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Trust
Pay attention to the way that your site creates trust. For visitors who haven't bought from you before this is particularly important. We all consciously and unconsciously assess a site to get a feel for whether we instinctively trust what we see. Not convincing your would-be shoppers will reduce your conversion rate, and a bad first impression will most likely see them not bothering to come back.
There's a few things you can do:
Pay attention to security certificates and logos, and ensure these are shown especially on checkout. It never hurts to offer guarantees on your service, and advertising these will help tempt shoppers into trying you out.
These days, 'https' secure URLs are a must – increasingly they are expected for standard pages, but are vital for every step through your checkout, both for real security and the feeling of trust.
As always, clearly displaying your contact details including geographic landline and physical address are very important to help visitors feel that they could check you out first.
It is nice to include a privacy policy somewhere, especially if you can have a link to a pop-up version of this on your checkout. Most shoppers won't read it, but will feel reassured knowing that you have thought about it.
And of course, a live-chat feature is a great (if you have the resources to make sure someone is always available) to answer quick questions customers may have.
Payments
Obviously, you need to make it easy for your visitors to pay you. These days it is standard to offer a wide range of payment methods — the more the better to ensure no one is put off by having the wrong card type. Including the option to checkout with PayPal is especially useful to speed up checkout, and helps with security-conscious shoppers who don't need to give you their card details directly.
Keep things quick and simple
If you can, make sure that your checkout forms include autofill features. It can really make things very easy for shoppers if they start typing their name and find that the majority of the other forms can be filled in by their browser. This can help push conversions from people in a hurry.
It's a great idea these days to get a one-page checkout. This has the benefit of being easy and quick, but also showing shoppers exactly how much work is between them and getting their confirmation email. If you can't do a one-pager, at least incorporate a progress bar so shoppers can see how many steps are left.
Encourage conversion
Try to remove distractions during the checkout phase. Concentrate your pages down towards the key actions required to complete the transaction — reduce navigation options, avoid additional product links, and ensure nothing is competing for attention.
This can be complemented by paying attention to the copy on your buttons and even their colour. Make sure that your pages are tested so that they are crystal clear about what you are asking your customer to do. There should be no ambiguity about what is required to proceed.
Don't ask too much
During the checkout, one of the best ways of losing a sale is to ask for too much information. From the visitor's perspective the transaction is pretty simple: they want to swap their cash for your product. They know they need to hand over some information — name, email address, postal address are standard — but a major turnoff is finding a checkout that asks for seemingly irrelevant information.
No nasty surprises
Popping in unforeseen surprises near the end — such as high shipping costs or unusual terms — is probably the biggest reason for abandoned carts and is pretty simple to avoid. Ideally you should already be offering free shipping above a certain purchase level, or rolling the shipping cost into the product price. If free shipping isn't practical, clearly advertise shipping information from the front page right through the site. It is the surprise factor that puts people off, not necessarily the cost itself.
Another aspect of this is giving accurate stock information during shopping. Finishing a purchase only to receive an email saying the product is out of stock gives a really bad impression, and could be avoided by giving the information on the product page.
Knowing what to fix is the first step — the second is having the right team to implement it.
