How to Avoid the 3 Most Common E-Commerce Checkout Mistakes
by Michael - June 20th, 2008 10:51 am
Is Your E-Commerce Solution Making the Grade or is it failing your business during the final exam?
Here are three of the most common mistakes made during ecommerce website development and design:
1. The Easy Out
When it comes time to click a button to submit the customer’s order, that’s all they need to see – a submit button. Don’t confuse them or given them the easy out by placing a ‘cancel’ button right next to it. That’s almost like saying “are you really sure you want to buy this?” and in many cases the answer is going to end up being no.
2. Defaults
Believe it or not, having the wrong defaults set up in your online forms can be a big subconscious mistake. Instead of having your shopping cart set to default to Visa as a payment option for example, look into an ecommerce shopping cart software solution that will automatically detect the type of card being used based on the card number entered by the customer.
3. Lack of Confidence
Display your contact information prominently throughout the checkout process, and assure your customers that at any point they can call you to ask questions or even to complete their order with a live human being if they so desire.
In addition, have your ecommerce shopping cart software tested on a regular and consistent basis to ensure that there are no errors popping up during the process and do whatever you need to do in order to avoid those Internet Explorer popups that remind visitors that they are entering information on an insecure website.
The shopping cart and checkout process should be quick, easy and trouble-free and if it isn’t, it is your sales numbers that will suffer.
Related posts:
- The SummerCart Open Source Shopping Cart Solution From the PR Canada news wire I learned today about...
- The 4 in 1 Shopping Cart Special Over the weekend, I spent money. I spent a lot...
- Real People Visit Your E-commerce Store – Ask Them What They Think of Your Site You lose customers every day, and that’s a fact. Some...
- Monetize International Traffic & Sell Overseas with FiftyOne If you sell products throughout the U.S. but have always...
- Web Usability and Branding – What Are Your Customers Really Looking For? When people talk about how to increase their website conversion...
December 28th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Thank you, the points you mentioned are definitely very useful, just to add in my two cents:
1) Make the Checkout Process as simple as possible – I read somewhere a while back, the more pages & clicks you add to the process, the more likely is the customer to “opt out”
2)Use the information that the customer is entering intelligently : There is no bigger turn off for the customer than to enter the same information all over again..
3) Make sure the customer knows that paying through credit card is 100% safe on your website (or, let him / her know, that the website does NOT store credit card information & so it’s safe…)
4) Innovate the whole process : I came across this Ajax based “drag-and-drop” to shopping cart feature… that’s so innovative & cool.. something that’s bound to intrigue the customer!