5 easy steps to improve usability of your Magento store checkout
If you own a Magento online store there are several issues you should take care about to make sure your website converts visitors into buyers, thus increasing your profits. Most importantly, your store should be easy to use. Magento offers some great solutions in this aspect; however, it’s still up to you to make your website unique and more competitive.
In order to make your Magento store more user-friendly, you should focus primarily on the improvement of the checkout process. This is where visitors pay to you and, at the same time, this is the place where, according to many surveys, visitors abandon their carts to never come back again. There are 5 easy steps that will significantly cut your Magento store’s cart abandonment rate and make the checkout area more usable for you and your customers.
1. Require no upfront registration
It’s difficult to find anything more annoying for customers than having to register and fill out numerous fields before even choosing an item and checking the total price. Of course, you need buyer’s personal information for future offers, but you also need to be a bit smarter. Let customers finish the checkout as a guest and sign up at the end.
Visitors can get frustrated when they don’t know how long the checkout process is. Introduction of a progress indicator to your Magento store will show customers that the goal is close.
3. Craft Magento checkout fields according to your needs
Checkout area is also your source of the necessary information about customers’ orders. Make it comprehensive and easy to use. Magento Order Attributes extension provides you with a wide set of tools to manage Magento checkout fields. With the help of this extension you can add any number of fields of different types from textfield and checkboxes to dropdown and date with time. You will no longer have to spend time and money on making calls and sending emails asking your customers for additional data. The display of attributes can be setup according to the flexible conditions that you set. What is more, Magento Order Attributes allows saving the attribute values for future purchases, so that a registered customer does not need to enter them again.
4. Remove distractions
While at the checkout, the customer should concentrate only on the task they got in hand - completing the purchase. Try to reduce the number of links that can take the customer away from the checkout page. At the same time, make delivery details, contact information and security logos more visible - this will make the buyers more confident that the purchase is safe.
5. Guide a customer to payment
Many owners of Magento sores don’t pay enough attention to this important aspect: enrich your checkout area with vivid and clear calls to action. Test with colors, fonts, placement or size, but make sure a customer knows what his or her next step is.
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Thank you! very useful tips! I am starting own online business and I am choosing the best e commerce platform for it. I was thinking anout Word Press but after long searching I decided to choose Magento. There are a lot of positive reviews (like this one for exampple http://sam-ecommerce.com/blog/view/magento-for-e-commerce). They say that magento is higly flexible platform and I think using your tips it should be easy to run it.
Thanks for the tips! I've benn using Magento for some years already and checked many one step checkout modules. the ones I like most are by Amasty and Magestore. @Paul, I've read bad reviews about your mod, so i didn't tried it out myself.
Thanks for sharing these steps. By utilizing these techniques, one can easily improve the checkout page. To add extra custom fields to checkout page, I would recommend to use this extension - http://www.fmeextensions.com/magento-additional-checkout-attributes-fields.html