The 4 Top Benefits of Single Page Checkout

Shopping cart abandonment is a growing epidemic in the ecommerce world. Shoppers fill their carts with products from around your store and the moment it’s time to checkout they disappear. In fact, it’s gotten so bad that almost 70% of shoppers abandon their cart before purchase, leaving billions in goods each year.

Store owners have implemented various tactics to combat cart abandonment online such as sending purchase reminder emails, offering money-back guarantees, providing free returns, including progress bars on the checkout pages and even spending money to retarget wayward customers.

Most of these tactics will help your store convert a few extra customers over time, but none of them address the immediate issues customers face when initially checking out. 

During checkout many customers become overwhelmed with the amount of pages they have to go through in order to complete their purchase. Even with progress bars the task can seem daunting, especially when the customer was on the fence about their purchase in the first place.

Additionally, many multiple page checkout sequences don’t show the entire cost of the order until the very last page when taxes and shipping are applied, a drastic change in cost will undoubtedly lose you a majority of your customers.

Ecommerce store owners are now moving to a new checkout method called the single page checkout to drastically reduce cart abandonment and any surprises from the customer’s point of view.

The Benefits of the Single Page Checkout

What exactly is single page checkout? It’s exactly as it sounds, instead of guiding a user through each stage of checkout such as gathering shipping and billing information on individual pages that data is collected on a single page.

It makes it much easier for customers to quickly fill out their information and purchase their products.

1) Increased Conversions

Simplifying the checkout process is bound to increase conversions by at least a little bit, right? By allowing users to quickly fill out required information with a single checkout page, you’ll notice an instant boost in how many customers actually complete the forms.

Getelastic decided to A/B test single page checkout against their traditional checkout method and ended up increasing their sales by 21.8% almost immediately by customers using single page checkout.

2) Faster Checkout

How long do you wait in a retail line before it becomes annoying? A couple minutes? A few seconds? Fact is, people tend to get annoyed fairly quickly when it’s time to checkout in person and online.

The average multiple page checkout takes customers 1 minutes and 40 seconds to complete. In the world of online retail we’re told we only have a handful of seconds to capture our customers attention before they bounce and move on to a competitor’s site, so how is almost 2 minutes acceptable?

This is where single page checkout really shines, the average single page checkout takes a customer 53 seconds to complete their purchase. That’s almost an entire minute, or half the time,  shaved off, and as we know many customers tend to change their minds quickly when making purchasing online. That’s why it’s so important to get them through the process as quickly as possible.

3) Better Site Performance

Mobile continues to increase market share in terms of how customers of purchasing goods online, 79% of customers have made a purchase using their mobile devices. Now, more than ever, it’s extremely important to be optimized for mobile experiences and that means cutting out excess pages.

When on a mobile device page load times can vary from a few seconds to almost a minute depending on your connection. With multiple page checkout sequences this can mean 5+ minutes just trying to fill out your information in order to purchase a product. As you can imagine, many of your customers are going to give up well before they hit the 5 minute mark.

A single page checkout would fix this issue entirely, loading a single page would drastically cut down on the time required to checkout.

4) Increased Customer Satisfaction

All of the above benefits tie into this last one, which is one of the most important metrics you can focus on when it comes to ecommerce and business in general. An improved checkout process also improves the satisfaction of your customers. When they’re able to purchase the products they want faster and more fluidly they tend to leave feeling happier overall.

If your customers have a good experience with your store they’ll typically come back again and as we know, repeat customers are our most profitable customers. Designing a checkout sequence to not only increase conversions but to all also increase repeat sales should be the focus of any ecommerce store.

Simple checkouts have proven to work, which is why Amazon and only major retailers have opted for faster, or even single click checkout solutions.

If you haven’t tested single page checkout with your store yet, it may be time to give it a try. With benefits of seeing sales increase by over 20% and leaving customers with a positive view of your store the pros vastly outweigh the cons of switching.