Ecommerce Checkout - Make Them Register
- by Brandon Spilove
- Published on 3/15/07
- Article views: 1841
The world of ecommerce is expanding daily as more and more retailers take their business to the web in the hopes of attracting a percentage of those ever finicky web shoppers. As the amount of businesses open up ecommerce shops online, the amount of web development companies is also growing, offering ecommerce solutions for even the smallest of budgets. Ecommerce has become an online commodity, so much so that it is deceiving many retailers into thinking that an ecommerce business is cheap and easy. On the other hand, there are many online retailers who understand the true nature of this business, and want to grow beyond the basic solutions the commodity industry is peddling.
One important aspect of the ecommerce web site is user registration. This is a complex topic, because it is widely known that forcing a customer to register and create an account in order to checkout is a big turnoff, and can significantly increase abandonment rate. However, most online retailers recognize the need to make customers create an account. One of the biggest advantages in customer registration for both the customer and shop owner of an online store is self-service. The primary reason customers contact retailers after making a purchase is to check on the status of their order. If they have an account, they should be able to check the status of their order online, reducing the need for a phone call to customer service.
One way to think about the checkout process is like a stream of water running down a tube or pipe. There shouldn't be anything obstructing the stream, customers should flow through the process with little or no distractions or obstructions. The process should feel easy, and not mucked up with creating passwords and re-entering their email address five times and entering their mailing address and all other sorts of things that prolong the process and increase customer frustration and subsequent abandonment rate.
There are 2 primary points to consider when conceiving the checkout process:
- Reduce abandonment rate, and
- Cater to the primary audience.
There are many reasons customers abandon their web site purchase. You need to remove those barriers, and one way to do it is by removing the registration step. Many ecommerce packages and copycat web developers offer that page which confronts customers with the question: Already registered? Sign in here OR Click here to create an account. Somewhere along the line, a bunch of ecommerce developers decided this was a good idea, and now it seems this page has now inserted itself in the customers checkout stream on a large amount of web sites.
Checkout Abandonment
One way to reduce abandonment is to reduce the number of steps (i.e. pages) the customer must complete before making their purchase. The less Continue buttons the customer must press, the less chances there are for them to second guess their decision to make their purchase from the online store. Two pages that can easily be eliminated are the Sign In OR Create Account page and the subsequent Create Account page for customers with no current account. For one thing, the day the online store opens, there are no registered customers. Why prompt them to log in when you can be fairly certain they don't have an account? Additionally, you should be catering to your first time visitors anyway, after all, first impressions are everything and if done right, will lead to repeat customers and referrals.
At minimum, registering for an account usually encompasses asking the customer to enter their email address and to choose a password. On many sites, additional information is necessary to create the account, most of which just serves to distract the customer from the stream and potentially make them leave. Many customers are turned off by the notion that they must create an account in order to make a purchase. This is why we need to make them create an account as subtly as possible.
When a customer decides to make a purchase from the web site, their number one goal is to go through checkout as seamlessly as possible. They have a mission, to purchase the item without any hassle as quickly as possible in as few steps as necessary. Web developers should be mindful of this and adjust the checkout stream to accomplish this. It is possible to give customers both a hassle free checkout stream, and subtly create an account. Chances are that most of the information you need for a customer account is already being requested during checkout via entering a billing address and an email address. The only thing that separates a non-registered customer from a registered customer is a password, so here are the specific steps to a pain free and highly intuitive 3 step checkout process.
Steps to an Intuitive Checkout Process
Step 1, Enter Billing and Shipping Addresses:
The billing/shipping address page should be the first page a customer comes to from pressing the Checkout button on the shopping cart page. There should be a link at the top of the page saying Ordered from us in the past? Login to your account or something to that effect. If you use cookies, you can even say Hi John Doe, click here to log in. I would suggest even using Ajax to open and close a login panel, so that the customer doesnt even have to leave the page, they just enter their email and password, and the address forms pre-populate with all their stored information.
The addresses should pre-populate from their most recent order. You can include drop down boxes of past street addresses to let them select alternate previous addresses.
Step 2, Choose Shipping and other Options
This step is where you can present the customer with your shipping options and any other options you need from them, for example gift wrapping or coupon codes, ship dates, etc. Basically, any other choices the customer must make prior to getting a final order total should be performed at this stage.
Step 3, Final Review and Payment
This step will be where you show the customer the contents of their shopping cart, their billing and shipping addresses, and the shipping options and any other options they selected. There will be a final order total on this page, including any necessary tax calculations.
This is where you can ask the customer for payment information, such as their credit card information and so forth. It is a good idea to ask for credit card information on this final review page so that you don't need to store the information in your database. Namely, the CVV code is not permitted to be stored in electronic form at all, as dictated by the major card vendors. The customer can submit their order, and the data can be transmitted directly to your payment gateway without having to first store it in the database for use on a subsequent page.
Now, here is the big difference between a first time customer and a returning customer. If this is a first time customer, there would be a small section near the final Submit button prompting the customer to create a password and enter it twice. We will utilize their email address from Step 1, and combine it with the password they enter here to create their account credentials. This is a very un-obtrusive way of having the customer create an account, and it doesn't require making the customer go through any other procedures to create the account.
The steps above outline a 3 page checkout process for ecommerce web sites to make a customer create an account without obstructing the process with needless steps. 3 pages or less should be the goal. There are many other factors in the checkout process which need to be incorporated, such as the calculation and selection of shipping options, the addition of discount codes or gift certificates, custom messages or instructions, etc. All of these other components can be incorporated into the 3 step checkout process and do not necessarily impact the customers requirement to register or not.
An ecommerce site that follows these general guidelines should be well on their way to reducing checkout abandonment and increased sales. Unfortunately, most of the canned ecommerce packages for sale do not offer this type of checkout process, so custom web development will most likely be necessary. Additionally, the information in this article covers only one aspect of ecommerce, there are numerous other topics to consider and research. Don't be deceived by the commoditization of the industry and be thorough in deciding how customers interact and checkout, it makes all the difference.
Brandon Spilove is the owner of a 10 year old web development firm Business Edge Services & Technologies (http://www.busedge.com) based in Washington, NJ. We offer Microsoft ASP.NET development, web design, web hosting, sharepoint, data warehousing and database design and development.
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