Strategies for improving checkout conversion

On the best day, customers breeze through your checkout, and it’s straightforward and simple: they want to make a purchase, they complete your form, and their payment ist accepted. But in those moments when a customer is checking out of your store, a complex system of events is happening, unseen. In reality, nearly 80 % of online shoppers abandon their carts before marketing a purchase.

The good news is that there’s a lot you can do to optimise your payments funnel, improve your customer’s experience, and recover lost revenue along the way.

Unify teams to encourage a holistic approach to payments

The parts that make up the payments process:

  • the checkout form
  • the fraud protection component
  • and network acceptance

are often handled across different teams in a business. For example, checkout completion might be managed by your marketing and site teams, while fraud protection is managed by your risk team. Often, these teams are not talking to each other. They might be working towards different goals, without considering the implications for other parts of the funnel.

Instilling a “one team” mentality to work on the entire payments experince is key to ensuring that different teams within your company are actually talking to each other. By driving cross-collaboration, establishing shared goals and metrics, and conducting shared experiements, your business is set up to think strategically and holistically about optimising checkout conversions.

Even the smallest details can influence checkout conversion rates

There are considerable options for improving the checkout experience, so make sure you’ve explored them all. If a customer types in an invalid expiry date for their card, is your checkout form telling them in real-time that they’ve made a mistake? Have you enabled autofill support so that they don’t have to go through the tedious task of filling out their entire credit card number? When Stripe surveyed the top 100 ecommerce sites in the UK, only 38 %  of checkouts provided real-time card validation, and 21 % did not support autofill.

These are easy ways for you to stand out from the crowd and create a great buying experience.

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Push your payments solution to serve your business' unique needs

The technical infrastructure you choose to power your checkout is extremly important. You should be looking at what’s possible with your current technology stack, the dynamic needs of your business, and the ways in which your payments technology partner can help you improve conversions.

When building your fraud strategy, you should access as much data as possible to inform it. You might be looking at internatl data to understand fraud trends – but you should understand the bigger picture acrooss a larger network. That’s where you can collaborate with your payments partner, who should be able to provide network-level insights.

As your business expands and enters new countries, you’ll face the challenge of integrating payment methods preferred by local consumers. Just integrating one of these payment methods is incredibly complex. The right payments provider can manage this for you, and take on other complicated aspects of scaling your business as it grows.