3+2 Impressive Ways to Optimize Your Checkout Process With Data​

Hi,
Your friendly analyst, Peter, here!

70% os visitors leaving their shopping carts just before finishing checkout. 

This can be frustrating because they were so close to finishing the order…

but it doesn’t have to be this way. I’m going to show you how to find out what your visitors were missing and how you can fix these issues to have less abandonment and more successful transactions.

6 Min. Read

Table of Contents

Cart Abandonment Rate

First things first, you should be able to determine where you’re at currently when it comes to abandoned carts and abandoned revenue. This is going to be our baseline.

 

It’s crucial to know if this number is good or bad compared to your competition.

Why Compare Your Results to your competition?

  1. If I’m good compared to my competitors there is no urgency to further improve my results. I would probably waste my time here instead of fixing some much more burning problem.
  2. It’s exponentially easier to get something to the average level from below average, than making something super good out of something which is already quite good. It’s important to estimate the Level of Effort. I think you get where I’m going with this.

It’s fairly easy to compare your results to your peers with a tool like Conversific where you can set your industry and it takes your most relevant competitors’ data and aggregates them.

Otherwise, you need to scrape inaccurate data from the internet or talk to a bunch of your competition ( good luck with that :/ )

Purchase Funnel

To understand your customers better and to get the full story you should definitely check your whole purchase funnel before zooming in on the checkout process.

Wow, there is nothing wrong with the number of carts created and actually, the ratio of checkout processes started is straight awesome, but I’m not good at helping people to actually finish their transactions.

You can find it with less context (without benchmarks) in Google Analytics also.

Let’s combine GA and Shopify data and find out why customers don’t compete there transactions!

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Skyrocket your online store’s profit, while minimizing the chance of losing capital with Conversific! 📈

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Checkout Funnel

It’s time for a more deeper analysis of the Checkout Funnel. 

The checkout process is basically everything which happens after people add their last item to the cart and start the process of paying for the items in their carts.

It consists of a couple of steps like:

  • Customer Information
  • Shipping Address
  • Billing Information
  • Order Confirmation
  • Thank you 

Most of this information is automatically filled in if your customer already has an account. This is very convenient for returning customers but can be a pain for someone who tries to buy from you for the first time.

In the case of these individual steps, you should be looking for the exit rate and the time they spend with a specific step.

checkout google analytics

In the first step don’t be surprised to see higher exit rates (around 50% or lower even). 

Why Cart Abandonment

This is common behavior, people tend to just put stuff into their carts and change their minds soon after that.

cart_abandonment

This only means that they were not ready to make the purchase just yet. They remembered that they don’t really need the product or don’t have the money for it or are afraid to make the purchase because of previous negative experiences.  Perhaps they want to check your pricing elsewhere?

There are many possible reasons for cart abandonment.

What you can do here is collecting their email addresses and sending them reminders to continue the purchase. (Don’t forget to showcase the values of the product in your reminder.) 

Pro tip: Always, always, always go for the emails first.

Apart from the first step, you should always see a close to 100% proceed rate.

For most of the people, truly starting the payment process and sharing their email address with you (so you can reach them later) is a clear sign of real intention to buy.

capture-more-subscribersSource: OptiMonk

If you see that some of the steps have lower than 90% proceed rate it means that something is wrong in that step.

Apart, from the exit/proceed rate, you should keep an eye on the time they spend on each page.

The whole process should be something they have already done before (maybe not in your store). No one should have to spend minutes filling in forms with data such as shipping address or billing information if not necessary.

Shipping Methods

You can see the percentage of people got lost on the Shipping Methods page.

Let’s see what kinds of methods you offer for shipping and how they affect your ability to generate revenue.

 Payment Methods

You should definitely do the same exercise for your Payment Methods.


 Conclusion

By using Conversific and checking out the info mentioned in this article you are going to be fully aware how your customers behave when it comes to purchasing your goods, where they experience problems or get distracted when it comes to actually complete the payment, your strengths, and weaknesses, etc. 

You can see all this at one place in your Conversific account.

There is no need to gather this data from different places and connect them together in a tangle of excel sheet.
If you want to save the pain of gathering this information scrap by scrap from other sources you can create a free account here.

However, the Checkout Report is a Pro feature only available for paying customers which you can add by clicking on the add more reports button below the list of reports on the Reports section.

checkout report

This should be more than enough insights for you to empower data-driven decision making.

However, if your my kind of people and your hunger for data cannot ever be satisfied you can check the performance of your top exit pages in Google Analytics or analyze actual recordings of what customers do during checkout with the help of a screen recording software.

The author

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