How to Create a Seamless Checkout Experience
I’m not the best at sports analogies but I would say that the checkout experience is not a whole lot different than rounding home base and making the final sprint towards home plate. You’ve already hit the ball out of the park and now you just need to bring it home. As an online seller, you’ve already done the hard work of putting what you’re selling out there, marketed and merchandised it effectively, and convinced someone to hit the Add to Cart button. Now, it’s just time to close the deal.
Creating a seamless checkout experience makes sure that checking out on your site is as fast, easy, and painless as possible. It makes for happy customers and home runs for you! (Home runs = sales.) With this in mind, here are my top 3 tips for creating a checkout experience customers will love!
Enable Express Checkout
Express Checkout is a super cool Squarespace feature that you can enable that automatically directs customers right to checkout, bypassing the shopping cart altogether. Without Express Checkout enabled, items are added to a customer’s cart for them to go to check out whenever they are ready. However, if you sell something that people typically just buy one of enabling Express Checkout saves users a click and can reduce both frustration and cart abandonment rates!
So, if you have just a single-product store or most people just buy one thing at a time on your site, I would suggest enabling Express Checkout by going to COMMERCE > CHECKOUT > EXPRESS CHECKOUT. Doing this will change the name of the button on your product page(s) from “Add to Cart” to “Purchase.” This feature not only saves people from having to hunt down the shopping cart icon in order to buy, it also gets them right to the checkout page when they are most likely to complete a transaction.
🚨 Note that if people typically buy multiple items from you that this is not the way to go for you. In that case, I would just make sure that you have your shopping cart icon clearly displayed in your site’s header. (Check out this Squarespace support article for instructions on how to display and style your shopping icon in your site’s header.)
Keep Required Info to a Minimum
File this one under: “just because you CAN doesn’t mean you SHOULD”. For example, can you ask your customers a bunch of questions at checkout? Yes. Should you? No.
This is because people really, really dislike having to divulge more information than is absolutely necessary, and with every additional question you ask the chances of customers bailing out increase exponentially.
There are several ways to reduce the amount of required information at checkout. You can edit most of these by going to COMMERCE > CHECKOUT.
Custom Checkout Forms - Use custom checkout forms only for absolutely imperative information that pertains to the order being placed ONLY. For example, as a way to include a gift message or to add helpful delivery information. I’ve seen some carts where I feel like I’m taking a survey because there are so many questions. Where did I hear about you? Would I recommend you to a friend? What’s my birthday? What is my favorite color? TOO MUCH.
Additional Fields - Do you really need to know a customer’s billing AND shipping phone number. Do you even really need their phone number at all? My bet is nope. Turn off the phone number field as required under the Additional Fields section.
Billing & Shipping Info - Can you default to assuming customer’s billing addresses are the same as their shipping addresses so that they don’t have to enter that info twice? My bet is yes and people can still opt to enter something different if they need to. Enable this as the default by checking the Use Shipping Address box.
There are so many easy ways that you can make things easier by reducing the workload for your customers at checkout. For more on this idea check out this post: 12 Ways to Build a More Empathetic Brand.
Be Strategic About Accepted Payment Methods
I’ve talked before about how reducing the number of options available can actually help people in making decisions and the same concept holds true when it comes to deciding what payment methods to accept at checkout. Some sellers want to try to appeal to everyone by offering a ton of different payment options thinking that then there will always be something for everyone.
I see this pretty often on Shopify sites because it’s a lot easier to do on Squarespace but IMHO the simplicity of acceptable payment methods on Squarespace is part of the genius. Sure some people would use Google Pay if you gave them that option at checkout but not offering it isn’t going to deter them at all from checking out; they’ll just go with whatever option you offer.
On Squarespace, you can get paid via Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, and AfterPay but this doesn’t mean you need to offer them all. That would just make your checkout clunky and slow people down. Instead, choose to enable just the options you think your target demographic uses and likes the most. I would say that 99% of shops only need to offer Stripe (for regular credit/debit card payments) + possibly Apple Pay. For more on getting paid, check out this post: How to Choose an eCommerce Merchant Processor.
Style Your Checkout Page
A few quick edits to the default settings on your site’s checkout page will make sure that it feels on-brand and cohesive with the rest of your site. This helps shoppers feel confident that their transactions will be safe and secure at checkout and keeps them from slowing down because they feel uneasy. At a minimum, I would recommend customizing the following elements by going to DESIGN > CHECKOUT PAGE:
Display Your Logo - Toggle the option ON to display your logo on the checkout page. This is the best way to help things visually appear seamless.
Background Color - Ideally make it the same color as the background on the rest of your site!
Button Color - Make it the same as your main buttons (aka the Add to Cart buttons) on your website.
There are some more checkout page style tweaks available but if you just do just the three things above they make the biggest impact in making things feel custom vs. generic.
Bottom Line
Creating a seamless checkout experience is pretty easy on Squarespace because it’s simple, streamlined, and pretty well-designed as a default. You don’t have to do a ton of work to improve on things but you can choose to use a little restraint when it comes to what info to ask or how many payment options to provide. You can also enable some of the additional features available to you to make things as fast, efficient, and on-brand as possible. Just a little TLC here to make sure your checkout is a home run!
