Increase Your Sales This Holiday – 6 Tips to Improve Checkout

As we gear up for the busy holiday shopping season, it’s more important than ever for online retailers to offer consumers a seamless checkout experience, which can significantly reduce cart abandonment and impact a business owner’s bottom line.

A recent Baymard Institute study showed that the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is 68 percent – underscoring the need for retailers to have a seamless online checkout that can help capture some of those lost sales opportunities.

What are the key reasons that shoppers select products, then walk away without buying? Sometimes they don’t find their preferred way to pay online – for example, they may not want to pay with VTC Pay instead of a credit card. For other shoppers, fraud protection matters: They might not feel confident that the site will handle their personal information securely. And mobile shoppers may not finish a purchase either because it’s too challenging to complete them on small screens, or because the checkout steps are too complicated.

So if you’re a business owner, what can you do about it? VTC Pay has developed six key tips for businesses to improve their checkout process and help shoppers to complete their purchases.

Here is your cheat sheet:

1.Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. When you’re creating your online store, you spend a lot of time thinking about the fundamentals: Are you selling the right mix of products? Are you building an attractive and well-designed website? Is your supply chain as efficient as it can be? However, it’s just as important to consider the customer shopping experience. Try out your own checkout process to identify and eliminate steps that can frustrate, confuse or annoy customers. Friends and family can be a good way to get others to look at this experience as well.

2.Streamline and simply checkout. When you design an ecommerce website, the little things matter. Focus on removingobstacles on the path from product selection to completed purchase: Keep it simple, reduce the number of steps it takes to check out, remove having to retype lengthy amounts of information - use autofill, and store shipping and payment information.

3.Weigh the desire for customer data against the need to complete the sale. Now that data about customer habits and preferences has become easier to gather, it’s tempting to use it in your business so you can better serve shoppers. However, avoid asking for information upfront that isn’t absolutely necessary for the purchase, as it can deter some consumers from continuing their shopping experience at your store. Save your information gathering for the confirmation page after they’ve purchased or follow-up emails.

4.Make checkout easy for mobile shoppers. Streamlining checkout is even more important for mobile payments, where small screens and buying on-the-go create an environment ripe for cart abandonment. To make your site mobile-friendly: Design for the small screen, use larger fonts and buttons, minimize data entry, and remember to test, test, test!

5.Give customers the right information at the right time. Customers like to know what’s happening when they begin the checkout process: How long will it take to make a purchase? How much information will they have to hand over? How many online forms will they need to complete? Minimize confusion by telling customers what’s happening at each checkout stage.

6.Offer favorite ways to pay. Showing shoppers that you offer their favorite ways to pay can improve conversion rates – and sales. Provide customers with every way that they may want to pay to help improve conversions and drive repeat business.

In 2016, VTC Pay facilitated 6,5 million USD monthly transaction amount and currently has more 500 thousand Activated e-Wallets, including 10000 merchant accounts.  

Visit VTC Pay payment gateway site to learn more.