The month of May is the perfect time to start optimizing one of the most crucial components of a successful peak shopping season later in the year: your checkout and payments experience. Faster, smoother, transparent—these are the hallmarks of a good checkout page that shoppers come to expect if they are going to ultimately click that buy button. Here are some ways to make sure you are ready with a stellar customer experience come Cyber Week.
It’s never too early to start optimizing and making updates to your payments and checkout systems and third-party integrations. Starting in May gives you the opportunity to test during smaller surges when summer holidays like Memorial Day creep up on the calendar.
The checkout process has to be smooth.
We’ve all experienced less than ideal buying experiences online. That won’t be your shoppers, though. Assess your checkout and decide if it could maybe use less steps and less pages. (The answer is usually, yes.) If you’re not offering it already, explore one-click checkout.
According to Stripe, more than half of customers will give up on a purchase that takes more than two minutes. It’s a challenge since the average checkout time is three minutes. This means a checkout experience must be free of snags.
Offer many payment and installment options.
Your customers want flexibility and choice when choosing how to make their holiday purchases. The more payment methods offered the better.
In addition to the how, the when can be just as important. Offering shoppers the option to pay for their holiday purchases in installments is a welcome bit of freedom that might make a difference in a shopper choosing where to buy.
Stripe’s optimized checkout suite product lead, Abhinav Tiwari, adds some backing to that theory and says, “Stripe ran A/B tests on more than 150,000 global payment sessions and found that businesses that offer installment payments generate new sales, increase revenue, and boost conversion rates.”
Final Thoughts
The holiday season is an exciting time, full of joy and opportunities for special moments. Follow these tips and your checkout experience will be responsible for some of those special bits of joy.
For more recommendations on how to prepare for the holiday shopping season, read our month-by-month holiday guide.
