Improve your checkout experience to increase revenue and succeed in a global market
With ecommerce continuing to boom in a global landscape where consumers want the ease and convenience that digital transformation brings, ecommerce platforms like Shopify have an incredible amount of potential to expand your reach and increase sales revenue. But it takes more than just launching an online store and waiting for the money to roll in; understanding how to boost Shopify sales is also a vital part of your ecommerce business’s success.
The checkout experience offered is critical for Shopify merchants. For visitors to turn into loyal customers they’ll be looking for features that make the checkout and payment experience quick and hassle-free. From plugins for Shopify that let them use their preferred payment methods to shipping options that suit their needs, if shoppers don’t find what they’re looking for, they’re more likely to abandon their cart and look elsewhere. For example, 72% of consumers see free delivery as the number one reason to shop online, so if you offer that at checkout, you’ll be lowering cart abandonment rates.
Boost Shopify Sales by Improving Your Checkout Experience
How can I improve my Shopify checkout page?
Here are some tips for optimizing your Shopify checkout experience:
-
Use abandoned cart recovery
Taking steps to avoid abandoned carts is valuable in terms of boosting sales. With Shopify, there are a number of apps available to help merchants do that, as well as tools in Shopify itself. When you get notified about abandoned carts, you can take action to recover some of those sales by emailing reminders to customers to complete their purchases (either manually or automatically).
-
Optimize your checkout for mobile
With consumers making more purchases than ever using their smartphones, making sure your checkout is fully optimized for mobile is key. Don’t fall into the trap of optimizing your product pages for mobile and forgetting about the checkout experience, because that’s when cart abandonment is rife. Your aim should be to make it as easy as possible for customers to press that ‘pay now’ button.
-
Be transparent about shipping costs upfront
One way of avoiding ‘sticker shock’ when your customers are faced with the actual cost of something, is to be as open and honest about shipping costs as possible, right from the outset. If they’re thrilled by your low prices only to be faced with unexpected costs for delivery when they get to the checkout, there’s a fair possibility they’ll abandon their cart even if they can afford the shipping. Nobody likes to feel like they’ve been tricked, after all.
-
Use personalization in upsells and cross–sells
Personalizing your upselling and cross-selling strategy can improve the shopping experience for customers, and boost your sales in the process. Both upsells (encouraging customers to buy another or a higher ticket value product) and cross-sells (encouraging customers to buy a complementary product as well) are more successful when you personalize your marketing efforts at checkout.
-
Offer a first time customer or new subscriber discount
Discounts attract sales, that’s for certain. And as well as bringing in new customers, offering this type of discount has an added bonus of getting customer email addresses when they sign up—meaning you grow your list of email marketing recipients. Of course, the trick is to turn your first time customers into repeat customers, so after you’ve attracted them with an initial discount, make sure the service they get is so good they want to come back for more.
-
Send follow up emails
We’ve already talked about sending cart abandonment emails, and there are several different types of email you can send to keep your business at the forefront of people’s minds, encourage them to come back, and give them incentives to purchase from your store again. Order confirmation emails are something we all expect, and because of that, they have a high click-through rate meaning any type of marketing you include in them has a greater chance of getting eyes on it. Upsell and cross-sell emails (personalized, of course!) are another way to help you boost Shopify sales.
-
Offer a variety of payment options
When it comes to Shopify payment processing, one surefire way of keeping your customers happy is to offer a variety of payment options. While debit and credit card payments remain popular, digital payment methods like ewallets are increasingly the first choice for many people. And globally there are numerous different ewallets that consumers use from ApplePay to Paypal to Grabpay, although these vary widely by region.
-
Make sure you can accept localized payments from international customers
Probably the most crucial factor in successfully selling to a global market is offering the payment options the global audience wants. And while providing preferred payment methods in each location is often a matter of choice—sometimes it’s also a necessity. Not every international customer has access to a bank account, for example, or a credit or debit card, but they still may be willing and able to purchase goods from your ecommerce store. The question is, will you make it easy for them?