In the past few weeks, we looked at how to prepare your e-commerce website for the holiday season and outlined tips on how to take advantage of the increased traffic that will be coming your way.
This week we’ll take a look at the most vital part of your online shop – the checkout process. It’s the last step in your conversion, where people have done their research and landed on your doorstep to finally buy from you.
In this post, we’ll tell you a few things you can do to help keep your checkout abandonment to a minimum and to boost your Christmas sales.
Add transparency
Chances are that if you hate seeing unexpected costs during the checkout process – then so does everyone else. In fact, a whopping 56% of online shoppers will abandon your online shop when presented with additional costs.
If you’re charging for delivery or gift wrapping, make sure it’s communicated clearly and early in the checkout process – ideally it should be directly on your product pages.
You’ll also want to display delivery times so people know how long their products will take to arrive. Having an express shipping option available can also help in converting last-minute holiday shoppers buying from your online shop.
Offer free shipping during the holiday period
According to Adobe Insights, lower prices and better deals rank as the main reason for shopping online. Which makes running a special promotion crucial to maximising your holiday sales.
[Tweet “”For holiday shoppers, the importance of free shipping has jumped from 34% to 42% in 2015″”]
The most obvious would be to offer a shop-wide discount of 10–25%. But what if that’s not possible? Then you may want to consider offering free shipping during the holiday season. What’s worth noting is that the importance of free shipping has jumped from 34% to 42% in 2015.
While free shipping might not seem like much, consider that in a survey conducted by Wharton, 61% of online shoppers are “somewhat likely” to cancel their purchase if free shipping isn’t offered. Plus it also adds more value, as the same survey indicated that shoppers would spend 30% more per order when free shipping is included.
Cross-selling and up-selling
Up-sells and cross-sells can be responsible for an average of 10–30% of e-commerce revenues according to a Forrester research analyst.
Cross-selling is displaying a complementary product to the one that is being purchased to the customer, such as a belt to go with your trousers. Whereas an up-sell is trying to get customers to spend more on the same product, e.g. buying a smartphone with double the storage from what you originally chose.
What’s important to know is that based on data from Predictive Intent, up-selling performs 20 times better on product pages which led to a 4.25% increase in sales. However to take things a step further, cross-selling on checkout pages boosted sales by another 3%.
While these strategies are designed to boost your Christmas sales, don’t forget to keep track of any changes you make on your e-commerce website to see if they’re working for you. For more ideas on how to optimise your checkout process, you may also be interested in reading: 5 Key A/B Tests For Checkout Optimisation
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