Quick wins for improving your ecommerce checkout this holiday season

What is particularly worrying for businesses is that according to Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is 69.23%, a worryingly high percentage for those in ecommerce. So, it’s up to you - the retailer - to make sure the customer has a great experience from the moment they first land on your website to the moment they receive their purchase.

With festive code shutdown looming, it’s never too early to start making improvements, so we have put together this handy checklist of quick wins to help you get your online checkout running smoothly ahead of the holidays...

Site performance

To ensure your site can cope with the large number of eager festive shoppers, we recommend completing a thorough analysis of performance issues you experience during peak trading. Issues such as outages should be resolved, and you should find out your tipping point, adding memory if necessary.

Customer service

Have you thought carefully about your shipping service? Do you need to increase next day cut-off times? Are you increasing your returns periods to reflect gift purchasing cycles? Do you have a plan in place to alert customers to any changes in delivery times and/or cut-off dates when ordering online? These are all factors that need to be considered around the holiday season. We recommend increasing cover across all your customer service channels including: email/phone/web chat/social media.

Page load speed

Slow page load compromises user experience and also sends a negative signal to search engines. To combat these issues, use page speed monitoring tools such as GTmetrix and Monitis, and perform regular checks on your pages. If you detect any sustained patterns of speed decreases, work with your development team to investigate and fix the problem.

Improve UX

Poor UX can be the downfall of many retailers. This is something businesses can’t afford - especially around the holiday season. Review the UX of your site and make it as easy as possible for your customers to complete address delivery and billing forms across all devices.

Mistakes and typos in mCommerce sites are common, and fat fingers on small devices can make form filling tricky. Type-ahead address verification technology can help improve user experience and ensure accurate delivery details are captured while gliding the user through the checkout quickly and effortlessly.