In the days when brick and mortar was everything, no one worried about how to decrease cart abandonment. All it took was a committed salesperson to ask if a customer was ready to check out, take their cash or card, and process the transaction before the buyer had a chance to change their mind.

That doesn’t work in e-commerce. Your customers are essentially on their own to add products to their carts and make the commitment to click “Checkout.”

That may be part of why the average cart abandonment rate today is 69.8%. You read that right — more than two out of every three shoppers leave the checkout page before making a purchase.‌

You can retain many of these customers just by simplifying your checkout page. You’d be amazed how a few tweaks can make everything flow more smoothly, appeasing the wary customer and guiding them to purchase — almost as if you were holding their hand.‌

Simplify Your Checkout

When was the last time you looked closely at your checkout page? Take a moment and create a fake order, then look at it as a customer might. Ask yourself:

1. ‌How many steps does it take to check out?
2. ‌How many buttons does the customer have to click?
3. ‌How many separate fields are there for add-ons, financing, bonus activation, etc.?

‌The more clicking a customer has to do before making a purchase, the more likely they are to abandon. You can significantly reduce friction at checkout by getting rid of all those extra buttons — and there are probably more of those than you think‌

Consider retail giant Amazon. It had so much success simplifying its checkout that in 2017, it had to refund $70 million for purchases children made without permission.

Amazon is still known for its ease of ordering. Even if you don’t use the Buy Now one-click feature, you can still have your product on its way in seconds. How close can you get to that level of simplicity?

Reduce Your Load Time

Bounce rates soar whenever a customer has to wait more than two or three seconds. You want your e-commerce site to be at the low end of that scale.

Simplifying your checkout page is one of the easiest ways to decrease load time. Use a one-page checkout if possible. This might mean minimizing the amount of customer data you ask for, and that’s okay. You’ll still retain more customers because you’ve reduced friction at the cart.

Other effective redesign techniques include:

1. ‌Minimizing image sizes
2. ‌Using social sharing buttons instead of plugins
3. ‌Limiting or eliminating redirects to other pages

‌‌These simple technical interventions can decrease cart abandonment. If they’re not enough, ask your web design team about coding adjustments.

Keep Customers on the Cart Page

Eliminating redirects does more than just increase page speed — it also keeps your customers in their carts.  

Imagine having to leave a physical store to visit an ATM. If you didn’t need your purchases urgently, you might be tempted to just go home. But this isn’t just a brick-and-mortar problem.

If you have third-party Buy Now, Pay Later options or co-branded payment cards that take consumers off your site, you’re essentially sending them to an ATM on the other side of the mall. 

When a shopper clicks on a financing link, they suddenly have a new website to navigate and multiple fields to fill out. Plus, they stop seeing the products they were excited about purchasing. The motivation is out of sight and sometimes out of mind, so it’s easy to click away.

You can break this cycle by keeping all of your financing options on the same page. And the simpler those options are, the better. 

Simplify Financing Options

According to Forrester, offering financing to customers can increase order value by 15% and boost incremental sales by 17%. And when you add pre-approved financing to the mix, you can increase customer conversion by 44%.

‌The key is to make the application process simple enough that you don’t scare people away. Applications for consumer financing can be unnecessarily lengthy, reminding people of buying a car or taking out a loan.

Consumer financing should be much simpler than either of those things. With a company like Skeps, you can add a single, consumer-friendly application that qualifies buyers for multiple financing options — from installment payments to co-branded cards.

‌A simple application with multiple options reduces the frustration of financing for you and your customers. Shoppers are much less likely to get all the way to checkout only to find that a third-party lender has declined their financing application.

‌Skeps allows you to offer financing from several different lenders all at once. If one option doesn’t work for a consumer, another might. The shopper doesn’t have to fill out a second application to find out. 

Display Offers Sooner

Shoppers often get all the way to the checkout page without realizing that financing options are available. Seeing one can be a relief, especially for a big-ticket purchase, but it can also be jarring.

‌That’s why Skeps offers instant financing to simplify this process and decrease cart abandonment. It lets you display financing offers when shoppers log in. This removes a barrier to purchase immediately for some buyers and decreases cart abandonment in advance. The customer goes all the way to purchase with their new payment plan instead of adding an item to their cart and then leaving it behind because they can’t afford it.

‌Additionally, displaying finance offers at login makes checkout easier and quicker. The buyer doesn’t have to stop to apply for financing or choose an offer — they’ve already done it. They may even spend more because they can finance.

The Power of a Simple Checkout

Convenience is a powerful motivator, especially in the world of online shopping. Your shoppers do enough mental work to get themselves and their shopping carts to the checkout page. 

‌The easier that page is to navigate, the more you can decrease cart abandonment. Think of simplification and easy financing options as the electronic version of a helpful store associate, guiding a customer to checkout. 

‌You don’t have to choose between convenience and multiple financing options anymore. With Skeps’ intuitive platform, you can have both — with a side of top-notch customer satisfaction.