Customers are humans and sometimes they make mistakes. At times they may pay for stuff only to immediately regret the purchase. They may want to return the product for refund or exchange it for another variant or a different product entirely. In physical stores, returning products before leaving the store with them is hassle free. […]

In a physical store, you select your goods, pay for them, and take them home immediately afterwards. This is never the case for online shopping though. There is always a delay between the time you pay for your goods and when you receive them. And it’s not just a time delay. It involves extra costs […]

The checkout process is extremely important to any online store. It’s here that all your work either comes to fruition or falls flat. After optimizing everything you can, this is the part that determines whether your customers actually give you money or walk away and become another cart abandonment statistic. Due to this, optimizing your […]

Some data According to Business Insider, 28% of US online shoppers abandon their cart because they don’t want to register/create account just to make a purchase. According to Baymard, it is the reason given by 31% of shoppers. (source) ASOS’s approach removed the account creation step on the checkout login page and it reduced their […]

Once you’ve made a sale your job is over, right? No. As long as you have inventory you should keep selling. The order confirmation page is constantly underutilized yet it provides an unmatched opportunity to provide more value to your customers and grow your sales. The leading cause of conversion problems in e-commerce is customer […]

Typical payment methods Credit card PayPal Google Pay Apple Pay   PayPal In regards to PayPal, roughly half the stores I looked at (see the table below in the examples) offer an express PayPal checkout with a CTA button at the same place as the normal ‘Checkout’ button (in the cart). And the other half […]

Imagine spending your time filling out a long form, submitting it, and then receiving an error message. It is incredibly frustrating. This is where inline validation comes in. Inline validation checks user inputs for errors and informs them immediately.   How do you implement inline validation properly? Proper error message placement – Show the error […]

Forms are at the very core of the checkout experience. This is the part where a shopper does the most ‘work’ on your site. While other parts of the page only require scrolling, clicking, and tapping, forms involve a lot of typing.      Sadly, a lot of shoppers approach forms with apprehension. Filling a form can […]

Forms are an indispensable part of the sign-up and checkout processes so reducing friction by limiting the information users have to type here as much as possible is instrumental to a great user experience.   Reduce the number form fields People are always intimidated when they see a long list of form fields on a […]

Everyone understands the necessity of a shipping address. Their purchases have to be sent somewhere after all. The billing address is used to validate the credit card and determine fees like sales tax. However, not every customer knows this so requesting the billing address can be a little confounding to them.  Users hate typing and […]

Mobile users are extremely important to e-commerce. According to Oberlo, they now represent 73% of all ecommerce sales. A great pain point for mobile users is the keyboard which typically takes up half the screen space. A standard mobile keyboard layout has 40-46 keys tightly packed together. This leads to errors when typing long text […]

Credit card fields can be long. The standard credit card form can have anything from 4-8 fields. The required fields: Billing address Credit card number Security code Expiration date   The optional fields: Cardholder’s name City  State Zip code   While massively popular and widely used in North America, credit cards aren’t the kings of […]

Look at these two numbers: 7826924512354720 7826  9245  1235  4720   While both numbers are identical, B is a lot easier to read than A. That’s how numbers are printed on a credit card and your formatting needs to reflect that. Formatting isn’t just necessary for readability, typing a 16-digit string of random numbers is […]

Checkout flow should have as little friction as possible. Eliminating unnecessary selections and typing is a great way to go about achieving as little checkout friction as possible. The fewer hoops a customer has to jump through, the sooner they can make a purchase.  Asking customers to select their credit card type is a good […]

Forms are an indispensable part of e-commerce. They are currently the only means of collecting information like shopper details (name, address etc) and credit card information at checkout.  There are various implementations though the traditional one has always been a label with a rectangular box beneath it. Without the label, these rectangular boxes don’t mean […]

If you’re planning to go on an overnight trip, let’s say to the next town, you won’t carry your two changes of clothes in a full size suitcase because that would be insane. The suitcase would be too large. You don’t stuff them into your pockets either because pockets are too small for clothes. You […]

About 5% of packages are undelivered. While shoppers like to blame vendors, improperly typed addresses are the leading cause of these delivery failures. There are ways of reducing errors during the entry of addresses to reduce cases of undelivered packages. Automatic zip code lookup is one way but it only gets you so far.   […]

