Checkout Conversion Index — What Merchants Are Missing!
Your business’s elaborate marketing plan has managed to pull a customer to the website — Kudos! However, the effort to retain him/her becomes susceptible to failure due to a frictional checkout experience, widely known as — Cart Abandonment. A merchant can expect to lose as much as 36% of sales due to the frictions that remain from discovery through checkout.
To convert the data revolving around this to meaningful insights, PYMNTS.com, in collaboration with BlueSnap, a leading provider of global, mobile checkout solutions releases a quarterly report that benchmarks the performance of 650 merchants across 14 merchant categories against 46 attributes that define the optimal online shopping and the checkout experience. The Index provides insight into what’s causing checkout conversion issues, as well as what merchants can do to overcome them.
The Checkout Conversion Index provides a look at what hurts conversion rates and creates shopping-process frictions — just how much money retailers are leaving on the table due to problems with friction and conversion, and why customers are abandoning their online purchases.
Some of the interesting results The Checkout Conversion Index found include :
· The best sites deliver results in a speedy 134 seconds — just over two minutes.
· Size doesn’t matter: the average Index ranking between small and large companies was relatively similar.
· 93% of the best sites provide trusted security logos when checking out to let their customers know that they care about their financial data and will safeguard it.
· The Automotive Parts & Accessories industry came in with the highest score of 91.
The Index has also helped in identifying the top drivers of Cart Abandonment:
1) Speed
2) Unexpected Cost
3) Form filling complexity including registration form
Speed –
Stats say –
· A 100-millisecond delay in website load time can hurt conversion rates by 7 percent
· A two-second delay in web page load time increase bounce rates by 103 percent
Best performers have a checkout process that is 50% faster than worst performers with also 50% lesser clicks.
Unexpected Costs –
The Baymard Institute asked over 2,500 US adults why they abandon their online purchase during checkout. Below are the latest results.
Two plausible solutions highlighted are –
1) Offer Free Shipping
2) Display Order Totals Upfront
Form Filling Complexity –
Two triggers of cart abandonment are –
1) Ask the user to create an account
2) Too long/complicated checkout process
The way around it is simpler than you can imagine –
· None of the top performers requires a customer profile.
· The best performers allow customers to tick a box and not retype their address twice if the shipping and billing addresses are the same.
Getting the website up and running is definitely completing 90% of the task, however, a smooth and frictionless checkout experience bags the remaining 10% — to score the final goal.
Sources—
- https://blog.onestepcheckout.com/2019/04/checkout-conversion-2019/
- https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2021/five-fast-facts-on-fighting-checkout-friction/
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