A Few Ways To Optimise Your Woo-commerce Checkout

Woo-commerce is the plugin/ add-on to WordPress which allows you to create an e-commerce store on top of the WordPress content management system. This is a robust add-on created by WordPress and is very feature rich, as well as adaptable and extendible, allowing it to be used for most e-commerce applications.

Yes there are other options out there, but we find woo-commerce to be a pretty solid offering on top of the WordPress CMS, offering you more flexibility for additional page structures and functionality. Anyhow enough about the Woo-commerce suite, we are here to optimise the checkout process and get more customers converting into sales.

Before I get into the belly of this, there is a caveat, ** not all optimisations suggested are guaranteed to work in all situations, ideally these should be tested using A/B testing and post completing user analysis and research to be sure these optimisation stand a good chance of working.

That being said these are still worth considering.

So the aim of improving the checkout process is to remove any friction and blockers that discourage a user from checking out. This can be crucial for e-commerce stores as the average cart abandonment rate is somewhere between 50 - 70% depending on industry, so even to capture some of these lost users can only help your bottom line and sales volume.

Ok so here goes:

1. Optimise The End To End Steps In The Checkout Process.

So the idea would be to have a reduced number of screens whilst going through each stage of the checkout. A widely debated theory is whether to reduce the checkout to a single page or not. I'm gonna sit on the fence on this one as i've seen both work well and can depend on the website owners requirements. I will say however by reducing the number of steps, you're reducing the number of clicks, which in turn reduces the speed of the checkout, so a rule of thumb would be less is better.

I think for this type of optimisation its more about considering the fluency of the process rather than hard and fast screen numbers. So for instance if you show the form input fields in a natural manner, progressing through the shipping details through to billing and payment, as long as the process is clear and you indicate to the user at what stage they are at (whether this be via a progress bar or other means) then I think both can work equally well.

There is however one thing that sounds obvious, but often people overlook and that's removing distractions. This is so the user can focus on the job at hand and not be side tracked with additional offers, promotions or spinning, whizzing things. (I may have gotten a bit carried away with spinning, whizzing things, but you get my meaning).

2. Allow Checkout As A Guest

Although this is somewhat misleading as you're still collecting the same data through the checkout process in order to process the order, it offers the user a feeling of being less committal to the process and just buying the product, as opposed to signing up to all sundry of marketing materials. Of course if they sign up as a user thats great, but I wouldn't enforce this.

3. Ensure Your Checkout Is Mobile Optimised

Again a simple one, but one people can overlook as more often than not they will be testing there beautiful, sparkly new woo-commerce store on a desktop or laptop. Please, please, please makes sure all the input fields fit on the screen across different resolutions, there is nothing more annoying than having input fields on a form you cant fill in. By using percentages rather than fixed values, your input fields can shrink and expand to the mobile device making everything much more flexible. A good choice for testing different formats is using a tool such as browser stack. This can help you test your website using an emulator across different mobile device types as well as desktop.

4. Lightening Fast Is The Way Forwards

Website speed should be as quick as possible across the board, including checkout, as nobody likes to wait around these days. This applies to both desktop and mobile versions and by optimising the code, CSS, Javascript files as well as using Webp image files can all help speed up the page delivery in the browser. You can also implement server and browser based caching, which stops browsers from having to load all elements from scratch over and over. There are lots of very good plugins that will help with this and allow you to speed up your website to be pretty dam quick. Be warned though, some of the changes using plugins, can be quite technical, so don't just change things blindly and hope for the best.

5. Using an Address Finder

By using an address finder, you can prompt the user for their postcode and the add-on will search (often the royal mail database) and deliver address options for the user to choose from. This has multiple benefits including, it saves time for the user not having to type their full address out, it avoids typos and spelling mistakes, which could be become problematic further down the line as well as it uses an address format already familiar with Royal Mail for shipping. I would say this is a must for most stores.

6. Use Multiple Methods Of Payment

In this day and age people are all about ease, so by having multiple payment methods on your website, can often make it easier for the user to checkout. Payment gateways such as Google Pay or Amazon Pay also have the added benefit of pre-populating shipping and billing addresses, so again making the process a lot slicker from the user prospective.

7. Make the "Apply Discount" less prominent

So offering discounts is a great promotional tool and can often help with increasing sales, however this feature can also work against you. As soon as a user sees this on your checkout the first thought is........"there might be discount codes I can use". So off they go searching the internet for free shipping codes and promotion codes, acting as a distraction from them actually checking out. Therefore its good to have this as an option if you intend on this type of promotion, but I would make it much less obvious on the checkout page.

8. Customer Reviews

The inclusion of social proof during checkout can also be a good thing, this shows the prospective customer that other people have enjoyed shopping with you, and you to could experience the same level of customer service and quality of product. These of course can be tailored to use personalised reviews based on products in the cart, but generic ones work well also.

9. Abandoned Cart Emails

You've likely come across these already with your own shopping habits, if you have say left something in the basket and haven't checked out. These often promote discount prices based timed checkouts " Get 10% off if you order within the next 60 minutes" that type of thing. These can work well and bring the user back to your website, where they have already shown interest and intent in ordering your products.

In summary, there are many different ways to optimise your checkout and website, hopefully these optimisation points prove helpful in reducing the number of drops offs during checkout. Some of these aspects would benefit from being tested, but in the main should help you convert more users into customers.

There are of course many additional ways to improve the process including personalisation, if you want to discuss this further, feel free to reach out to us as often we need to see the site first, before making recommendations.