The checkout process is the most critical part of your customers’ online shopping experience, but it’s often the most overlooked. You might assume that once shoppers have added items to their carts and started checking out, they’re committed to buying, right?
Not exactly. In fact, a study from Baymard Institute revealed that the average cart abandonment rate is over 70%. It basically means that roughly 7 out of 10 online shoppers leave without completing their purchase. And that results in an estimated $111 billion to $136 billion in lost revenue each year for U.S. retailers, based on Coresight Research survey findings.
While users may abandon their shopping carts for a variety of reasons, a poorly optimized checkout process remains one of the primary drivers. In this blog, we’ve outlined the five essential steps you can take to improve your checkout and ensure higher conversions.
Checkout conversion rate is an ecommerce metric that measures how many shoppers complete their purchase after initiating the checkout process. Unlike the sales conversion rate, which measures the percentage of all website visitors who make a purchase, the checkout conversion rate focuses specifically on those who have already shown strong buying intent by starting checkout.
Factors like payment options, shipping fees, page load times, and customer effort all influence this metric. Tracking your checkout conversion rate can help you determine how effective your checkout process is at driving conversions. This is basically how you:
Understanding how many people actually make it through checkout and where friction is happening puts you in a better position to optimize the entire process, reduce cart abandonment, and increase sales.
To calculate your checkout conversion rate accurately, you need just a few key data points:
Checkout Conversion Rate = (Number of Completed Purchases / Number of Initiated Checkouts) x 100
Let’s say 1,000 people initiated the checkout process and 700 completed the purchase. Your checkout conversion rate is (700/1000) x 100 = 70%. This means 70% of your customers who added items to their shopping carts made purchases.
Your number one goal should be to make the checkout process as intuitive and user-friendly as possible for your customers. Any point of confusion or unnecessary step in the checkout flow can create friction and lead to cart abandonment. To create a truly frictionless experience, eliminate anything that makes customers pause or question what they need to do next. Here are some steps you can take:
When it comes to online checkout, speed is everything – even a slight delay can cost you conversions. According to research from Capterra, 2 in 3 online shoppers (66%) expect to complete online checkout in 4 minutes or less, while 29% expect to finish it in under 2 minutes. A few steps to consider:
A slow checkout page can be just as frustrating as a complicated one, so make sure your pages load quickly on both desktop and mobile.
Checkout abandonment often spikes at the final stage because merchants fail to offer enough payment options, leaving shoppers unable or unwilling to complete their purchase. In fact, statistically, 56% of shoppers expect a variety of payment options on the checkout page.
Providing flexible payment methods can greatly improve conversion rates and appeal to a wider range of customer preferences, boosting both sales and customer satisfaction:
The more payment flexibility you provide, the more likely customers will find an option they prefer and complete their purchase.
Adding an AI chatbot widget to your checkout page can also help improve your checkout conversion rate and reduce abandoned carts. According to multiple studies, ecommerce chatbots can cut cart abandonment by 20-30%. Here’s how and why that works:
The work doesn’t stop once you’ve implemented a solid checkout process. Regularly testing and refining your ecommerce checkout is essential to keep up with changing customer expectations and behaviors. Even a minor adjustment (like changing the placement of a button or simplifying a form field) can have a significant impact on your checkout conversion rate.
By taking a proactive approach to testing and optimization, you can stay ahead of potential issues and continue to refine your checkout process for maximum conversions.
While optimizing the checkout experience is only one step in improving your online store performance, it’s an important one. With Maropost Commerce Cloud, you can increase your checkout conversion rate and drive more sales by making the checkout process quick, effortless, and intuitive for your shoppers.
On top of that, Maropost Commerce Cloud offers all the tools you need to manage your entire ecommerce engine effectively – from storefronts and massive product catalogs to inventory, pricing, orders, fulfillment, and customers – all from a single platform.
Book a demo now to see Maropost Commerce Cloud in action and learn why it’s the only solution you need to run your ecommerce business.
The average checkout conversion rate varies depending on the industry, product type, and region. While there’s no universal benchmark for what is considered a good checkout conversion rate in ecommerce, various resources suggest that the typical range for most e-commerce stores is between 65%-85%. If your checkout conversion rate is below 60%, it might indicate serious friction points in your checkout process that you need to address.
Sales conversion rate is the percentage of all website visitors who complete a purchase, which reflects your online store’s performance. Checkout conversion rate is the percentage of shoppers who start the checkout process (e.g., land on the first checkout page) and successfully complete a purchase. It isolates your checkout performance and tells you how well your checkout process itself works once someone already has strong purchase intent.
You should care about your checkout conversion rate because it directly impacts your overall revenue. A higher checkout conversion rate means more sales from your existing website traffic. Simply put, you turn more of your ready-to-buy shoppers into paying customers without needing to invest more money in marketing to bring in new traffic. And considering that nearly 70% of shopping carts get abandoned, every percentage point you gain in checkout conversion directly recovers a portion of those lost sales.
Key essential ecommerce metrics that you should be tracking beyond checkout conversion rate and include: