First you need to know why customers leave

Research has found that the top reason why customers leave during the payment process is "excessive additional costs" (such as shipping, insurance, taxes, etc.) . These usually occur after the website requires an account registration (no "Guest Pays" option), a long and complicated payment process, not being ready to buy, overpriced products, needing to save or add to a wish list, etc.

Here are 7 major problems with uncompleted purchases and how to solve them:

Additional taxes, slow delivery and excessive delivery fees

Amazon Prime offers free 2-day shipping, allowing its customers to expect their purchases to arrive faster. But not all e-commerce websites can provide such services like Amazon. Can it be said that they can only disappoint customers because of slow delivery and high delivery fees? uncertain.

Solution

Based on your business, you may be able to work with a local logistics service provider to streamline the delivery process. Generally this would require investing a lot of money and resources in customized in-house package tracking software like Amazon does. For other businesses, there is now a wealth of software that can help you manage tracking, shipping, catalogs, and even finance and fleet management.

For additional taxes and fees, you can solve it through coupons or regional promotions. For example, remind customers in a certain area that there are promotions or discounts.

An Australian e-commerce company not only provides free shipping services above a certain sales volume, but also tells you how much more you need to increase to meet the free shipping threshold. By providing a variety of payment methods, we provide customers with more convenient and faster payment methods. Some merchants on JD.com and Taobao are also doing this.

But perhaps the biggest and most effective change you can make is to offer free shipping, which can increase conversion rates as much as possible. But how many customers will complete payment because of free shipping?

The answer may surprise you.

ComScore’s research shows that 90% of the customers who participated in the survey will be attracted by the free shipping policy, 58% of them will add other products to meet the free shipping threshold, and half will choose the slowest delivery method.

Site issues: slow loading speeds, crashes, complex payment processes

Problems on the other hand are often site-specific, regarding the technical capabilities of the shopping cart platform or the site itself . Two main issues – the speed of the website and the speed of the payment process. This also affects customer conversions.

For loading speed, we need to check for issues that may be causing the page to load slowly. You can use tools like GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed ??to spot problems, and you'll get suggestions on how to make your pages load faster. For example, how to check Amazon.com:

While there are a few tricks (perhaps that "just work"), GTMetrix provides a lot of information so we can figure out where to start to improve performance and loading speed. For example using CSS is a possibility for loading speed optimization, although less commonly used.

Resolution

Because this is SitePoint, I won't go into detail on what is necessary to resolve each issue, but if you have any issues, find your server administrator and Front-end engineers start optimizing every detail. Just finding the problem without solving it will not improve your website loading speed at all.

Even if your page loads quickly, you still need to pay attention to the payment process. Unusually complex payments, no guest payments, and the payment process requiring too much information are minor but still major concerns for customers.

Research shows that customers also have problems entering shipping and billing information when making payments. This common sense information should not interrupt the user experience at this stage.

The following improvements can be made:

Synchronize shipping and billing addresses by clicking the checkbox

Pre-fill relevant information, even if there are errors

Automatically fill in geographic location information and complete it

Clearly identify which information is required and optional

Only require the same information to be filled in once (such as name, email, address, username/password) )

Reach the "Thank you" page

Letting customers reach the "Thank you page" is our ultimate goal, but many websites set up many obstacles to this. A common complaint among users is that too much information is required during the payment process. The shopping carts of most e-commerce websites provide a standard and peaceful billing/shipping information window, which we can improve here.

Solution

For example, a single-page payment process is more efficient. Amazon even applied for a patent for “one-click ordering.” Luckily, with your shopping cart platform, there are now many single-page options available. For example, plug-ins or extensions provided by WooCommerce, OpenCart, Magento, etc.

Is it surprising that single-page payment is the panacea for all e-commerce conversion rates?

Not exactly. Some research reports indicate that some tests show that the conversion rate of multi-page payment is sometimes not inferior to that of single-page payment. The core issue that affects ease of use is not entirely the number of pages. Second, individual items (such as the inability to automatically use the shipping address as the billing address) lead to the loss of users.

