Every step customers through the purchasing journey presents an opportunity for them to give up on their purchase. Your checkout page is one of the most critical stages along the journey, where potential buyers are just a few clicks away from completing a purchase. It’s always where a lot of buyers abandon their carts leading to missed sales.
In this article, we’ll cover some tips to optimize checkout in your fashion e-commerce store and make purchasing as easy as possible for shoppers.
Why optimize your checkout page?
The average cart abandonment rate in 2024 is 70.19%.
There are a number of reasons why that figure is so high – quite a few of which are related to the checkout process. As the last stage of the purchasing journey, when customers can give up on their purchase, fixing issues causing checkout-related abandoned carts can be one of the most effective ways to increase conversions.
If checkout isn’t quick and easy, a lot of shoppers give up on their purchase. According to Baymard, 1 in 5 adults abandoned carts because checkout was too long or complicated. In that regard, simplifying your checkout and following best user interface (UI) practices can help increase your conversion rates by 22%.
The same Baymard study found that 13% of US adults abandoned their carts because “there weren’t enough payment methods”. Another opportunity for a 13% increase to conversion rates just by accepting more payment methods.
Optimizing your checkout process helps ensure your customers’ entire purchasing journey is quick and easy. More importantly, it helps you avoid potentially abandoned carts and convert more sales.
How to optimize your online fashion store’s checkout process
The big advantage of shopping online is that it’s faster and more convenient than shopping in person. The checkout process is where a lot of speed and convenience in online shopping is lost. Optimizing your checkout process includes implementing a simple and clear user interface, offering guest checkout, accepting multiple payment methods, and providing one-click payments. You may also want to consider accelerated mobile checkout, since a growing number of e-commerce sales happen on mobile devices.
Here’s a primer on how to optimize your fashion e-commerce store’s checkout process for increased conversions:
Follow design best practices
The interface, design, and pages needed for checkout are where a checkout process being “too long or complicated” comes into play. Checkout requires quite a bit of information from users, so there are a lot of ways for things to go wrong. Follow user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) best practices and keep your checkout interface clean and simple.
Maintain trust by keeping your checkout screens on brand. Completing checkout is where the risk is involved for shoppers since they need to enter their credit card information; anything that doesn’t seem right is enough to put shoppers on edge. Branding is an important part of fashion e-commerce, and weary shoppers will certainly notice if it’s not consistent during checkout. Shoppers may become uneasy about completing a purchase on a checkout page that doesn’t have the same look and feel as the rest of your website – even something as simple as an outdated logo or color palette.
One-page checkout
You may want to consider a one-page checkout if your store’s checkout process is longer than it should be. As the name suggests, a one-page checkout collects all the necessary user information for purchases on a single webpage. This allows customers to view all information fields at once with faster loading speeds.
Offer guest checkout
Not all users want to commit to a particular site or store. Forcing them to create an account is often pressure they don’t want to deal with and a strong reason to abandon their cart.
According to the Baymard Institute’s research on cart abandonment, “the site wanted me to create an account” explained 26% of abandoned carts. If 26% of shoppers don’t want to create an account, allowing guest checkout is the obvious way to capture those sales.
Ensure the guest checkout option is easy to spot. Shoppers should be able to easily identify the option at the beginning of checkout before having to enter any information. Use direct microcopy to make this option clear to users, a simple button like, “Continue as guest” or “Check out as guest” serves this function.
Accept multiple payment methods
Accepting multiple payment methods gives your customers freedom to choose what payment method best suits them and helps make your store more accessible. Many users prefer not to enter their credit card details and would rather use a payment method they already use, like PayPal, Google Pay, and Apple Pay.
Additionally, if you operate in different global markets, do some research to see if the preferred payment methods are in local markets. For example, in Brazil, the Brazilian Central Bank introduced an instant payment system known as Pix, which at least 71% of the Brazilian population uses. If you sell in Brazil, you most certainly need to offer shoppers the option to pay via Pix or you’ll be leaving money on the table.
A note on accelerated mobile checkout
Two of the abovementioned payment methods, Google Pay and Apple Pay, are mobile payment methods. Considering how much traffic comes from mobile devices, it seemed fitting that we add this section to directly address the importance of accelerating checkout for mobile users.
Mobile users want things faster than desktop users, creating a key distinction in how they’re willing to pay. Desktop users are much more likely to grab their credit cards to complete their purchases, while mobile users want greater convenience. Google Pay and Apple Pay allow mobile users to check out quickly with a single tap on their phone, no need to fumble around for a credit card they might not even have access to. They’re fast and secure payment methods that help build trust in shoppers while allowing for faster conversions.
One-click payments
One-click payments are an easy way to speed up the checkout process and skip inputting information entirely for returning customers. One-click payments systems securely store customer payment information so they can make future payments without reentering their information. If shoppers opt-in to have their information stored, they can skip the checkout process entirely for future purchases and check out with a single click.
While providing one-click payments is a great way to elevate the experience for returning customers, it won’t help your conversion rates of new customers.
Keep customers checking out
You don’t want to lose out on sales because you’ve overwhelmed shoppers with a drawn-out checkout. Keep your checkout process simple and easy. Look for ways to optimize checkout and accept multiple payment methods. On your mobile store, make sure to accept accelerated checkout methods like Google Pay and Apple Pay.
Reducing abandoned carts at checkout can mean huge gains for your e-commerce store. If you’re interested in improving your e-commerce store’s performance, check out our article with tips to sell more clothing online.
