7 Proven Strategies for Ecommerce Checkout Optimization

The most pivotal (and oftentimes high-risk) moment of the ecommerce shopping journey is the point of purchase. Once potential customers reach the checkout, a culmination of the entire shopping experience occurs, and the checkout experience can either aid or derail a purchase decision. 

Brands should employ ecommerce checkout optimization measures to ensure hard-earned site visitors become customers, and potentially even repeat customers or Superfans. Focusing on the checkout experience prioritizes high-intent customers’ experience and improves the journey of customers who are most likely to make a purchase. 

This guide will discuss and explain seven proven strategies to optimize your ecommerce checkout experience to help focus your online efforts where they can have the greatest impact on revenue, brand reputation, brand loyalty, and even your brand’s long-term viability.

What is Ecommerce Checkout Optimization?

Ecommerce checkout optimization is the practice of enhancing the checkout experience to best reduce friction, aid the purchase decision, and provide a convenient and intuitive end to the shopping journey. The user experience before checkout “hooks” the sale (user adds products to the cart), and the checkout experience reels in the fish (the purchase). Ecommerce checkout optimization ensures that your online brand has the right fishing line, hook, and reeler to bring in sales.

Ecommerce checkout optimization focuses on the end of the shopping journey and aims to alleviate any friction a customer might experience at the highest point of purchase intent. Checkout optimization strategies generally focus on shipping, security, purchase validation, convenience, and user experience.

Why Checkout Optimization is Essential 

Customers who reach the checkout are the highest-intent customers in your shopping journey; this is why checkout optimization is essential. Customers who reach the checkout have experienced the full extent of your brand’s efforts and are likely the most expensive subset of customers, assuming their traffic was the result of paid ads and they interacted with any third-party features on your site with an associated cost. An unoptimized or cumbersome checkout experience puts the most expensive and easiest to convert customers at risk of bouncing or abandoning cart.

Further, customers who successfully complete a transaction are considered existing customers, and the brand can then gather data on their preferences, personalize any future experiences, employ cross-sell and upselling techniques, and foster brand loyalty with lifecycle marketing efforts. Brands have much more to gain from checkout optimization beyond just a few additional transactions.

Eric Panofsky, Founder/CEO of SLTWTR says, “Checkout Optimization is a priority for the players in the ecommerce platform space, and Shopify’s is notably the most performant. But optimization goes beyond core performance metrics from a platform level and presents opportunity for brands to engage and delight consumers in this critical step of their journey. The transaction with the brand is the event that leads to an increased lifetime value (CLV), and surfacing the mechanisms for that deeper engagement during checkout is the optimization what brands should be evaluating today.” 

7 Ecommerce Checkout Optimizations to Implement Now

Ecommerce checkout optimization strategies are critical to ecommerce success and often simple to incorporate into your checkout flow. The following seven strategies involve psychological triggers, convenience enhancements, data collection, and incentivization—adopting a couple or all of them will enhance your brand’s customer experience, revenue, and profitability.

1. Leverage Social Proof and Reviews

One of the reasons a checkout experience might lead to an abandoned cart or low customer confidence is uncertainty surrounding the cart contents. Customers will often add items to cart as a makeshift wishlist or shortlist of items to consider before making the final purchase or committing to spending at the online store.

The job of the reviews to affirm the purchase and provide confidence that the customer made an excellent choice. This is where displaying social proof in the form of reviews, and UGC across your website including PDPs are most effective in the checkout experience. 

2. Personalize the Checkout Experience

Brands should consider adding personalized product recommendations, exclusive discounts to logged-in users or loyalty members, or even fields for displaying the customer’s name in the checkout flow. Personalization not only creates the opportunity for upselling or cross-selling but also helps affirm the purchase and indicate to customers that their business is valued.

3) Quizzes

Customers are more likely to complete their purchases and successfully proceed through the checkout flow if they are confident the products in their carts suit their needs. Quizzes are an interactive, engaging, and seamless feature to include in your shopping journey that will direct customers to the most suitable product in your assortment for your customers’ needs. In addition to collecting valuable zero-party data, quizzes have a “personal-shopper” effect and provide personalized recommendations that can easily be added to cart (ideally with one click).

4. Post-Checkout Surveys

Surveys and requesting customer feedback are important throughout the customer shopping journey, but the survey that would get the most comprehensive feedback lives at the end of the checkout flow. While this strategy might not necessarily reduce abandoned cart rates, it does help online brands identify what works and what needs improvement from customers who have seen the full experience from end to end.

It’s important to note that post-checkout surveys only represent the opinions of customers who have successfully completed a checkout flow. Therefore, the feedback may be skewed in favor of the brand. 

