Golden Rules To Design Excellent Checkout Steps Pages

Cart is the place, where you can pull more money out of your customers’ pockets by showing them upsells. By keeping the added products relatively small to make upsells standout on the page, you can drive them to add more.

The probability to add more products is high, especially, when the advertised products are low priced, e.g. if the added product is camera, the cart can display cart accessories, (which are relatively low priced than cameras , like camera bags, covers, stands, etc.

With new programming methods, ecommerce websites can remember their customers on the basis of their email addresses. By offering them multiple ways, like already registered, new user or login as guest, we will help them checkout faster. The account page should not interrupt their shopping process. By asking those for minimal information and taking them quickly the next procedure will make the process hassle free.

The web users, today, dislike the word “register”. Use any other word instead, like “create an account”. The stage where the page appears is also critical. It should appear, once the customers opt to checkout enabling them to create an account with just 1 or 2 clicks. Make it simpler with 2 fields and 1 or 2 buttons. We’ve seen many ecommerce websites, where they force to register and people can’t buy without registration. This strategy comes out of their greed. They think they would trap the customers this way and by doing this they will not be able to levee without buying. This is totally w wrong and hurts the conversion.

First of all, remember to use one column for forms. The online customers find it difficult in understanding the difference between two fields in two columns of any form. Customers will abandon their purchases, if they enter anything wrong due to their misunderstanding and the page shows error.

The idea is to set a cheapest shipping option by default. More than 38% abandoned carts resulted when the delivery times exceeded 7 days. When the buyers complete his purchase, they are anxious to get their product and asking them to wait for 1 or 2 weeks is not acceptable for many.

Majority of the online shoppers order products and want to be shipped at their home address. So, it doesn’t make sense to ask them to fill all fields again. By using the same shipping address in the billing form, you can reduce the chance of typos or errors. The placement of checkbox at the end of the shipping address with the text asking them “Ship items to the above billing address” will work even better.

The best design layout of a good payment page is to bring form filling and presentation of information (order summary) side by side in two columns. The highly rated payment page designs show reassurance by telling their shoppers “You can review this order before it is final”, so that they more comfortable by knowing that they will still have an opportunity to confirm the order before finalization.

Leaving security concerns is a death to your sales. The satisfaction of shoppers is high when they see security badges. Shoppers are reasonably comfortable in giving their details when it prominently displays familiar logos, like Visa and McAfee.

One of the golden rules of UI design is to “Permit easy reversal of actions”. Online shoppers hesitate in going through the checkout steps pages, if they don’t see the last page to review their order before the last click.

The page should be clean leaving no ambuidity with notification that the order is not yet finalized, which gives them comfort that they can still redo everything. Once submitted, the shopper should be redirected to the order received page.