Did you know that 70% of online shoppers abandon their carts? A slow and complex checkout experience is often the culprit for this.
A seamless checkout process, on the other hand, enables you to reduce cart abandonment and increase conversion rates. Customers value a fast checkout experience almost as much as they value your products. It helps them complete the buying process with minimal friction points, which boosts customer satisfaction.
You can ensure a lightning-fast checkout process for your customers with the help of optimized APIs, one-click checkout options, smart SDK integrations, and a mobile-friendly UI design for frictionless payments and quick conversions.
Additionally, optimizing your checkout process with payment UX best practices is key to reducing drop-offs and abandoned carts.
In this guide, we will discuss the best checkout UX practices that can help developers and UX designers craft a frictionless checkout.
Understanding the checkout drop-off problem
Checkout drop-offs may happen for a number of reasons, including:
- Unexpected costs
- Slow loading times
- Poor mobile experience
- Lack of payment options, and so on
Customers may cancel purchases if added costs (like shipping and taxes) exceed expectations. Plus, they can abandon their cart if the website loads too slowly. The good news is that almost all of these issues have a solution.
Common reasons for checkout abandonment
| Checkout Issues | Solutions |
| Slow loading time | Optimize images Implement caching Ensure faster API Reduce plugins Choose a reliable web host Optimize website structure Compress code |
| Too many form fields | Group related form fields Remove unnecessary options Use conditional logic Focus on user experience |
| Unexpected fees | Reduce additional charges like platform fees and delivery costs Maintain transparency while displaying product prices |
| Lack of payment options | Choose reliable payment providers that ensure fast, flexible, and secure transactions |
| Poor mobile experience | Make your website mobile-friendly Build an app Optimize web pages for mobile viewing Focus on mobile checkout design |
Other reasons for checkout drop-offs can be bad UI design, errors in copywriting, no SSL certificate, or an unfamiliar payment gateway. You can solve all these issues and more with a reliable online payment provider like Plural by Pine Labs.
Plural’s products include a payment gateway, affordability suite, payment links, card tokenization, subscription solutions, banking, payouts, and more for a fast and secure payment process.
Business impact of a slow checkout
Slow checkout can be caused for different reasons, but it has universal impacts on a business, such as:
- Lower conversion rates: Customers often leave their cart at checkout if the process is slow and multi-step. The checkout process must be curated so customers think it is worth their time and effort. Otherwise, your conversion rates will lower due to high drop-offs.
- Reduced customer trust: Slow checkout processes raise questions about the business’s efficiency and professionalism. Customers may lose confidence in your business if they’re met with slow loads and timeouts during checking out.
- Lost revenue opportunities: Needless to say, if customers abandon their carts while checking out, your business will lose valuable revenue opportunities. To ensure growth and high conversions, optimizing the buying process is crucial.
Optimizing checkout API architecture for frictionless payments
To fix this issue, we start with checkout API optimization.
What is a checkout API?
A checkout API is a set of programming instructions that helps integrate an online payment gateway into a website or app. This enables customers to complete their purchases on a dedicated checkout page securely. It acts as a bridge between the merchant’s platform and their payment processor.
API-driven checkout streamlines the payment process, allows customizations, and enables smooth and secure payment processing.
Best practices for fast payment APIs
Ensuring a fast payment API is a major step towards reducing checkout time and improving performance. The following best practices help greatly in achieving this:
1. Use asynchronous processing to reduce latency
Asynchronous processing ensures parallel execution so that the system continues with other tasks while a lengthy operation completes in the background. This makes the UX more responsive and reduces timeouts.
2. Implement webhooks for real-time payment status updates
Webhooks are beneficial for timely payment status updates, as they provide real-time notifications and automate payment workflows. This reduces latency and improves the responsiveness of the checkout process. For payment processing, this is a very useful feature.
