One of the areas where many companies have trouble when it comes to actual sales is during the checkout process. They’ve put in all of their effort to making their product pages and landing pages as perfect as possible, and they are having trouble with their checkouts. Let’s look at some of the best ways to improve the sales on your ecommerce site while focusing on the checkout. It might surprise you to see just how helpful these tips can be.
Keep It Clutter Free
While the temptation might be there to put more advertisements and a load of brand information on the checkout page, you want to be careful here. By keeping things as simple and as free of clutter as possible, it becomes much easier to improve your chance of getting the sale. By keeping the customer focused on the checkout process, it helps to move the sale forward. Simple as it sounds, it really does work. Make the process simple, smooth, and start seeing more sales.
Give Customers Buying Options
Too many sites today still have a limited selection of payment options. You will want to make sure that you utilize more than just credit and debit payment options. For example, many customers like the safety and the simplicity of services such as PayPal and Google Wallet. Many do not like putting their credit card information online, and they feel that PayPal is a safer option. Make sure you allow that option.
Do Not Require Registration
Some online stores require customers to provide an email address and register for emails and newsletters when they buy. They see this as a way to get future sales. While that could be true in some cases, it’s certainly not always true. In fact, having registration to be a requirement is often a turnoff for customers. Do not set up your site so that registration is a requirement for your customers. Many will simply abandon the shopping cart right there. Give them the option and many will choose it, especially if you offer discounts for registered customers, but never make them sign up.
Consider Free Shipping
A great way to pull your customers all the way through the checkout process is to offer free shipping. A large number of companies are doing this today, and if you can do the same, you will be able to compete with the larger companies. If you can’t afford to offer free shipping for all orders, that’s understandable. Something you might want to consider is offering free shipping for those larger orders that are over a certain dollar amount.
Make sure that you choose a good dollar cutoff point for free shipping based on the type and expense of the products you sell. This could be $25, $50, $100, or another number that makes sense for your company.
One of the benefits of using a threshold for shipping is that it encourages customers to buy “just one more little thing” so they can get the free shipping. This could result in greater sales for you and more than make up for the cost of shipping.
Cross Selling and Upselling
Another great technique to increase the sales on your ecommerce site is by adding cross selling and upselling to the checkout process. Showing the customer other products they might need or want can appeal to the impulsiveness of someone getting ready to buy. It can also remind them of some things they might need. For example, if they are buying a tablet, you could also offer cases and screen protectors as the cross sell items as they are getting ready to check out. When you add this technique in with a shipping threshold, you might get people to buy more than they initially planned.
Resource: http://www.mycustomer.com/feature/technology/tips-helpful-ecommerce-upselling/166421