For an e-commerce website, one of the biggest concern is cart abandonment. The problem is, potential buyers, add products to their carts, but they don’t proceed to the checkout page. There can be many reasons why users abandon the checkout process. It can be due to indecisive nature of users, it could be price or discount, but mostly it is due to the user experience on the checkout page.
When it comes to designing a checkout page, many e-commerce websites make the mistake of not optimizing the UI and UX of the checkout page. Tweaking UI and UX design of a checkout can easily improve the conversion rate and cart abandonment rate. Here are few tips in this regard.
Progress Map
Often checkout process is a long process. You need to enter some information and select few options before you make it to the part where you can finally place the order. Often this is necessary. Some e-commerce websites make the mistake of providing the entire process on a single page.
The best practice is to break the process into few steps and show a progress map on top of the page so users know their current location in the checkout process and how many more steps they need go through for placing their order. This way users won’t get annoyed by the checkout process and will be less likely to abandon it.
Design for All Screens
In this age where mobile is the most popular platform for browsing the internet and buying stuff from e-commerce stores, it is necessary that your entire website is mobile friendly, especially your checkout pages. If your checkout page is not optimized for small screen sizes and users have to zoom in to view and enter information, it will make the process frustrating for them resulting in higher abandonment rate.
To create a checkout page that is truly mobile friendly, design the checkout page for the smallest screen first and then scale up the design with the screen size. This will ensure that your checkout page looks good and usable on smallest screen size as well.
Remove navigation from the page
Since most of the users who enter the checkout process are those who have made up their mind, it doesn’t make sense to show the navigation menu or other unnecessary information on checkout page. This will distract them from making the desired action.
It is industry standard to remove the navigation menu from the checkout page and only show the necessary information, like required information to fill and CTA button.