Optimize your checkout

The checkout page is where your customer lands when they hit “buy.” Here, they enter their payment and delivery details before completing the purchase.

This is the narrowest part of your sales funnel. It’s the culmination of all your hard work. But you haven’t closed the sale yet ...

In fact, among global shoppers in 2018, the abandonment rate for retail orders was as high as 74%. 

Customers can be turned off by anything from a poorly designed payment form to insufficient payment options, or too many steps in the process. The good news is that these issues are easily fixed.

Here’s how to create a checkout that will keep your customers coming back again and again.

Today everyone’s increasingly tied to their mobile devices. According to GSMA Intelligence, over half of the world’s population (some 5 billion people) are mobile internet users.

Statista Worldwide predicts mobile payment revenue will surpass $1 trillion USD in 2019. So it’s no longer a matter of just supporting mobile, you have to do it really well.

Average transaction value and screen size

As you can see in the graph below, consumers still tend to be more comfortable making expensive purchases on large-screen devices.

Make sure your payment experience is optimized for all screen sizes by creating dedicated interfaces for each device. The best option is a response design that automatically detects the screen size of the device and adjusts the payment process accordingly.

Digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, Alipay, WeChat Pay) make it easier than ever to pay on mobile, both online and in store. With these, the card information is securely stored on a shopper’s device and released after authentication (usually via a fingerprint or a passcode).

Chinese shoppers: Big mobile spenders

Not all high-value purchases are reserved for larger screens. Chinese shoppers are increasingly used to paying for expensive items on their smartphones. Mobile wallets Alipay and WeChat Pay are showing high average transaction values (ATV) on the Adyen platform. So don’t overlook these methods if you’re selling high-value items to Chinese shoppers.

Entering payment details is the least fun part of shopping, especially on mobile. In some emerging markets where internet infrastructure is unreliable, you risk a time-out before the purchase can be completed.The answer is one-click payments, where the customer enters their payment details once only. The information is then securely stored for subsequent purchases, which they can complete with a single click (or tap of their finger).

Be aware of security concerns

In some markets, one-click payments might undermine the perceived security of the transaction. Be sure to display security icons and explain your data protection policy clearly. Also, make sure your customers have access to swift, flexible customer service, and make it easy to cancel orders at any time.

Keep customer card data safe with tokenization

The challenge with one-click payments is how to securely store customer card data. Fortunately, this is made easy with tokenization technology. Payment details are captured by your payments provider and replaced with an encrypted token, which you can use to charge transactions. So your customers can pay with one click and your payments provider shoulders the responsibility of keeping the data safe.

Redirecting your customer to another page with a different URL can be fatal, especially on mobile where slower load times or (worse) timeouts are more likely.

Today, it’s possible to cut the redirect and host the entire payment on your site. You don’t have to worry about compliance (known as Payment Card Industry or PCI compliance).

You can accept cards and local payment methods by embedding secure hosted fields into your page.

Your payments provider should handle the bulk of PCI compliance.

Hosting the payment on your site also means you have total control over branding and layout. And, since you have all the data, you can use conversion analytics and A/B testing to identify areas for improvement.

Adyen Checkout is the fast, secure, developer-friendly way to accept payments anywhere, on any device.

You can create a secure, mobile-optimized checkout in minutes, with just a few lines of code. For customized mobile checkouts, our SDK comes with a suite of tools to fine-tune the experience.

Everything is hosted on your site, so you benefit from on-page analytics to start A/B testing and find the best payment flows.