The last step in an online buying process is always the checkout page; your website’s cash register. It consists of a number of steps that lead to a completion of a purchase. It’s not uncommon for people to abandon their shopping carts during the checkout process due to a bad user experience. And it’s a shame when this happens. In this post, we’ll discuss the things you can improve, from the UX of your shopping cart to your thank you page. We’ll tell you how to make your visitors as comfortable as possible while they complete their purchases.
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Before we begin, please realize that conversion and checkout page UX go hand in hand. Improving the UX of your checkout process will influence conversion as well. For instance, a too complicated checkout process accounts for 17% of cart abandonment. So you should be looking to make your potential customers as comfortable as possible while they complete their purchases. Don’t lose out on a purchase because of bad checkout page UX. With that said, let’s explore the various elements on your checkout page that affect user experience.
Design, layout and typography
Let’s quickly talk about the look of your checkout page before going into the actual content of the page. We recommend a clean design for the checkout page no matter the products or services you’re selling. The checkout page is all about completing purchases, and so everything on this page, including the page design should facilitate that. There’s no need to ‘wow’ your customers with fascinating images and interactive web elements anymore at this stage. Instead, try to make it quick and easy for them to go through the checkout process.
That could translate to employing a simple page design with lots of white space to make the important fields and information stands out. And the font choice should be easy to read on both desktop and mobile devices. Take Nike’s checkout page as an example, the page design is clean and simple, which makes it easy to get an overview of the checkout process.
Progress bar
One of the most important things to realize is that checkout page UX is actually about optimizing every single step (page) in the checkout process. Before going into detail, we’d like to mention your visitors’ best friend in the checkout process: the progress bar. It makes it visible for visitors how far along they are in the process. This actually results in gamification, which makes it even more likely they’ll finish the entire process.
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This article was written by Amy Lees and originally published on SEO blog • Yoast.