversion by 35.26%. Specific elements to address include security, speed, offering a variety of payment methods, and displaying the final amount due in the customer’s currency, among others. A comprehensive approach to optimizing all of these elements will position your company to markedly improve its checkout abandonment rates and drive higher revenues as a result.
The main culprits: pinpointing the causes of checkout abandonment
According to an aggregate score of 41 individual studies, an average of just under 70% of sales are lost to cart and checkout abandonment. There are many reasons why customers choose not to complete a purchase online when they reach the checkout stage. And while it may be unrealistic to expect to eliminate checkout abandonment completely, you can absolutely minimize its occurrence in a significant way.
By understanding the specific reasons for this customer behavior, you are best placed to remedy them with the right solutions, and, as a consequence, generate higher conversion rates. Here are some of the most common reasons for checkout abandonment.
High additional fees
Extra charges typically include postage and packaging, taxes, and processing fees. Cited by 50% of customers who fail to complete the transaction at the payment stage, it is the number one reason for checkout abandonment.
Obligatory registration
Many online stores force customers to register in order to make a purchase, and often this mandatory step only appears at checkout. It is a surefire way to turn away a lot of customers.
Time-consuming process
Some checkouts are still littered with various hurdles that the customer has to clear. This can include inputting the same personal information two or more times. Frankly, the longer the checkout process, the more customers you are likely to lose to abandonment.
Those are the three most cited reasons by customers who have abandoned purchase at the checkout stage. Others include a lack of trust in the site’s security credentials, both with personal and financial data; slow deliveries; poor returns policy; lack of payment methods; and website crashes. Added to these motives for abandoning checkout, some customers might simply want to get an idea of cost on a purchase, whereas others may simply want to dream about something that they would like to buy but can’t.
Introducing Payment Processing Interface (PPI) Optimization
Many online stores are still dependent on antiquated payment processing interface (PPI) design. It is this older design that generates many of the problems that lead to checkout abandonment. PPI optimization modernizes the checkout process with a detailed, granular approach to the most common bottlenecks causing failures in purchase completion.
A best-of-breed payments processing interface does away with multiple pages and steps as part of checkout with a single, simplified page upon which the customer starts and completes the purchasing process in one fell swoop. A benchmark PPI provider understands that the checkout page should be easy to follow; offers multiple payment options, including debit and credit card, and PayPal; can demonstrate high website up-time performance to avert crashes; and enable companies to customize page design in line with their own branding and preferences.
Optimization of your PPI can also include advanced anti-fraud and data management protection with security features like tokenization and help make PCI compliance as straightforward as possible.
Solving checkout abandonment with a benchmark customer experience
Customer experience has overtaken price and value as the most important unique selling point among customers. Customers are increasingly demanding of an intuitive, personalized sales process at every touch point. And while it may seem like the payment process is a step that comes after an online store visitor is already convinced of making a purchase, this frankly is not the case, as the avalanche of checkout abandonment data demonstrates.
The checkout process is as much a part of, and just as important as, any other step along the sales funnel. The risk of foregoing the implementation of a fully optimized payment process interface means that not only are checkout abandonments likely to continue, but to rise in frequency, as customer demands continue to shift and technological capabilities keep on improving, notably in hyper-personalized CX. By integrating a benchmark PPI, your company can drastically cut the rate of checkout abandonment and enjoy greater customer satisfaction and increased sales.