Should I Use Single Page Or Multipage Checkout?

For eCommerce store owners, abandoned shopping carts forever remain a mystery and something that silently eats up potential revenue. On an average, online retailers experience 60% to 80% of cart abandonment every year. And when you drill down the research, you realize that 70% of your customers abandon carts just before they checkout. Although the major reasons for cart abandonment are usually pricing and high shipping costs, the fact is that you can’t really reduce the prices below a point.

So what can you do? From working with our eCommerce customers, we’ve found that the best way to address the cart abandonment problem is – Fixing your checkout page!

It’s not easy to prove that your checkout page may have frustrated your customers. But when customers find a checkout page that seems unending, confusing, and that requires unnecessary information, they can get suspicious, frustrated and don’t think twice about abandoning their cart. Just look at your Google Analytics – You’ll see a huge drop off at your checkout page.

Having worked with several SMBs and large eCommerce businesses, we have dealt with different scenarios that affected our customers’ checkout pages. And here are the three possible checkout solutions that worked for them.

• Optimizing the existing checkout page
• One page checkout
• Multipage checkout

Most online retailers are of the opinion that a single page checkout is the holy grail to their cart abandonment problems. But that’s not how it works. Although most studies and researches favor single page checkouts, we recommend that you optimize your existing checkout page before jumping into a conclusion on what works the best for you.

Christian Holst, one of the researchers at Baymard rightly says, “There do exist some A/B cases where one page checkouts outperform multi-step checkouts significantly. These cases however often compare a non-optimized multi-step checkout with a new optimized one page checkout.”

What’s The Hype About One Page Checkout?

• Faster and simplified checkout process
• Quick and intuitive navigation
• Apt for mobile shoppers
• Increased page performance and interactivity
• Options like guest checkouts help users to skip the need to fill long forms and directly move to the payment part

Customers don’t have to wait for successive pages to load before they make their payments. This way, one page checkouts save a lot of time.

As the billing, shipment, order review and confirmation details are all on the same page, it’s easy for them to complete their checkout without much distraction. Customers who make repeat purchases, shop inexpensive products and prefer mobile shopping will definitely love a one page checkout, as its ideal for them.

Read how one page checkout increased LoCost Medical’s conversion rates up to 10%:

One of our clients, LoCost Medical, was facing many website related problems and they were having difficulty driving traffic and making conversions. After analyzing their site, proposing solutions and feedback, we realized that they needed something more to impact conversions.

We found that they had a complex, multipage checkout, causing customers to quickly abandoned their cart.

We worked on this and replaced their multipage checkout with a single page.We also analyzed all the form fields and optimized their fields, making the process better. Because of this, our client saw a 10% increase in their conversion rate. It boosted their website performance and eventually increased traffic.

Hence,providing a hassle free checkout can be a suitable option when you want instant results in traffic and conversions.

Optimization Tips:

Here are some of the optimization tips for one page checkouts that can balance your multipage checkouts.

• Don’t clutter your checkout page. Studies show that 5.08 is the average number of checkout steps. Keep it concise and remove redundant fields.
• Provide prominent CTAs and guide them clearly during the process.
• Provide an option to enter alternate billing address. This is one of the major drawbacks because customers find it difficult when they have to enter a different location.
• Display the progress of checkout. This way your customer knows his checkout progress rather than staying clueless and leaving the cart halfway through. You can display a countdown timer to increase the urgency to complete checkout.
• Make it easy for them to return to their cart and modify their orders.
• Provide instant online help through live chat or toll free numbers.
• Let your customers know that they’re performing safe transactions.

Why Is Multipage Checkout Still Preferred?

Multipage checkout mostly works for customers who want to make complex and expensive purchases and don’t really mind spending time to make sure everything’s perfect. Despite the number of success stories of one page checkouts, multipage checkouts have their own reasons to be preferred by many top eCommerce businesses. Because,

• You can elaborate the checkout.
• Acquire more customer information.
• Encourage cross selling and up selling before they make their final purchase.
• Study customer drop outs in detail using various analytics.
• Integrate different payment gateways.
• Possible to double check your cart and add gifts and other customized offers.

Final Words

There are pros and cons to both types of checkouts.Picking the right one for you can be a difficult task. As mentioned earlier, one page checkouts are easy to optimize and simple to execute. With the huge spike in mobile shopping, there’s no better solution than one page checkout, as it’s faster, saves time and convenient. Through one page check out you can considerably increase repeat purchases thereby improving customer retention.

But before that,we strongly recommend that you A/B test all your strategies and optimize your pages to find out what actually works.This is because what works for one may not work for another.

Not sure why your website isn’t driving enough traffic and converting? Our eCommerce experts are just a call away!