No metric is more important than the conversion rate – a metric dependent on the checkout experience one delivers. You may have an excellent website with consistent traffic, but that does not guarantee a sale.
Nothing else matters if visitors do not proceed to the checkout page to make their purchase. The success of your eCommerce website is determined by the number of sales, not by how many visitors you can bring to your site.
According to Baymard’s research, the average cart abandonment rate is around 70%. One in every five shoppers abandons their cart because the checkout process is too long or complicated.
Recommended Read: Reduce Cart Abandonment with Paytm Payment Gateway’s Seamless Checkout Flow
This article explains why you should optimise your checkout process to convert more visitors into customers. But first things first –
What is a checkout experience?
Consumers complete their purchases at the checkout stage of the shopping process. The consumer pays a business for specific products or services at the checkout point, which also marks the beginning of the checkout experience.
With the global eCommerce market continuously expanding, this concept has become associated primarily with digital payments, which are usually made via a secure and dedicated checkout page.
Customers enter their payment information, shipping information, and preferred shipping method on the checkout page. A final click allows customers to finish the checkout process and send their payment and other details to an online store.
The current state of eCommerce in the Asia Pacific
While data-driven analytics can aid in anticipating customer demand, businesses must still strive to provide the best eCommerce experience possible. That is because happy customers become repeat customers, which always helps businesses increase sales.
The experience must be seamless from the instant a consumer opens an eCommerce application or webpage. Any type of delay or difficulty navigating the site will frequently result in customer loss to another application or a competitor’s website, operating against your effective marketing efforts to increase sales.
After all, with so many eCommerce websites and mobile applications available today, customers are far more likely to be fascinated and remember the ones that provide the most enjoyable online experience.
Furthermore, according to Euromonitor International, Asia Pacific’s eCommerce sales are projected to almost double by 2025, reaching US$2 trillion. The key drivers in the region’s post-pandemic transformation into an innovation hub are digitalisation, connectivity, and demographics.
Why is the checkout experience important?
The checkout page is where your actual revenue is generated. However, the average eCommerce checkout conversion rate is 2.12%, and the average eCommerce add-to-cart conversion rate is 6.96%.
So, what’s going wrong? The answer lies in the checkout experience. You can boost conversion rates on the checkout page by providing your customer with all of the information needed to make an informed decision.
Customer experience is critical. It is only growing in importance for both businesses and customers. Here are a few reasons why CX should be prioritised.
1. To increase customer retention
Keeping the design of your online business and checkout process simple is more likely to bring in more returning customers right from their first purchase.
You should provide both guest checkout and an account function to avoid lost sales opportunities. However, you must motivate your loyal customers to register and save their payment and delivery details to make their return much easier.
This is especially important if the majority of your customers shop on smartphones, where filling out forms and navigating different tabs can be a painful and negative experience.
So, it’s best to go for a one-page checkout because the more steps and pages you add, the more complex and time-consuming it becomes – which may discourage customers from returning.
Usually, account creation is one of the key measures of a returning customer, so how do you persuade shoppers to sign up?
One trick for encouraging customers to register themselves is to give them the option of quickly creating an account at the time they place their first order.
It means that all of the account information is already filled out, and thus the customer has had a positive overall purchase experience with your online brand, which lends itself well to the creation of an account.
2. To boost the customer lifetime value
It is well known that managing your customers’ entire experience is the best way to boost your retention rates. Creating value for a customer throughout their entire lifecycle is critical to retaining them and establishing a brand-loyal relationship.
On the other hand, a negative experience at any point in the customer lifecycle can ruin your relationship and lead to the customer completely abandoning your brand.
As a result, you must track every touchpoint, from how a customer discovers your business website to the checkout process and after-sales experience.
But how do you consistently provide an excellent checkout experience?
Simple by integrating a checkout solution by a reliable payment gateway service provider that ensures a payment goes through every time a customer places an order. Yes, transaction success rates make a big difference in the success or failure of an online business.
Also, a good service provider comes with an intelligent analytics dashboard capable of offering insights on your customer so that you can deliver a personalised experience to them.
3. To build brand loyalty
Consumer shopping satisfaction and their decision to return to an online business for repeat purchases are heavily influenced by friction during the critical final step of the purchase journey.
According to new PYMNTS research, 91% of consumers believe a positive checkout experience influences their eagerness to shop with a merchant again.
Here is how seamless checkouts can help build customer loyalty:
- Smooth checkouts have a significant impact on customer satisfaction and their willingness to return to the merchant’s website. As a result, they play an important role in fostering customer loyalty.
- Customers expect multiple checkout options and are dissatisfied if they are missing. Checkout pain points include irritating checkout processes and excessive personal information requirements.
- Customers expect a variety of features that facilitate smooth eCommerce checkouts, such as payment method selection, mobile optimised checkout pages, and order confirmation.
4. To improve brand reputation
Customers usually want to make purchases across multiple channels, so it’s critical to keep the cart up-to-date and accessible across devices to deliver a consistent shopping experience.
Upselling items based on previous purchases or recently viewed products by the customers can improve the cart and checkout experience.
Increasing brand visibility on the checkout page will also help you improve your brand’s reputation as it will give your customers the impression that they are not redirected to an unreliable page and give them peace of mind while making a payment.
Additionally, running bank offers, discounts, cashback offers, and offering reward points on purchases are great ways to build brand reputation and increase brand loyalty.
