You created a beautiful and user-friendly ecommerce website. You put in a lot of time and energy to write great content and create amazing products. All that’s left is for customers to actually buy your products. But this can be harder than you might think. Perhaps there’s something in your checkout process that secretly aggravates your customers. That’s why it’s important to optimize your customer’s checkout flow. In this blog, we’ll discuss five tips. So read on to learn more!
What is a checkout flow?
Let’s start with the basics. A checkout flow is essentially your customer’s journey from the moment they visit your website up until a completed transaction. This includes browsing your online store and your individual product pages, adding products to their cart, filling in their personal details, and paying for their items.
Why should you optimize your customer’s checkout flow?
By optimizing the checkout flow, you ensure that customers won’t be distracted by other things while they’re buying your product or service. Additionally, you want to reinforce their trust in your brand and your product. This will assure your customers that they’re making the right choice.
You can optimize their checkout flow by incorporating tactics like cross-selling and upselling. Both of these encourage customers to buy more products and spend more money. However, we recommend that you first focus on creating a smooth checkout flow for your customers before you incorporate other tactics.
5 tips to optimize customer’s checkout flow in WooCommerce
1. Have a quick and easy sign-up
You want to collect data from your customers, and the easiest way to do this is by having them create an account before they can check out. However, this can discourage one-time shoppers. They want a quick and easy way to buy your products. In addition, some people just don’t want to share all their personal details. That’s why it’s good practice to offer a guest checkout. Fortunately, adding a guest checkout is a matter of simply checking a box in WooCommerce’s settings.
But there’s more you can do! A lot of people have a social media account (if not multiple) nowadays. By allowing your customers to sign-up via a social media account, they can very easily and quickly continue to checkout their items. We recommend using the WooCommerce Social Login plugin, which allows for a seamless account creation. Customers can choose between multiple social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, and many more.
2. One-page checkout
In the same vein, consider implementing a single page checkout. Meaning: you simplify your checkout process by having all the necessary checkout fields on one page. So both the personal details and the payment details. Why should you do this? Because less is more. You’ll take away all the distractions and frustrations by having everything on a single page.
There are multiple great plugins if you want to implement this. The most obvious one is the WooCommerce One Page Checkout. But there are more interesting plugins to explore, such as the WooCommerce One Page Shopping plugin. This plugin lets a customer complete the purchase process right after they added an item to their cart. How? By having the checkout fields appear at the bottom of the same page.
You can also skip the cart altogether by downloading the Quick Checkout for WooCommerce plugin. This plugin adds a buy now button, allowing your customers to immediately go to the checkout page instead of their cart.
3. Provide multiple payments options
It’s good to know your audience and offer the payment options they want to use. Since no two people are the same, it’s better to provide multiple payment options instead of just one or two. Especially since some people only trust one specific provider.
There are a plethora of different payment plugins for your WooCommerce store. To name a few: Stripe, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and Square. We recommend doing your own research into which payment methods best suit your company. Just keep in mind that you also want to provide a great and easy shopping experience for your customers.
4. Create a smooth mobile checkout flow
Nowadays, more than 70 percent of people do their purchases on their mobile phone. This is a mind-blowing statistic. And all the more reason for you to optimize your customer’s mobile checkout flow. This means you should have a responsive website design that automatically resizes for different screen sizes. But it also means you need to make sure your add to cart and checkout buttons are large enough for fingers to press on!
And let’s not forget site speed. People don’t like to wait, especially when they want to make a quick purchase on their phone. So make sure your website is fast, no matter what device your customer uses.
5. Cross-sell and upsell
First: what’s the difference? Cross-selling means you want customers to add another product to their cart, while upselling promotes a similar but higher-priced product. Though they are slightly different, both depend upon you promoting highly relevant products. Because if the recommended products are too different, they have no added value to customers. Your customer could lose trust in your business and might be turned off altogether.
Another vital part of both cross-selling and upselling is making it easy for your customer to add another product to their cart. One way to do this is by using plugins. The Iconic Sales Booster for WooCommerce plugin, for example, is a great plugin for cross-selling. It gives you the option to offer cross-sells at almost every opportunity: on the product page, after a customer adds a product to their cart, at the checkout, and even post-purchase!
But if you also want to incorporate upselling, we recommend using the YITH WooCommerce Frequently Bought Together plugin. It allows you to display additional products right below the “Add to Cart” button on your product page. And what’s more, you can decide what kind of products you want to promote. You can show related products, cross-sells, upsells, or even custom products.
Conclusion: quick and easy
Of course, optimizing your customer’s checkout flow is an ongoing process. It isn’t a matter of one size fits all, so try out new things and see what works best! Just remember to make the checkout flow easy and quick. And don’t be afraid to ask your customers for feedback. They’re the ones who visit your website, after all.
