6 Ways To Optimise Your Checkout With Magento Commerce

Cart abandonment is a challenge that most online retailers face. There can be many reasons shoppers may abandon their cart including unexpected extra costs, an overwhelming checkout process or the site may not offer their preferred payment method.

Magento Commerce offers various ways to solve these checkout problems, and many more. Here are six ways that Magento Commerce can optimise your checkout; helping create an exceptional user experience and ultimately increasing your online revenue.

Clearly Display All Costs

Unexpected additional costs, such as tax and shipping fees, is the number 1 reason why shoppers abandon their carts. Make sure you avoid hidden fees and instead, clearly display the tax and shipping costs along with the product price in the shopping cart.

The latest version of Magento Commerce uses an integrated Vertex tax solution which takes into account the latest tax rates and rules internationally. This allows accurate tax fees to be instantly calculated and displayed in the shopping cart. Not only does this ensure your customers are always paying the correct tax fees; it eliminates the need for your team to check the latest tax rates and manually update your tax table.

It’s also important that you give your customers full transparency into shipping costs. Magento Shipping handles this by automatically calculating and showing the order’s total cost according to the shipping option the customer selects.

Offer a Range of Shipping Options

Different people have different budgets and delivery timeframes when shopping online. This means you should cater to everyone’s expectations by providing a wide range of shipping options such as Next Day Delivery. Magento Shipping connects with many global shipping carriers, so there are plenty of options to suit your customers no matter which country they are based, what their budget is, how quickly they want their order delivered or whether they would like it to be tracked.

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Offer A Quick Way To Buy

Filling out payment details to make a purchase is time consuming, and many online retailers are starting to offer quicker alternatives to streamline the checkout process for customers. With over 237 million active PayPal account holders, many shoppers prefer to pay with the fast (and secure) option of PayPal. This payment services provider eliminates the need to fill out a long form, as only the account holder’s email address and password are needed.

Magento Commerce offers an Amazon-like experience through instant purchase. Logged in customers can simply click an “Instant Purchase” button on the product page and they are taken to a confirmation page; eliminating the steps required in the shopping cart. The customer’s stored details will be displayed in a pop-up box and they simply click an ‘ok’ button to confirm their purchase. Merchants have found that instant payment has helped increase impulse buys and purchases via mobile devices. Also, since there aren’t a lot of retail sites that offer instant purchase options, this could help differentiate your website from your competitors’.

Image source: Magento.com

Improve Mobile Checkout Experience

The cart abandonment rate on mobiles tends to be high compared to other devices. Mobile users are often shopping while on the go so the checkout process needs to be quick and easy. Also bear in mind that too much information on a small screen can be overwhelming so this should be avoided.

Magento 2 offers a fast and intuitive checkout for mobile users. It is fully responsive and designed to reduce the amount of information that customers need to submit. These are some of the checkout features that make help create a better user experience:

• Automatically saves the user’s address so the next time they login and order, they won’t have to fill this out and skip to the payment step
• The billing address will be pulled from the shipping address, so this saves time (unless they want to change the billing address of course)
• Postcode detection enables the cart to only display the shipping methods relevant to the shopper’s location
• Automatic detection of credit card type

Offer Flexible Payment Terms

Shoppers may not have a big enough budget to purchase your products immediately, particularly if your products are of high value. Instead of allowing these potential customers to slip through the net, you could offer a credit solution, available via PayPal Credit, Klarna and others. This allows shoppers to pay through installments. Research conducted by Klarna suggests that on average, customers using credit solutions made 79% more purchases and spent double the amount compared to other customers within a year. It’s therefore well worth considering a credit solution offering (if you have a high average order value).

Another payment term that Klarna offers is “Pay Later” – letting customers try their purchases before they make payment. Depending on your preference, your customers can pay directly to Klarna 14 or 30 days later. This eliminates checkout friction and can be a tempting option for shoppers. For example, a customer may be unsure if a dress would suit them. Parting with their hard earned cash can feel like a gamble, but Pay Later can make it an easier decision to order it. The speed and ease of Pay Later has proven to have a big impact on conversions. Klarna claims that customers using Pay later have an average order size 20% higher than card payments and order value 15% higher.

Ego.co.uk has increased conversions with Klarna, advertising “buy now, pay later” with Facebook campaigns

Provide Flexible Fulfilment Options

According to Forrester Research, 61% of online shoppers want the ability to buy online and pick up their order in store. Click & Collect not only helps omni-channel retailers increase online checkout conversions, it can also help increase in-store sales. 40% of customers who order online and collect in-store will end up making another purchase when they visit the store.

Magento Commerce Order Management (MCOM) makes it easy for retailers to fulfil orders from multiple locations and channels such as stores, warehouses, drop-shippers and third party logistic companies. The cloud-based system uses metrics such as location and logistics to determine the most appropriate fulfilment options for the user. As well as this, MCOM allows your product pages to display real-time information on which stores have the product in stock and how many they have available.

Giving your customers more options for how they receive their orders can make a big difference to your revenue and can help you gain loyal customers too.

To recap, Magento Commerce offers many ways to optimise your checkout: you can offer your customers various shipping options, a seamless mobile experience and provide transparency with up-to-date shipping and tax costs. Your site can even exceed customer expectations by providing an instant payment option, flexible payment terms or additional fulfilment options.

To help you decide which cart optimisation options to prioritise, Magento Commerce has a built-in analytics reporting system. This features useful metrics and charts including a checkout funnel which shows the drop-off rates at each step of the checkout process, allowing you to identify any points of friction.

If you would like to find out more about what Magento Commerce can do for your business, we’d love to hear from you so get in touch.