A Winning Shopping Cart Checkout (Shopify Tutorial 7/20)

Hey, Ezra here, back with you and continuing on our journey of optimizing our pages. I just want to quickly talk about the shopping cart and checkout pages we use on our store to make our store convert as best as it possibly can. The shopping cart and checkout, not a whole lot to understand here about shopping cart pages and most eCommerce stores are going to come with a pretty decent shopping cart page, but some of the main elements here are that you want to have multiple calls to action, so multiple ways that people can move from the shopping cart to the checkout. You want to use the isolation effect, so you want those buttons to be a different color than everything else on the page so that when people get to the shopping cart, they can very easily see how to continue to the checkout.

You also want to have a progress bar to kind of let people know where they are in the process of checking out. Security and guarantee symbols are really important and also, you want to have a left navigation with links to all the relevant content so that people don’t have to leave your shopping car to sort of get access to the content they need, like returns information and shipping information and stuff like that. You want that stuff really visible from the shopping cart. A lot of times people abandon the shopping cart looking for information like that. Also, obviously product image, the contents of the cart, those things, and that’s going to come standard in pretty much any shopping cart today. Then, if you have a shipping calculator, where people can actually calculate how much shipping is going to cost, that’s a really sweet feature. It does help conversion rate.

Then, I like to have the ability for customers to log in because we get a lot of returning customers. You don’t need customer accounts, but it is a good thing to have. As you can see here, we’ve got our left menu where people can get access to the information they need. We’ve got the multiple checkout buttons that are using the isolation effect, so it’s the only time you see that specific color on this page. We’ve got our progress bar and we’ve got our security symbol, and we’ve got a little comment box and obviously you can see what products are in your cart. That’s our shopping cart. Here’s Crate and Barrel, they’re great eCommerce advertisers, and then Zappos, so you can kind of see that a lot of folks are doing similar … Both of these folks have the multiple calls to action, they’ve got some of these same elements, so you want to add those elements onto your shopping cart page.

Your checkout is pretty straightforward and most of the time you can’t actually modify checkout very much. Most checkouts are pretty static. Shopify doesn’t give you a whole lot of room to modify the checkout, and that’s okay. It converts quite well. Congruency, it’s got to look like the shopping cart they were just in. You want to have multiple payment options, Amazon, Apple Pay, PayPal, credit card, as many payment options as you can add is a good thing. Single page checkout or a page where it’s step one, step two, step three, is really good, kind of the way Shopify is laid out. If they’re moving from page to page and each page looks different, that’s not so good. Finally, a coupon field. If you’re using coupons in your marketing, you want to make sure that it’s easy for them to enter those coupons into the coupon field.

Ezra here for the shopping cart and the checkout page, simple stuff, but stuff that I feel like you should know about your shopping cart and your checkout page.

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