If you are running an online store, you would know the concept of the checkout process. Having a smooth checkout system is always critical for an e-commerce website. Since these days people browse through websites from their mobile devices more than from desktop, everything that you optimize on your website needs to be optimized for mobile as well.
As mobile phones become a more convenient means for people to do online shopping, businesses are realizing the importance of creating a smooth user experience for their mobile websites. If your online store is not responsive enough to give users an error-free mobile browsing experience, your bounce rate is likely to be high and your sales from the store will become low.
Having a mobile checkout on your online store means the checkout process on your site should be free from technical errors when a user goes through it from their mobile phone.
If you are planning to build an online store, or if you already have one, make sure its checkout process runs smoothly on a mobile device. Why is that? Let’s look at the importance of a smooth mobile checkout flow for your online store.
5 Key Benefits of Creating a Smooth Mobile Checkout Experience on Your Online Store
There are many benefits of providing a smooth ecommerce checkout mechanism on your mobile website.
1. Encouraging Add-on Purchases
Most of the e-commerce websites have to compete with the e-commerce giants that we have these days. That’s why they keep coming up with more and more features on their site so that they can provide their users with a better online shopping experience. One such feature is a seamless mobile checkout process.
According to a research study conducted in Barrington by Brick Meets Click, about one-tenth of grocery shopping will be done by people online by next year, 2022. This ratio is further going to increase by 13 percent every year.
If you have a pure-play e-commerce site, you cannot allow your users to make add-on purchases the way they can during their in-store pickup shopping process. But if your buyers place their order on a computer, you can enable them to make additions to their order via a mobile device if you have a scan-as-you-shop app for your online store.
This will cause a rise in your average worth per transaction, which will eventually increase your overall sales revenue. Hence, a smooth ecommerce checkout via a mobile app can help you make more money from your online store by encouraging add-on purchases by your customers.
2. Preventing Losses
A mobile checkout helps you prevent losses in your business. Some e-commerce website owners worry that if they introduce the scan-as-you-shop technology, they might incur theft on their website because the technology makes it so easy for anyone to drop an item into the shopping cart without having to scan it. But this is not entirely true.
This kind of self-checkout solution for mobile ecommerce actually lets retailers know who their customers are, which helps them in keeping in touch with them, building good relationships with them, and offering good customer service to them in the long run. This means this technology actually helps in preventing losses for your business by being able to keep customers and building a good repo for your online store.
If you notice a customer involved in suspicious activities, you can flag them in your system and audit them closely on their next encounter with your store. You may also cross-reference your website statistics and data to locate the criminal more quickly using the help of law enforcement within your locality. If you built your store on Strikingly, you can view the audience list of your site in the Strikingly editor.
Image taken from Strikingly
3. Interacting With Customers in Real-Time
Providing a mobile checkout allows you to interact with your customers in real-time. Introducing checkout best practices for mobile devices is a way of improving customer loyalty and gaining customer feedback right at the end of their smart retail experience. When a customer completes a purchase on your online store, you can ask them to rate their site visit and leave a comment about their mobile checkout experience.
When customers have just gone through the mobile checkout, they are likely to leave very honest feedback about their experience. Their comments will not be distorted or biased when they write them down in real-time. Thus, the feedback that you will get from your customers right after their ecommerce checkout will be the most genuine form of feedback you can get. This can help you learn about of any issues your customers might be facing and make improvements in your mobile ecommerce accordingly.
4. Empowering Your Staff
As contradictory as it sounds, providing a good mobile checkout experience to your customers actually empowers your front-end staff. A popular belief states that using mobile ecommerce takes the power away from cashiers, as they have no more role to play in the customers’ checkout experience. But in reality, a mobile checkout mechanism can increase the empowerment of your front-line workers.
For example, a shop that allows mobile checkout but makes sales through its retail outlet can assign to their staff the task to help customers scan their items in the parking lot. This is helpful in times like the pandemic we are currently going through, whereby customers prefer not to enter a store or spend minimum time inside a store to buy the items that they need. Larger retailers might even build a section or stand outside their store’s main entrance to help customers check out using mobile ecommerce without having to queue at the cashier inside the store premises. This eliminates the shoppers’ need to go back into the store for checking out, as the staff uses mobile checkout at the stand outside the store and gives them receipts for their purchase on the spot.
5. Understanding Your Web Design Better
When you test the mobile checkout process on your website to make sure that it functions smoothly, you are actually giving yourself the opportunity to test and improve your website template. If you are using one of the Strikingly templates, you can switch to another Strikingly store template you find more suitable for your business.
Image taken from Strikingly
For example, by reading the comments and feedback of your mobile checkout users, you might find out that your customers are confused about the way to scan and pay for the weighted or heavy items in their cart through your store’s app. In response, you might decide to place digital scales in your store’s bulk sections to make the weighing process easier. You would also need to ask your staff to know that your customers are using the app, so that they can provide instructions to them and assist them in scaling the items via the app.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
6 Quick Tips to Implement Mobile Checkout Best Practices
Now that you know the importance of having mobile checkout, let’s go through 6 ways to implement the checkout best practices to offer a perfect mobile checkout to your customers.
- Base your mobile checkout sequence on existing consumer behavior that you observe via your website analytics.
- Do not request critical or unnecessary information from customers during their mobile checkout. If a customer is at your checkout screen, it means they are already well vested with your brand. There is no need to overcomplicate the process for them by asking them to fill up a long-form or asking for information that’s not pertinent to their checkout or delivery. It is better to ask for supplemental information at a later stage in the customer’s pathway.
- To provide your customers with the most convenient ecommerce checkout experience, implement social login on your site or app to allow your customers to login and checkout via their Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest account. In this way, you can get the shopper’s data, while your customer will have one less password to remember.
- If your mobile checkout sequence has multiple steps, keep the customer informed where they are throughout the process. This helps in avoiding user fatigue, which might cause your customer to drop off before completing the checkout.
- Make sure your customers feel protected during their ecommerce checkout. Inform them that their credit card information is secure. Send a confirmation email or SMS to confirm their purchase.
- Activate mobile specific features on your online store, such as Google Wallet, Square, or iOS Passbook. These are easy to integrate with your mobile payment system and allow you to streamline the mobile checkout process.
Mobile Checkout Process on Strikingly Websites
If you build an online store on Strikingly, you can provide your users with a very smooth checkout process. To change the ecommerce checkout sequence, you can customize your checkout form settings.
Image taken from Strikingly
Image taken from Strikingly
To run a successful e-commerce website, it is critical that you focus on the checkout experience you offer to your customers. A smoother mobile checkout experience on your online store means happier customers for you.
That’s why we, at Strikingly, ensure our users can build a customized and speedy checkout sequence for their customers. If you face any issues in customizing your checkout form in Strikingly, or want some suggestions on how to set up online payments on your Strikingly store, you may contact our Happiness Officers anytime via our 24/7 free live chat support.
Further, if you have not built your e-commerce website yet, but are planning to do so, check out Strikingly as your online store builder. Our free plan is good enough for you to try out our most basic features. You can also upgrade to our paid plans anytime to experience more features for your website.
