Did you know that, on average, almost 70% of customers abandon their shopping carts?
There are numerous reasons for abandoning shopping carts – from high additional costs to insecure payment.
You’re probably spending a lot of time and money trying to convert your visitors when they are at your WooCommerce store.
Unfortunately, many potential customers leave your store without making any purchases.
If you strive to increase your store’s sales and improve profit, you must ensure a better checkout experience using effective checkout optimization methods.
In this guide, we’ll cover the most important custom WooCommerce checkout page optimization methods to reduce your visitors’ friction and help you maximize your conversions.
We’re witnesses that you can increase your income by at least 30%, which is great, right?
Adopting these best practices to your business can help you optimize your custom WooCommerce checkout page and increase your income drastically.
But only if you focus on implementing these tactics.
If you’re ready to set your store to a higher level, let’s begin!
Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment
In case you suffer from high cart abandonment rates, remember that you’re not alone.
Many other online businesses are trying to figure out why they’re going through the same situation as you are.
What are the reasons that nearly 70% of online shopping carts are being abandoned every day?
According to Baymard Institute’s research, these are the main reasons for shopping cart abandonment during the checkout process:
While the reasons are numerous, all of those problems are related to one common thing ━ the non-optimized checkout process.
Solving those problems can significantly increase your conversion rate.
In case your store is on WooCommerce, we can help you solve that.
How to Improve Custom WooCommerce Checkout Page And Boost Your Conversions
It doesn’t matter how much traffic you generate on your store or how good your product photos are if your conversion rate is low.
Yeah, the number of sales you receive directly impacts your business’s success.
But a good checkout experience isn’t only about increasing your income, no matter what.
It’s also about enabling your customers to purchase easily and quickly, no matter where they are, and building long-term relationships.
So how to prevent your visitors from abandoning their carts and encourage them to make that purchase?
1. Simplify the WooCommerce Checkout Page
As you may see from the graphic above, 17% of consumers are abandoning their purchases due to a complicated checkout process.
Did you know that the average checkout process has about 14.88 fields which is almost twice as necessary?
A customer who is ready to buy something and adds a product to a cart should be able to purchase as fast as possible.
Having a lengthy checkout process will get them confused and frustrated, and your conversion rates will suffer.
For example, the standard WooCommerce checkout page has about 20 fields, which is much longer than an average checkout page.
What do you think about how this long form affects your potential customers?
Exactly.
So be wise in situations like this.
The more unnecessary steps you eliminate, the more conversions and money you’re going to make.
For example, iCheckout has only 6 fields by default, making the checkout process super easy for customers to go through, and you get all the information needed.
However, sometimes you’re gonna need an extra field or two, specifically if your business requires that information at checkout to fulfill orders properly.
To-do: Write down what information you really need from each customer, and then review it to see if you can exclude any information from your checkout form.
Note: The more extra fields you add, the more your customers will abandon the checkout page, so be careful. It’s okay to have up to 10 fields, but not more than that.
2. Set ‘Shipping Address’ the same as ‘Billing Address’ by Default
As we have discussed – the fewer fields you include on your custom WooCommerce checkout page, the sooner you’ll get more customers.
The “Billing Address” is another field that requires additional efforts from your potential customers, and they spend more time filling it.
Customers should have an option to check a box stating that their billing address is the same as the shipping one.
The primary reason why Ecommerce merchants ask for a billing address is to match the credit card information and to reduce the risk.
However, if your payment provider optimizes this process, this step may not be required at all.
3. Remove Any Page Distractions
The goal for your checkout page is more sales, more conversions, and more customers, right?
If that’s the end goal, you should focus only on that.
Make sure there are no distractions that could turn your customers away from the purchase.
To do that, you should:
- Completely remove the header, footer, and all the unnecessary sidebars
- Ensure that the checkout page only shows the information customers need to complete the purchase.
4. Keep Payments on Your Site
Did you know that Ecommerce brands lose $18 million in revenue every year due to cart abandonment?
While there are many factors that you should consider when choosing a payment gateway that fits your business, one of those factors is to choose one that allows accepting credit cards directly in your store.
Because if you send customers to a third-party site, they’re more likely to leave the checkout page or doubt the payment’s security.
5. Allow Guest Checkout
For customers who want to make a quick purchase, creating an account is time-consuming and deterring.
24% of customers are abandoning the checkout process due to the need to create an account. It’s absurd to push these people away.
Let customers choose whether they want to create an account or continue as a guest.
Using WooCommerce Social Login, customers are able to create an account using the one they already have(Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others).
Enabling this will simplify and speed up the entire checkout process for your customers, and it will help you increase conversions.
To do that, enter the WooCommerce Settings, then Accounts & Privacy, and check the guest checkout fields.
If, for some reason creating an account is a must, make the process of creating one as easy as possible.
6. Auto-Suggest an Address
About 4.7% of customers don’t get their packages due to shipping errors.
While this number doesn’t look significant, it costs merchants like you an average of $35 to $70 for each shipment error.
You can let this happen for a bit of time, but in the long run, this significantly affects your costs and profit.
To reduce these costs, there are WooCommerce extensions that can help you with this.
For example, you might use Google’s address auto-suggest so your customers may fill the form fields faster, saving their time and lowering the chances of your cart abandonment.
Also, checkout plugins such as iCheckout offer autofill features, so your users don’t have to manually enter their information when they first enter your store.
Instead, based on their address, all the other information regarding the address details, such as postal code, city, and country, gets automatically filled.
