In the age of customer experience, most brands are focused on optimizing website content, navigation, and customer service offerings. Often left out of the picture: the checkout experience.

That’s a mistake. Easy checkout is a key part of customer experience. And for two thirds of customers, also a major driver of customer loyalty.

That finding might resonate with anyone who has decided to overlook a brand’s indiscretions for an exceptional customer experience.

But you don’t have to be an online behemoth to create an industry-leading online checkout experience. Here, I’ll offer three ways brands can optimize checkout to win and retain more customers.

1. Make Checkout Easy

Complicated checkout experiences aren’t just unsatisfying. They also give customers more time to reconsider their purchases. Here’s a scenario to illustrate.

Imagine that you’ve loaded several items into your cart. You make it to the multi-step checkout page. But each step takes a few seconds to load. And while the wheel’s spinning on shipping calculations, you get a text asking if you’ve paid for your kid’s soccer camp yet. You start to rethink that designer sweater… and end up setting aside your cart indefinitely.

Scenarios like this are all too common. They’re a major driver of cart abandonment.

The good news: with a streamlined checkout experience, brands can reduce checkout times and make it easier for customers to follow through with their purchases.

To simplify checkout, I suggest building an experience with…

• More autofill capabilities. For instance, consider using a postal code to autofill an address’s city and state (or province). 
• Fewer entry fields. For example, instead of requiring customers to enter separate billing and shipping addresses, offer a simple “same as…” checkbox.
• A default shipping option. Auto-selecting the cheapest shipping option saves customers time comparing prices.

The right changes can help brands shorten checkout to under two minutes – the upper limit for nearly 30 percent of consumers.

Already doing these things? Then it’s time to look at your back end. By shrinking page load times from five seconds to one, you can more than double your conversion rate.

And remember: nothing replaces making changes based on data you can capture via A/B testing. You want to get this right, so testing is the best possible way to provide concrete evidence that these changes will work for you.

2. Prioritize Convenience

Big retailers like Amazon and Walmart have set the standard for convenient checkout, meaning shoppers compare every online checkout to those leaders. Even if you don’t consider either brand a direct competitor, you’re effectively “competing” with their checkout experience.

But that doesn’t mean you have to offer a one-click option. Instead, focus on offering the basics:

• Guest checkout. About 43 percent of consumers prefer guest checkout over creating or logging into an account. The top three reasons why? Speed, ease, and privacy.
• Preferred payment options. Payment preferences vary by age and location. Older US buyers tend to like credit cards. If your audience is primarily Millennials or Gen Zers, though, offering BNPL may be necessary: 56 percent of these consumers now prefer BNPL over credit cards.

If you’re already doing these things, consider how automation can improve your checkout experience: auto-calculate shipping and taxes, for example, or automatically populate prices in local currencies.

3. Foster Trust

Even if your checkout is fast and convenient, customers will likely abandon their carts if they don’t see the right trust signals. Nobody wants to share their data with a company that won’t protect it.

To make sure your checkout helps build customer trust…

• Add third-party trust badges. SSL or trust seals (e.g., Norton Secured or TRUSTe Certified Privacy) can externally validate your site’s security.

• Highlight familiar payment options. Add prominent credit card logos and express checkout buttons to subconsciously instill confidence.
• Optimize for mobile. Nearly 40 percent of consumers mistrust ecommerce sites with poor mobile optimization.

A secure and trustworthy checkout does double duty. It reduces a lot of the mental friction driving cart abandonment and gives customers the peace of mind to buy from your brand again.

The Right Tech Stack Can Turbocharge Checkout (and Loyalty)

Retailers can improve their checkout experience regardless of how their site is built. But tweaks to existing infrastructure only go so far. For dramatic improvement to checkout speed, convenience, and trust, retailers will have to reexamine their existing back-end technology and determine whether it still serves their needs – and meets their customers’ expectations.

All-in-one ecommerce platforms, for example, can bloat page load times throughout the customer journey. They may also limit checkout page customization and payment options, which, of course, can lead to cart abandonment.

The alternative: composable commerce. A composable architecture lets brands combine best-in-breed solutions (product descriptions, search and merchandising, transaction engine, payment gateway, etc.) to deliver the exact experience they want for their customers at every touchpoint. What’s more, connections among these solutions happen via API, making every customer interaction lightning fast.

Increasingly, brands that recognize checkout as an integral part of the customer experience – and invest in delivering the kind of checkout customers want – will be rewarded with loyal customers.

Sean Skamnes is VP of Ecosystem & Partnerships at Commerce Layer. Commerce Layer helps companies sell their merchandise through any digital channel (web, app, voice, IoT, etc.) by using the Commerce Layer’s API. With an API-first solution, and an entire suite of developer tools, Commerce Layer customers can scale their businesses into multiple markets with ease. 

Sean is a business development and digital marketing professional with 20+ years of experience in software and consulting/agency services. The last 15 years, Sean specifically focused on sales and development of digital marketing and ecommerce programs for Fortune 1000 clients.