It all comes down to testing. Test and document the friction and uncertainty caused by any user frustration, anger, or outright confusion that ultimately leads to abandoned payments. Every target audience is different and has their own preferences and perceptions when it comes to completing payments. Any obstacles in their path should be discovered and resolved.

The deterioration of forced registration

No matter which payment system you use now, forced registration is an ongoing problem.

Requiring registration before users can pay (or not allowing guests to pay) often prevents orders from proceeding.

While requiring users to register may seem like a smart idea from a business perspective (because you want to maintain long-lasting interactions with them), users get nothing in return for doing so. Maybe they were busy at the time, or just shopping for a gift, and didn’t want to be bombarded with your marketing emails and text messages. They just wanted to complete the payment smoothly and quickly.

Smart payments can encourage users to complete registration by saving orders for easy payment next time, or creating and saving wish lists and other features not available to visitors. This brings us to consider the buying process itself.

Beyond "Add to Cart"

The most likely scenario is as follows: the user visits your website, becomes interested in the product, agrees with its price and delivery, and then leaves. Maybe they just want to find the right item to save at first, or maybe they’re not ready to buy yet. For the former, many popular platforms already have wish list functionality built into them.

Although wish lists cannot directly lead to purchase conversions, we can use this to maintain interaction with customers and remind them that they still have a wish list and the items in it, especially during price promotions.

The most important thing is that "add to cart" or "wish list" can collect valuable user data for your analysis system and even create personalized services.

Solution

What are you going to do when your users don’t want to save the desired item? Or think they’re not ready to buy yet? The answer lies in the idea of ??a buying funnel. Rather than just a basic path from start to finish, the path to purchase is more like a winding street.

Customers may come to your website through a search engine, and then look for the best-priced products, compare prices with other e-commerce websites, compare shipping options, look for coupons, compare colors, sizes, etc. They even turn to social media to seek recommendations from friends and family. So you can see that conversion is not a simple one-hit-kill thing.

If you don’t offer your customers’ preferred payment method, they may have other options. Especially when Paypal (domestic Alipay) is not supported. Most customers are unwilling to purchase via credit card, and if you only offer credit card payment, they may leave and go elsewhere.

Follow up after the sale

Finally, even if the above issues are resolved and the payment process is eventually improved, you may also notice that a large number of customers only buy once and never come back. . What if you expect them to come back and make repeat purchases?

One of the main reasons is after-sales service. After they complete their order, a large number of advertising emails (promotional information, new product launches, quarterly discounts, etc.) fill their inboxes. Although you think this is helping them understand the latest information, customers may not really think so.

For our e-commerce customers, we recommend that they use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure and study whether their recent customers are satisfied with their purchases. This allows you to quickly locate and prevent after-sales problems, thereby promoting customer retention and generating greater customer value.

Among the 467 responses we received, 83% of the respondents were willing to recommend this e-commerce company to others. This score is very high, which directly reflects their excellent after-sales problem handling, fast shipping speed and the quality of post-transaction email follow-up.

But it would be better to make them editable than to lose them entirely. Maybe they only want to receive the main promotion of the current period, where new products are available, but only a few times a month. Most email marketing systems allow customers to access individual subscriptions (sometimes called accounts) to update their preferences accordingly.

Take the first step to improving payments

The bottom line is that when we talk about improving e-commerce payment conversion rates, optimizing the specific process itself cannot solve all your problems. . We need to dig deeper to understand why customers are not placing orders and decide how to streamline the process.

To this end, we need to conduct high-quality usability and conversion research, through survey questionnaires, observing users’ entire payment records and where customers get stuck and lose. This is not necessarily a panacea. Each e-commerce merchant has different audiences, business processes, and audience pain points that will lead to different payment funnel losses.

Summary

In short, pay attention to your customer's entire process from beginning to end. Any negative factors should be removed. This may sound counter-intuitive, but never give your customers a chance to leave, whether to learn more about a product, look for coupons, etc. If they can’t find what they need on your website, trust me they’ll find it somewhere else!