7. Display Shipping Costs Up Front
Surprises aren’t good for conversions, especially if those surprises are an additional cost. The majority of abandoned carts – more than 55%, are due to high extra costs.
You should ensure that the shipping and additional costs are visible on your “view cart” page.
This will help you eliminate the surprise the customer experiences at the end of an order.
Pro tip: You can use this in combination with mini-cart options, so your users don’t need to visit additional pages — they get it all within the mini-cart, which helps them purchase faster.
8. Offer Multiple Payment Methods
6% of users abandon their carts due to not having enough payment options. Another 4% abandoned it because their credit card was declined.
In today’s mobile-first digital world, customers have more payment options than ever and want more options when making purchases. Find a way to provide as many possible ways for payments.
Next to traditional debit and credit card payment methods, there are other ways to meet customers’ needs by ensuring options like:
- Cash on delivery
- Third-party payments such as Amazon Pay or PayPal
- Mobile wallets and extra checkouts such as Apple Pay and Google Pay
Explore your customers and find out what payment methods they use most, so you can ensure it for them using proper payment methods (such as Stripe, PayPal, etc.).
9. Include Upsells and Cross-Sells
Upsells are usually the same kind of product but at an increased price. It’s typically a better, bigger, or more feature-rich product.
A cross-sell is a kind of product that complements an existing product in the cart – for example, helmets for a bike or strings for a guitar. What’s important is that both upsells and cross-sells are great ways to increase your customer’s average order value(AOV).
With the Product Recommendations extension, you can add upsells and cross-sells to your custom WooCommerce checkout page based on the rules that you create.
You can recommend recently-viewed, top-rated or specific products established on what the customers already have in their cart.
And by going more in-depth with personalizing these offers will help you increase your conversions.
10. Show Trust Symbols
If a customer doesn’t trust you and your store, why would they give you their personal information or rely on you to complete their purchase?
The checkout page is your final chance to convey to the customers that you can be trusted to deliver everything they expect.
About 18% of customers will leave a cart if they are not sure of their credit card and information protection.
Since Credit Card frauds increase every year, customers want assurance that they are secure in your store and that they will not be a victim of fraud.
By installing SSL, adding trust symbols, and displaying your privacy policy – you can reduce their concerns and assure them that it is safe for them to purchase from you.
Display well-known logos below the payment for the securities you have on your stores, such as Norton, McAfee, or some third security provider.
Note: Also, make sure that you have an SSL certificate installed on your store.
In case you don’t, your customers will get a warning message from their browser, alerting them that your store may not be secure.
You must show them that they shouldn’t have a fear of shopping on your website.
11. Incorporate Cart Abandonment Emails
In case the customer comes to the end of your checkout process but doesn’t purchase, you probably have their email address.
You’re probably aware of the fact that email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels on the internet.
Did you know that each $1 spent on email marketing campaigns generates $32 of ROI?
That’s why it’s great to use email marketing to its full effectiveness in Ecommerce.
Also, sending cart abandonment emails is a strategy used by almost every large retailer.
You were asking why? Because it works!
According to GetElastic’s study, nearly 50% of all abandonment cart emails are getting opened, and more than 1 in 3 of them who click to get back to the site end up purchasing.
For this reason, every single cart abandonment email averagely generates $5 in revenue.
So, you can see why many retailers are using this checkout optimization idea – it gives results.
Cart abandonment emails are not just a simple and smart way to get your customers back to your store, but these emails also increase revenue.
The average order value(AOV) of recovered carts is 19% higher than regular purchases.
Capture these email addresses of your potential customers and set up an email autoresponder sequence that will notify customers that they left products in their cart.
Your initial cart recovery email should be followed up with two additional emails that will be sent over the next day.
What to include in these kinds of emails?
It’s good to show customers the concrete product they’ve left behind and include a CTA that will encourage them to return to your store and complete their purchase.
You should also consider offering a promo code in the email to motivate them to purchase.
Increase Sales With Custom WooCommerce Checkout Page Template
Having all these reasons and answers about cart abandonments, now you know how essential it is to have control over your WooCommerce checkout pages and process.
There are many plugins for WooCommerce checkout, but sometimes it can be hard to customize your checkout page using those plugins.
And if you don’t make it high-quality, your customers will leave.
You should pick a platform that gives you flexibility in promotions and a wide range of options for customizing the checkout page.
Before setting up your store, check out if there are limitations of the platform you’re considering, and make sure they allow you the features such as:
- custom styles of the checkout page,
- custom form fields,
- one-page checkout options, and more.
Many studies show that having a one-page checkout can help you increase your conversion rates between 10-20% averagely instead of having a multi-step checkout.
With a flexible iCheckout plugin, you can make your custom WooCommerce checkout page suit your business and increase your conversions.
Just choose the checkout template that fits you best, whether one-page checkout or a multi-step and adjust it according to your brand.
With thousands and thousands of eCommerce elites, we’ve built the ultimate WooCommerce checkout process that redefines the purchasing experience while keeping it secure, easy, and seamless.
Customers shouldn’t spend more than 25 seconds on the checkout page. That’s why we made iCheckout to solve that problem and increase conversions.
The whole process takes up to 19 seconds.
With a single click, you can choose which payment options you want to provide. Our job is to keep you and your business in front of your customers consistently.
Leverage the power of social proof and reviews at every step of the checkout process and increase your revenue by 21% through automatic discounts and the smartest upsells you have ever seen.
Ready to start boosting conversions today?
Start using iCheckout!
Join our waitlist, and be among the first beta users when iCheckout gets live!
