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 […]

When expanding into international markets it’s important to integrate local payment methods into your basket of options in addition to things like using local currency, language, and measurement units. People are less likely to complete a purchase if their preferred mode of payment isn’t supported.  While credit cards are used for the bulk of ecommerce […]

Humans love to see progress. It’s why we invented calendars, clocks, and mile markers. We like transparent beverage bottles so we can see exactly how much is left. Progress bars that are displayed when downloading or transferring a file exist for the same reason. Progress is calming while the lack of it is extremely unsettling. […]

Order summaries help remind customers of exactly what they’re paying for. As such, they should be shown at every stage of a multi-step checkout process except for the account selection step.  This is partly because the total order cost tends to increase during checkout once shipping costs and sales taxes are tacked onto the price. […]

Forcing customers to create an account is one of the leading causes of checkout abandonment. Nobody wants to have to remember another username and password. There’s also the issue of people not being very eager to hand their personal data over to some site they don’t trust just yet.  Forcing users to create an account […]

At times, the most minor of tweaks and optimizations go a long way in reducing friction for your customers. The credit card form can be easily optimized by presenting the data as it appears on the physical card yet 36% still fail to do this according to Baymard.   Confusing Typically, credit card fields are […]

People make mistakes. It’s the entire point behind the existence of the order review step during the checkout process. Customers are expected to look through their orders and other information like their delivery addresses and confirm everything is as it should be before finally proceeding to the payment stage.   Most stores overcomplicate the editing […]

Required phone fields cause abandonments There are numerous legitimate reasons to request a customer’s phone number. You may want to be able to contact them in case of issues with their delivery or you may need it to validate their credit card information. However, customers will be reluctant to provide their phone numbers if you […]

Credit cards expire, get lost, stolen, or get maxed out. People might also switch their bank or credit card provider. Whenever any of these things happen, your users will want to update their stored credit card details. Many people believe they just need to edit the number. There is just one hurdle: PCI compliance.   […]

45% of customers will abandon their carts and switch to a competitor if your delivery options are unsatisfactory. This is bad for you. You have to go the extra mile. “But I have same-day delivery,” you may say. “How much farther can I go?” This is where timeslot delivery comes in. It’s exactly what it […]

When designing your form fields, it’s always a good idea to let users know exactly which form field they’re filling out. It’s a form of instantaneous feedback that saves the user precious seconds and avoids a fair bit of confusion. The active field should be highlighted in a color that sets it apart from the […]

Do you offer coupons? If the answer is yes, then there is the question of presenting them. Many stores have a coupon field at checkout. You may consider doing the same for your store because it’s what everyone is doing but I’m here to tell you that you shouldn’t. Why? Let’s take a hypothetical customer, […]

You’re almost certainly building your site on a laptop or a desktop computer. That’s how you see it and that’s probably how you access it. It looks great to you. But that’s not how your customers are accessing your site. A majority of e-commerce sales are done on mobile devices now. But you probably know […]

It’s not over just because you have made a sale. You want your customers to come back. For that to happen, you have to leave them as happy as possible. The post-purchase experience is just as important as the buying process. That’s where a thank you page comes into play. A thank you page makes […]