Interestingly, 65 – 75% of shoppers abandon their shopping carts before completing check out, so it is essential to keep initial information requests to a minimum.
To improve the sales conversion rate, and thus enhance revenues and customer retention, online money makers needs to start with the basics:
- Simplicity or ease of use
- Attitude and accessibility
- Responsiveness or the quality, speed and helpfulness of your email replies
- Transparency of your policies including privacy and return policies
- Selection and presentation of products
You can always go back for more after registration or a sale! One way to do this is to have as many questions or fields as reasonable in a single column, on a single page above the fold.
Visually, please won’t overwhelm your visitor and also minimises the risk of losing them every time you force a click to move forward.
Keep the distance between customers and cash register short. In the traditional brick-and-mortar world, service businesses know that the longer you make a customer wait, the more likely it is that the customer will get frustrated and go elsewhere. Not so in the Internet.
Using a status indicator can also be useful to lead visitors through the checkout process as it enables them to see how many steps are involved and how long the process will take.
The more barriers a visitor faces throughout the checkout or registration process, the more likely they are to abandon.