Things tend to follow a certain order. Take dating as an example. When you meet someone new, first you say hello, then ask them out, talk, eat, or perform an activity together, and maybe walk them home. It’s only after a certain level of familiarity that you can try something like reaching in for a […]

Dropdown menus show a list of collapsible options a customer is expected to to make a choice from. They are among the most popular design elements on the internet. Nearly every site has them. Their widespread adoption is due to their incredible space saving abilities which allow for simple and uncluttered interfaces. However, these darlings […]

Autocompleting place names as they are typed is a good way to guarantee accuracy. A user types in Ca and you suggest California. For auto completion to work well, design needs to account for a few things:   Abbreviations US states and Canadian provinces have two-letter abbreviations that should be accounted for. AR is the […]

Reducing the amount of typing a customer has to do at checkout is a goal you should constantly be striving for. There is no point in a customer (let’s say Jonah) having to fill in the name of his city and state when all this information can be obtained from a single zip code. He […]

The ISO-7813 standard recommends MM-YY or MM/YY as the proper way to format credit card expiration dates. That’s why all credit card expiration dates have two digits for the month and two digits for the year. When implementing the same on your store’s credit card form, you need to follow the same principle. Don’t use […]

Forms are an essential data collection tool at sign up and checkout. They’re also places where a customer does the most work: filling in countless fields. That means it’s incredibly important to make form-filling as easy as possible. There are generally two kinds of forms: Single column forms Multi-column forms   A single column form […]

The decision as to whether your customers can check out in one step or multiple steps is a tough one. Over 60% of sites use multi-step checkout but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best kind. Usability studies have shown no significant difference in conversion rates between single and multi-stage checkouts.  They both have their […]

Customers at times make mistakes when typing data into forms. They might omit a digit or two, mistakenly type a letter into the credit card number field, reverse the day and month values of a date, or type a phone number without the area code among many other numerous mistakes. Using input masks reduces the […]

Customers are jittery about small brands According to Baymard, 18% of shoppers (from 1044 respondents in the US) abandon their cart because they do not trust the site with their credit card information. I would assume that as a site owner who is serious about your business you’d take your security seriously. If you use […]

Catch errors and suggest a correction I’ve seen examples where you could type an address with a street number (only a street name), which is invalid. So depending on the quality of the address finder, you may still want to have an address validator to catch invalid addresses that the Address Finder allows. If the […]

Payment options change per country If you sell internationally, users prefer certain payment methods based on where they live. For example, in South America, bank transfers are very common. (source)

For multi-step checkouts Add a progress bar at the top of the checkout which highlights which step they’re at, and gives a clear overview of all the steps.

On desktop This is more easily done on desktop, as there is enough space to always be showing the order summary.   On mobile Just make sure to show it on each step of your checkout, it doesn’t need to always be visible as they scroll.

How? Give them the choice to sign up or log in to their account, but the guest checkout could be selected by default, and visually attract more attention than the other options. Users expect it in the upper-left on desktop, and on top on mobile. Clearly label the Guest Checkout option (include the word “Guest”) […]

36% of stores Baymard reports that 36% of stores don’t! (source)   Confusing And if the cardholder name is your first field, 33% of users will type their credit card number in it because that’s what appears on their card.   Order of fields Typically, the order of the information on credit cards is: Credit […]

Most stores Let’s say you’re buying something and made it to the Order Review step, you’re ready to hit the Place Order button, and you realize that you messed up your address, or your card expiration date. What do you do? Most stores force you to go back to one of the previous steps to […]

Required phone fields cause abandonments Required but unexplained phone fields were observed to be a direct cause of abandonments for the subgroup of users who are suspicious of a site’s motives. – Baymard   58% of brands don’t provide an explanation Below is a poll done by Baymard to 2800 shoppers.   Do you need […]

PCI compliance PCI compliance prevents stores from saving a user’s credit card number directly. As a consequence, 84% of stores do not allow users to edit the credit number directly. Users are required to add a new credit card and delete the old one.   A solution An elegant solution to this problem is to […]