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Improving Magento Checkout Payment and Shipping Sections

We’ve found that a lot of people spend a great deal of time changing the look and feel of their ecommerce site, but then neglect to the users experience when trying to complete and pay for their items. After a user has found the products they’re looking for the next part can be more stressful, so it should be the site owners responsibility to make the users journey through the checkout as simple as possible.

We’re just going to outline some improvements you can make to the standard Magento checkout, these will hopefully get your customers through the checkout process as quickly as possible, eliminating unnecessary steps which is the best way to reduce cart abandonment. We’re not going to look at completely redesigning the checkout process of Magento as that’s a different article all together, we’ll just be looking at some little changes you can implement quickly and hopefully see results in conversions and reduced abandonment rates.

  1. Entering their Address

    Post Code Lookup in Magento

    There are a selection of easy to install plugins available for Magento to give a Postcode lookup service to the user. At just a few pennies per use why give the user the hassle of typing every line of their address by hand? But it’s important to remember they’re not perfect and it’s a good idea to allow the user to adjust or have the freedom to enter their address if they prefer. They won’t order if they think it’s going to be a hassle actually getting the item delivered correctly.

  2. Delivery Methods

    Delivery Methods in Magento

    Giving the user choice is important. Offering worldwide delivery isn’t as hard as some businesses believe so it’s always worth evaluating if going global is an option for your business. Try and explain to the user what methods are available and not have ‘standard’, ‘express’, ‘super fast’ etc as they’re still non the wiser about when they’ll get their item.

  3. Payment Methods

    Payment options in Magento

    Offer as many payment methods as you can but try to keep the choice clear. This merchant we setup didn’t want to offer Paypal or Google Checkout due to the higher fees, but I know personally that I might use a website if I’ve got some money left over it my Paypal account as it doesn’t always feel like you’re spending real money!
    This Merchant is using Sage Pay but there’s no need to tell the customer that, most people don’t run a business and don’t have a clue what Sage Pay is, they might have a Visa card and that’s what they know and want to use, show this is accepted, make sure you use an SSL certificate and highlight their transaction is secure.
    Sage Pay in Magento
    Sage Pay offers a great Token service so you’re able to fairly easily store Tokens that can be used to save a users card details for next time. This website is using an iframed integration with Sage Pay so the card details are never processed or stored on the server so there’s no requirement to go through the extra hassle of PCi Compliance and the cost associated with that.

  4. Final Card Entry

    Final Payment screen in Magento checkout

    It’s well known that for every additional step that a user is required to complete during a transaction the abandonment rate increases. So why redirect the user to a 3rd party website to complete their transaction? On this website we’ve styled the Low profile integration for Sage Pay so it matches the theme of the website and the user is never aware that they are entering their details on a separate system. It’s also important to require the minimum amount of information that you really need. Pass the billing address of the user if you have it, do you need the issue number?

Very soon We’ll be showing you more ways to improve the checkout process and be explaining the results of some test we’ve been doing with a single page 1 step checkout compared so Magento’s default 6 steps. Take 10 mins to go through your checkout, ask an impartial person to go through with no instruction from yourself, do they struggle at a section? are they unsure about the security of your site and see what can be improved.


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Luke

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