5. Create a Post-Checkout Referral Module

Customers who complete a checkout flow are far more likely to be brand advocates and vouch for the brand to family and friends. In the post-checkout time frame, brands can multiply the effects of their checkout optimization efforts by incorporating a referral module to encourage referral traffic and word-of-mouth advertising.

Brands invest plenty of budget, paid spend, time, and effort to acquire customers and ensure they make it through the checkout flow and complete a purchase. With a post-checkout referral module, brands can potentially acquire multiple customers for the price of one – thereby multiplying the impacts of their checkout optimization strategies.

6. Utilize Cross-Selling and Upselling Techniques

Once a customer begins proceeding through the checkout flow, the experience should be seamless and encouraging, so as to ensure a purchase. Cross-selling and upselling techniques in the checkout flow are beneficial for two reasons: One, they increase average order value and encourage the customer to try additional products, and two, they prevent the customer from clicking out of the checkout flow and delaying purchase.

Every additional click in the ecommerce shopping experience represents a potential risk of the customer bouncing or exiting the website. For this reason, keeping product discovery contained to the checkout experience after a customer has already begun the checkout flow prevents abandoned carts while also increasing average order value.

7. Offer Relevant Discounts and Lay Out Loyalty Bonuses

Discount codes and in-cart promotions are the ecommerce equivalent of negotiating prices with an in-store salesperson. They prevent customers from clicking away from the checkout flow to search in old emails or coupon sites to find a discount and potentially abandoning the purchase altogether. To encourage customers to proceed through the checkout flow, make it easy for them to find relevant discounts or apply earned loyalty rewards with a loyalty extension mid-checkout.

How to Fix Cart Abandonment Issues

Even after implementing many or all of the suggested strategies in this guide, your brand is still likely to experience some level of cart abandonment. Oftentimes customers just need one final nudge or reminder to finally make an ecommerce purchase. These two simple strategies can help reduce cart abandonment rates.

Adding Reviews to Abandoned Cart Emails

Customers will sometimes abandon their carts if they are skeptical of the product. To alleviate hesitance, add reviews or other forms of UGC to abandoned cart emails. Another customer’s testimony will remind the abandoning customer of the great quality or features of the product from an unbiased source. 

Abandoned Cart Surveys

While post-checkout surveys collect valuable feedback, they do not fully represent what could be wrong with the checkout flow that might cause a customer to abandon cart. Brands can identify issues in their checkout flow by adding surveys to any abandoned cart campaigns. In doing this, they might find that even small tweaks to the checkout experience can have a big impact and thereby reduce abandoned carts in the first place.

Importance of Measuring Your Checkout Process

Learning when customers tend to bounce can help brands make improvements to the checkout offering, features, steps, and user experience. Monitor each step of your checkout flow and measure whether customers successfully complete steps or bounce due to a complicated checkout process. 

If customers tend to abandon their carts at the delivery step, consider offering additional delivery methods. If customers tend to abandon their carts to browse additional items, consider employing and A/B testing cross-selling or upselling features. Continuously monitoring your checkout data can also help flag any critical issues before they persist for too long and detrimentally affect sales.

Leverage Okendo for Ecommerce Checkout Optimization

Okendo’s suite of products allows brands to optimize the checkout experience and amplify the optimization strategies for long-term and sustainable growth. Utilize Okendo Reviews to affirm your customers’ selections, vouch for your products, and create confidence in your brand. Okendo Reviews can highlight your best reviews at pivotal points throughout the shopping experience, like when the customer is about to make a purchase.

Okendo Surveys allows brands to gather valuable customer feedback throughout the shopping journey and thereby isolate feedback from different customers. A post-purchase survey will help your brand identify what works in the shopping journey from the perspective of customers who successfully converted. Meanwhile, an abandoned cart survey gathers feedback from customers who did not have a successful experience and provides insights on how best your brand can improve the checkout flow.

Okendo Referrals offers a post-checkout referral module to amplify your brand’s checkout optimization efforts. With this feature, your brand can potentially acquire additional customers for the CPA of one customer and even encourage the original customer to return for a repeat purchase. 

Make the loyalty experience of your checkout flow clear, user-friendly, and frictionless. With Okendo Loyalty, your brand can let customers see their rewards balance and redeem rewards without having to search their inbox for a reward code. Your checkout experience can encourage your most loyal customers to proceed with their purchases and relevant discounts confidently.

Conclusion

The checkout experience is one of the most pivotal and high-risk steps of the online shopping journey. While many elements might dissuade or hinder a customer from successfully completing a checkout flow, optimization strategies can just as easily remedy the checkout experience and create a pleasant, simple, and seamless transaction.