11 best practices for your eCommerce checkout process

This article is provided by BRC Associate Member Experian.

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Your shopping basket isn’t only a place that captures a transaction - it’s a place where you, as a retailer, have the opportunity to deliver an exceptional and easy customer experience.

To fulfill the purpose of your shopping basket and provide an easy-to-navigate customer journey, start by reducing basket abandonment and accurately collecting some of the most important inputs of the checkout process: the contact data. 

Basket abandonment rate is a key statistic to understand when designing eCommerce website checkout pages. Abandonment rates by industry can be as high there are many reasons why this may happen. The potential purchaser could:

• Be surprised by product availability, shipping costs, or delivery time
• Simply be researching to understand the full, extended price of a particular purchase without intending to buy at the time
• Or, simply find the checkout process too long and complex

Here are Experian’s recommended top 11 best practices for your checkout process. 

Asking first time customers to create an account requires a significant amount of time that could slow the checkout process.

The more form fields there are to complete the longer the process and the greater the potential for confusion and abandonment.

3.   Allow free text in contact fields

Requiring that visitors conform to specific formats (area code) (e.g. 020), may ensure that data is structured correctly for your database but will confuse customers whose data doesn’t conform, causing friction and chancing abandonment.

Waiting to validate data until all sections have been completed can be a cause of significant frustration and adds more time to the process while the consumer scrolls back and forth to identify errors. If you don’t validate contact information during the checkout process, you could be disrupting a positive customer experience.

Basket abandonment often occurs due to simple distractions that occur during checkout. That’s why it’s important to capture consumers’ email addresses up front, so that re-engagement is possible. Abandoned basket emails appear to be remarkably successful resulting in high open rates (>45%) and representing over 25 percent of eCommerce revenues. Those sent within a short time of the abandonment have most impact.

6.   Use fast, real-time, email address validation

It’s almost impossible to correct a bad email address after it has been submitted and accepted - minor changes to very well-known domain names excepted, e.g. yhoo.com to yahoo.com. Emailing to a valid, but incorrect address, can harm your brand perception or offer expensive and undeserved discounts to non-customers.

As eCommerce continues to grow, we can expect international sales to grow too. A natural order of your contact fields means ensuring your fields fit the consumer or national custom applicable to your audience, while accommodating international contact detail capture.

A key determinant in deliverability is whether an address is compliant with the official postal address formatting and recorded address data. In the UK, the default authority on address data is the Royal Mail. Addresses that do not conform to the Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF) risk being “undeliverable as addressed”.

9.   Be descriptive with error messages

Leverage response codes provided by your contact data validation software to ensure error messages give your consumer guidance on the reason why a field entry may be considered invalid. Although you may need to adapt the response codes to be understood by the customer, this will provide a better user experience. The consumer wants to complete their purchase as soon as possible.

When validating contact information, it is important to guide your customer through the validation process and always give them the option to opt out of any recommended changes. However, customers should feel encouraged to accept the changes by default and opt out only if they firmly disagree.

While we recommend that guest checkout should be the default, it’s likely that most of your customers will be repeat visitors, purchasers, or members whose data was captured on a previous visit. Therefore, there’s no need for them to re-enter their contact data and they can speed through the checkout process. However, before the purchase is complete, make sure you confirm their delivery details.

It’s time to reverse the risk and design a brilliant checkout process that is easy-to-use for your consumers and that captures accurate contact data for your business.

Download this tipsheet and discover how to minimise complexity and friction in the checkout process.