Mobile Friendly Checkout Optimisation Tips

Mobile Friendly Checkout Optimisation

With more than half (51%) of online shoppers now making their purchases on their mobile devices the need for a seamless mobile-friendly checkout process is becoming increasingly important. 

Shopping on a mobile device offers quite a different experience compared to shopping on a desktop computer. Mobiles have smaller screens making it difficult to enter lots of information and can often have an unreliable internet connection. 

Ensuring that your online store offers both an  efficient and speedy mobile checkout will help to improve your customer’s experience and allow transactions to be completed as  fast as possible, keeping pace with your customers online shopping expectations.

Benefits Of Mobile Checkout Optimisation

Offering an efficient checkout experience is crucial regardless of what platform your customers are using, as it has a direct link to your store’s revenue. By optimising your mobile checkout, your ecommerce store could benefit from:

• Reduce cart abandonment
  The checkout is where most customers decide to abandon their purchase. Therefore, offering an easy checkout experience can increase the likelihood of customers completing their purchase at your store. This is particularly important with the increased use of smartphones for online shopping, as, without a mobile optimised checkout, your cart abandonment rate may begin to increase.

• Increased conversion rates
  Optimising your checkout process for mobile devices also makes your products more easily accessible to a wider range of customers. If new customers discover that they can complete their purchase more easily on their preferred device at your store, they can be more likely to make a purchase, resulting in an increase in conversion rates.

• Improved customer experience
  Offering a checkout experience that is tailored to your customers online shopping preferences can improve your customer’s experience, which can in turn lead to customer loyalty, encouraging repeat purchases all of which has the potential to increase your store’s revenue. 

Useful Tips For Mobile Checkout Optimisation

Here are some of our top tips for optimising your checkout process for mobile devices.

• Offer multiple payment options
  With more and more people doing their shopping on their phones, it’s important that your ecommerce site offers a wide variety of options for mobile shoppers. Mobile shoppers are often looking for a fast and convenient way to complete a purchase, therefore, providing credit and debit card payment options combined with a digital wallet like PayPal, will allow you to cover the majority of transactions. The more payment methods you have available, the higher the chances your customers will be able to pay via your online store.

• Simplify forms with autofill
  As mobile phones have much smaller screens, it can be difficult for customers to enter lots of information into checkout forms. Offering features such as auto-filling address information, postcode lookup menus or duplicating shipping addresses into billing address columns, can help to simplify and speed up the checkout process. It might also be worthwhile to offer the AutoFill Credit Card feature, which allows users to take photos of their credit cards to populate information; the details are scanned and the information is then added to the website’s credit-card field. Similarly, having the ability to store your customers’ credit card details without them having to enter their card details each time will make their next purchase less “painful” meaning they’ll be happier with their purchase and more likely to return. 

• Include bigger CTA buttons
  It’s important to make sure your call to action buttons on your mobile site are significantly bigger than those on your desktop site. They need to be readable and work properly to allow the customer to go straight to checkout. Most users use their thumbs on mobile, and no thumb size is equal so it’s critical to design with that in mind so mistakes are avoided. It’s also worth ensuring that there is a suitable amount of distance between them. Clicking ‘back’ instead of ‘next’ can be frustrating for mobile web users.

• Offer a one-click checkout option
  If your customer has already set up an account with you, you may have their shipping and billing information already stored. For these customers, consider offering a one-click checkout option that uses the information they have provided you with for previous transactions.

• Provide larger spaces in text boxes
  Mobile phone screens are narrow therefore you should make sure shoppers have a big enough field in order to fill in the information related to their order such as their address, this helps reduce the risk of errors and customer frustration. 

• Display relevant keyboards
  When a mobile customer clicks on a form field you need to ensure that they are being presented with the right keyboard to input that information. For example, when asking for a telephone number, make sure that the number keyboard appears for your customer.

• Offer guest checkout or social logins
  Consider offering a guest checkout or option to sign in using a social media account such as Google or Facebook. These checkout options can make the payment process faster and reduce the need for form-filling, which can be challenging on a mobile device.

• Include a progress bar
  Placing a progress indicator bar near the top of your checkout screen can show customers how long it will take for them to complete their purchase. This is an especially useful feature for mobile checkout as mobile shoppers are often looking to complete their purchase more quickly. Progress bars can be implemented on both email and on-site. Either after a shopper has abandoned to let them know just how close they are or on-site to prompt and increase conversions.

• Vertically align information boxes
  Ensuring that your checkout process is formatted vertically means that customers do not need to use ‘pinch and zoom’ to orientate themselves on your webpage. If your customers are able to easily swipe through to the next stage it can reduce the frustration caused by poor website navigation, which can often lead to cart abandonment.

• Reduce checkout page content
  Mobile screens can accommodate less content than desktop screens, and because of this, you want to ensure that you are only displaying relevant information to your customers. Less content throughout the checkout process can stop your customers from becoming distracted and abandoning their purchase.

Conclusion

Ensuring that your checkout process is suited to your customers, regardless of what device they are using, can help to increase your store’s revenue and allow you to reach a wider customer base.

At Opayo we offer a range of online payment services to help all businesses create a seamless checkout experience. With 24/7 UK based support, we are here to support you at any time of the day. For more information about how Opayo could help your business, explore our payment solutions or contact us today.