5. To provide businesses with a competitive advantage
So, to summarise, what are the necessary ingredients in cooking a winning checkout experience? They include:
- a secure payment infrastructure;
- a seamless checkout experience;
- availability of multiple payment methods;
- attractive discounts;
- meaningful cashback offers;
- EMI option;
- a lucrative reward points system; and many more.
Some of these if not all will give your online store a competitive advantage and compel your customers to choose you over the competition.
Recommended Read: JS checkout: For lightning-fast integration and seamless checkout
How Paytm JS Checkout can help deliver the best checkout experience?
Are your online sales suffering at the hands of a messy checkout page?
Stop bidding farewell to leads. Paytm JS Checkout is here to help you deliver a smooth brand experience to your customers by providing the easiest and fastest integration that allows seamless checkouts.
Paytm JS Checkout is the solution for any online business, primarily small and mid-sized, that does not want to invest heavily (both in time and resources) in building or integrating a checkout solution.
Explained below are the advantages JS Checkout can offer your online business:
1. Lightening-fast 2-step integration
You can start accepting online payments in minutes with Paytm JS Checkout. All you have to do is set up a merchant account and integrate it with your company’s website or app.
A ready-to-use system guarantees no downtime. Even if there are any changes to the order/merchant specifics, there is no need for a re-integration; you simply need to modify it.
2. Seamless checkouts with zero redirections
Payment checkouts are usually performed on a new page via page redirection. That is not the case with Paytm JS Checkout. This is a win-win situation for everyone. For starters, it keeps the customer’s faith in the payment process. Also, it results in higher payment checkout success rates.
3. Enables customisable experience
JS Paytm Checkout allows you to customise your checkout page to match your brand’s colour scheme. It will help you maintain customer trust during the checkout process because they will see familiar colours while making the payment.
Furthermore, there is no redirection to any external page, providing customers with additional assurance.
4. Secure anti-fraud technology
Fear and lack of trust are common, especially when it comes to online payments. Paytm JS Checkout is PCI-DSS compliant and uses 128-bit encryption to ensure the safety and security of every customer transaction.
5. Flexibility to choose from a wide range of payment options
With Paytm JS Checkout, you can offer your customer the flexibility to choose from a wide range of methods, including credit cards, debit cards, net banking, Paytm Wallet, Paytm Postpaid, and EMI.
The checkout solution also offers you control over payment method sequencing. It means that if you wish to promote UPI over net banking transactions on your checkout page, you can do so.
Also, giving exclusive widely used payment methods such as Paytm Wallet and Paytm Postpaid will give you a competitive advantage.
6. Supports all platforms
Paytm JS Checkout can be easily integrated into your business website, mobile business website, and your business Android and/or iOS apps. The solution ensures that there are no delays in the checkout due to the platform you prefer or are most comfortable with at any given time.
7. Supports large transaction volumes
Paytm JS Checkout is built to withstand the pressure of large volumes of transactions at any given moment. Our systems are capable of handling up to 3,000 transactions per second making the checkout solution capable of handling small, medium, and large values and volumes of transactions altogether.
8. Offers real-time insights
With Paytm JS Checkout, you get access to a powerful dashboard that can offer insights into your business growth. Our intelligent business dashboard will allow you to view payments, bank settlements, and any checkout-related metrics you can think of. Everything is in one place.
Recommended Read: JS Elements: Offer Native Checkout Experience with Least Tech Effort
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Q1. What is customer experience?
The customer experience (CX) refers to everything that influences a customer’s perception and feelings regarding a business.
CX is concerned with the relationship between a business and its consumers. It includes all interactions, no matter how brief or if they do not result in a purchase.
Every interaction between customers and businesses strengthens (or harms) the relationship, be it a call to customer service, exposure to an advertisement, or even something as simple as paying a bill.
Most importantly, how customers perceive those experiences in totality is important.
Q2. What is customer retention?
Customer retention refers to a company’s or product’s ability to retain customers for an extended period.
A high customer retention rate means that customers return to a business/product, continue to buy from them, or otherwise do not switch to another product or business.
Q3. What is the customer lifetime value?
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a measure of how much money a company can expect to make from a particular consumer for as long as that person or account remains a consumer.
When calculating CLV, it is best to consider the total average revenue generated by a customer in addition to the total average profit.
Q4. What is brand loyalty?
In marketing, brand loyalty refers to a consumer’s positive feelings toward a brand and their commitment to buying the brand’s products and/or services again and again, regardless of flaws, competitor actions, or environmental changes.
Q5. What is brand reputation?
A brand reputation is simply how the public, customers, competitors, and stakeholders perceive it. It is the sum of all associations with your brand that stem from how people perceive it, interact with it, and what their experiences are with a brand’s products or services.
Q6. What is competitive advantage?
A competitive advantage is defined as anything that provides a business an advantage over its competitors, allowing it to draw in more customers and increase its market share.
On a concluding note
Overall, the most important aspect of your online store is the eCommerce checkout page. You can’t make sales or grow your business if customers don’t convert.
This is where trust comes into play the most. This is also the point at which any minor error or distraction could have a significant impact on your bottom line. Get as much feedback as possible from the customers to identify areas that need improvement for reducing friction and optimising your checkout page.
Simplify your checkout page and make it the least difficult part of your customer’s eCommerce journey by providing all available, convenient solutions.