3. Minimize API calls and optimize request payloads
You can minimize API calls and optimize request payloads by:
- Caching frequently used data
- Using bulk operations
- Reducing polling frequency
- Selecting only necessary fields in requests
- Compressing data
- Enabling API endpoints to handle multiple data points in one request
- Using API endpoints that allow field filtering or projection
For example, a travel booking platform can reduce checkout time by optimizing their API response speeds and carrying out a higher number of transactions in less time.
One-click checkout and autofill for faster conversions
One-click checkout allows the customer to complete a transaction with a single click without the need to fill out multiple forms or enter repetitive details.
One-click checkout is a blessing for customers as it:
- Reduces friction by eliminating tedious form-filling
- Uses stored credentials for instant transactions
- Saves time and effort for customers
- Provides security and speed to the transaction process
Autofill and Smart Suggestions
The Autofill feature lets you automatically fill form fields with your previously saved browser data. This may include your name, address, credit card number, and so on.
By auto-populating shipping and transaction details, customers are saved from the trouble of entering their information multiple times. This reduces cognitive load for users by minimizing manual input.
For example, an e-commerce brand can boost conversions by 30% simply by enabling one-click checkout on their website or app.
Smart Suggestions, on the other hand, offers AI-powered predictions of responses based on your current input. This helps users find smart search suggestions and predictions of the next word to type, which helps them fill out checkout forms faster.
Enhancing speed & reliability with SDK Integrations
Payment SDKs are prebuilt tools to enable faster and more secure payment integrations. These tools help developers integrate payment processing into apps or websites, including prebuilt codes, documentation, and libraries.
Some examples are Google Pay Merchant SDK, Samsung SDK, Square In-App Payments SDK, etc.
Benefits of using SDKs
Payment SDKs can benefit your checkout process by:
- Reducing development effort: SDKs help save time and effort by simplifying the integration of payments. This reduces the work of developers and enables quicker payment platform setup.
- Ensuring security compliance: Payment SDKs provide security compliance by enforcing PCI-DSS and tokenization to protect sensitive data.
- Improving checkout speed with optimized code: Code optimization improves checkout speed by minimizing database queries, caching data, reducing calculations, and optimizing image sizes.
For example, a subscription-based SaaS platform can integrate a payment SDK to streamline recurring payments by optimizing data types and selecting efficient algorithms.
Mobile-first checkout: Designing for smaller screens
According to market insights, over 60% of e-commerce transactions happen on mobile devices. Thus, businesses need to make their websites friendly for the small screen.
This doesn’t just mean optimizing web pages for mobile. It also includes creating mobile apps, adding features like biometric authentication, etc.
Best practices for a mobile-optimized checkout
The following best practices will help your business adapt efficiently to the small screen for a fast checkout experience:
Use large, tappable buttons for easier navigation
Mobile users are more comfortable with easy navigation options, simpler menus, and large, tappable buttons. This helps them go through the buying process quickly and without confusion.
Enable biometric authentication
Biometric authentication features, such as face ID and fingerprint, offer a secure verification process for users who don’t want to remember login credentials or passwords. This way, they can authorize payments faster while remaining security-compliant.
Implement a progress indicator
A progress indicator shows the customer at what step in the checkout process they are. It offers transparency and encourages them to complete the transaction, thus reducing drop-offs.
For instance, fashion retail websites can benefit greatly from an optimized checkout flow on mobile devices. Most of their customers are looking for a casual shopping experience, so they wouldn’t like to go through a long checkout.
Conclusion
To summarise, you can reduce checkout time and drop-offs through API optimization, one-click checkout, SDK integration, and mobile-first design. A faster checkout experience, in turn, leads to lower cart abandonment rates, higher conversions, and a better user experience.
A fast checkout experience can give you a major edge over your competitors. Not to mention, it boosts customer satisfaction and instills trust in your prospective buyers.
Looking to optimize your checkout experience? Explore Plural’s payment solutions to create frictionless transactions.
