Getting visitors to your website and convincing them to click the buy button is a challenging task in today's highly competitive e-commerce space. However, all your efforts can go to waste if potential customers abandon their carts at the last moment. With cart abandonment rates averaging around 69.99%, it is important to optimize your checkout process to provide the best experience for your customers, reduce abandonment, and maximize conversions.
In this article, we'll explore five proven steps to enhance your checkout page and achieve higher checkout conversions.
Quick Summary
What is an abandoned cart?
An abandoned cart occurs when a customer adds items to their online shopping cart but leaves without completing the purchase
How can you reduce abandoned carts?
- Offer multiple payment methods at checkout
- Allow guest checkout
- Ensure mobile compatibility
- Streamline checkout and simplify loyalty incentives
- Prioritize security
How can SeerBit help your business?
SeerBit’s checkout is fully optimized to help you offer multiple payment methods to your customers and reduce fraud in other to maximise conversions.
Tips for reducing cart abandonment
1. Offer multiple payment methods
To deliver an exceptional checkout experience, you have to provide your customers with multiple payment options, and tailor your checkout to include payment methods that are relevant to their preferences and geographical locations.
For instance, card payments and bank transfers may be the popular payment methods in Nigeria, but in East Africa, mobile money is the more preferred payment option.
By offering localized payment methods, you not only enhance convenience but also build trust, increase sales, and expand your customer base. If you partner with a payment solution provider like Seerbit, you can offer a wide range of payment options to your customers depending on their location across Africa.
What can you do?
- Consider the geographic regions where you have the most customers and compare their preferred payment methods to what you currently offer at your checkout.
- Customize your checkout process to cater to different shoppers at different locations
- Consider adding new payment options and prioritize the ones that are relevant to your customers.
2. Allow guest checkout
Requiring first-time customers to create an account during the checkout process can lead to cart abandonment. While it's necessary to collect information for a seamless future purchase experience, the option to skip account creation can prevent potential customers from abandoning their carts and provide a smoother buying journey.
“With ecommerce platforms becoming more and more popular, you don't want to discourage one-time shoppers,” says John Cheng, founder and CEO of Baotris. “A lot of people may see the process of creating an account as an obstacle, because they are looking for a fast and easy way to buy the product they want.”
Give your online shoppers a seamless experience,by allowing them to complete either checkout without an account.
What can you do?
- Make it easier and faster for guests to complete their purchase
- Do not make account creation a compulsory step at checkout
3. Ensure compatibility with different devices
As smartphone penetration continues to grow in Africa, it is safe to say that most of your customers will be shopping through their smartphones, tablets, and other devices. Hence, you must optimize your checkout process to be seamless across multiple devices.
Many businesses tend to overlook this when integrating their checkout, but it’s an important part of optimizing your checkout process and increasing your checkout conversions.
What can you do?
- Ensure that your checkout is compatible with various operating systems and devices.
- To ensure a seamless user experience, test your checkout on various devices.
- Streamline the checkout process by minimizing required fields and providing clean layouts for easy data input.
- Consider implementing in-app payments if you have a mobile app to provide a frictionless checkout experience.
4. Streamline checkout and simplify loyalty incentives
The checkout process is one of the most important moments in the customer journey. It's the last step of the sale, and it can also be a major source of friction. That's why it's important to make the checkout process as smooth and easy as possible.
One way to do this is to offer customers the option to save their payment and delivery information after their initial purchase. This allows customers to checkout quickly and easily, without having to enter their card information or address every time they shop from you.
By saving their information, returning customers can complete their purchase faster and even have their reward schemes tied to their payment cards.
When customers link their loyalty program to their payment card, they can earn points or miles for every purchase they make. These rewards can then be redeemed for discounts, free products or services, or travel. It will also help you to gather valuable data about your customers that can be used to improve their experience.
What can you do?
- Streamline the shopping experience by offering to save card details securely through tokenization.
- Partner with payment providers who can collect valuable data on payment behavior.
- Integrate payment information with your loyalty program for added convenience.
5. Prioritize security
Customers are increasingly concerned about identity theft and fraud when shopping online. To increase checkout conversions and build trust, you must put measures in place to reassure customers that their personal and payment information is safe and secure.
However, striking the right balance between fraud prevention and customer experience can be difficult, and if not done correctly, can result in the loss of legitimate customers.
That's why partnering with a payment solution provider like SeerBit, which provides businesses with fraud monitoring and security features like 3D Secure 2, can help you and your customers feel confident in your transactions and enjoy a smooth payment process.
What can you do?
- Incorporate additional authentication to your checkout flow.
- Use fraud tools to target fraudsters while minimizing inconvenience for genuine customers.
- Configure your risk tools to suit your business needs
Read: How 3D Secure 2 protects your business from fraud
How can SeerBit help you?
Seerbit offers an improved checkout that allows your customer to pay with their preferred payment method and in different currencies quickly and securely. Our checkout is easy to integrate on your website and has several conversion optimization and built-in features.
SeerBit's Checkout is fully optimized to maximize conversions. You can streamline your payment collections across 8+ African countries with a single API integration, gain access to all supported payment methods so your customers can pay you easily, and automatically authenticate high-risk payments with a 3D Secure 2.0 integration, among other things.
If you’re building a mobile app, you can integrate an in-app authentication flow with our mobile SDKs to provide a seamless experience without redirecting your customers outside of your application.
We are constantly iterating, adapting, and improving our solutions to help you meet the ever-changing consumer and regulatory demands, so you can spend less time on integrations and more time on your business.
