Optimise your e-commerce processes and stay ahead of the pack this Black Friday period

2022 has certainly flown by, with Black Friday a matter of weeks away – leaving retailers under pressure to update their online platforms in anticipation of the upcoming shopping frenzy! While the pandemic initially prompted a dramatic shift in shopping behaviour from traditional to online, we now have the cost of living crisis to consider.

With the cost of inflation hovering around 10% and the price of food, energy, and gas soaring, the affordability levels of goods and services for households are treading dangerous ground. This suggests that consumers will start changing their habits to sustain their lifestyles – meaning an increasing number of consumers shopping online, especially as we approach the shopping season.

Having an online platform for your business is no easy feat, with achieving optimal supply chain operations, maintaining tight cyber security, and providing a great experience for your clients online being the bare minimum expected – and that’s not even considering the unprecedented levels of online competition to contend with.

While having a slick, well-stocked, and easy-to-use website will ensure that you attract more than enough clients, the deciding factor in your success this online shopping season is your e-commerce checkout process – the most important step in driving conversions.

Read on as we dive into the dynamics of streamlining your e-commerce checkout process to maximise your return on investment.

Optimising your checkout process

Did you know that a 2021 study (link to https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate) on online shopping revealed that one in five shoppers abandon their online carts as they find the checkout process is too complicated or long – incredible! Checkout processes that are cumbersome and clunky can prove detrimental to potential sales and are a hindrance when it comes to converting online visitors into paying customers.

When you consider the large amounts of money and time invested in creating your e-commerce platform by carefully designing your website, selecting and/or developing bespoke products, creating tailored marketing copy that is SEO optimised, and making your customer’s choices easier than before, is their path to completing their purchase as clear and simple as your imagined?

When you look back at how much you have invested in paid and organic adverts to increase traffic on your platform or how much you’ve invested in improving the user-friendliness of your website, can you honestly say that you’ve devoted the same resources to enhance your online checkout process?

Just a few intelligent changes on your platform can boost your brand’s reputation tenfold and lead to much greater conversions. Online shopping has made people impatient, so once you have online visitors who have committed to a purchase, it’s critical that you make the final process effortless to boost your bottom line.

Let’s delve into some key areas where you can work on dropping cart abandonment rates and increasing your sales this shopping season and beyond.

Enable Guest Checkout

One of the primary reasons visitors abandon their shopping carts is that they don’t want to register an account on that platform. This is in addition to those visitors who are already registered and may have forgotten their login details. In these instances, your online platform should allow for guest checkouts to boost your sales – making it easier for your visitors as opposed to long-drawn-out measures to recover login details.

A great way to eventually get these “guests” to register on your platform is to send a follow-up email after their purchase offering enticing incentives if they sign up before their next purchase – a subtle technique to encourage data validation.

Enable search-as-you-type address lookup

Another fantastic technique for enhancing the checkout process for your customers is to integrate either a postcode lookup or type-ahead address validation tool on your online checkout forms. With this element in place, your visitors can find an address with a few keystrokes – even if they’ve typed incorrectly – as opposed to manually typing out their full address or choosing from an address finder drop-down list.

Not only does this avoid mistakes when capturing the recipient’s address, but it’s quick, easy, and mobile-friendly. In addition, this will ensure that your customer’s purchase is delivered to the correct address and avoid the costly burden of returned parcels.

Incredibly, failed or delayed deliveries cost almost $200,000 annually per retailer, on average – additional expenses that can certainly be avoided if you invest in a solid type-ahead address validation system at a fraction of those would-be expenses.

If that wasn’t enough to convince you, by integrating a fit-for-purpose address lookup tool on your platform, you would ensure that you have the most accurate and updated customer address information on your database.

Open the correct keypad

With a large proportion of online sales conducted through mobile phones, e-commerce retailers must do everything in their power to ensure that the customer experience on their platform is effortless – irrespective of the device that they are using.

If, for example, the form requires your client’s mobile number, the keypad should open in numeric format to eliminate the frustration of your customer having to manually switch keypads whenever they need to type numbers or alphabets. This seamless process will enhance your client’s experience and will encourage them to visit your platform again for future purchases.

Batch clean your email database

Many retailers plan their marketing well in advance of the shopping season and one of the most popular methods of marketing is through email. The accuracy of the emails on your database comes into question, however, as there is an approximate 10% degradation rate of email addresses due to customers typing them incorrectly, through fake email addresses being used, or due to those email addresses becoming dormant.

By batch-cleaning or data cleansing your email database, you can identify and delete email addresses that are outdated or invalid. In addition, by allowing your visitors to type their email addresses without validation means you could be gathering information that serves no purpose – directly correlating to poor returns on your marketing efforts.

Enhance fulfilment efficiency

One common concern that many e-commerce businesses face is that the addresses on their databases and checkout forms are not formatted according to the systems used by their courier companies. Such a minor detail can have a devastating impact on operations as it slows down the delivery process significantly and increases the rate of failed deliveries – leading to unwanted expenses.

The right address validation tool will provide addresses in the correct format and can also deliver Rooftop Geocodes for each address which couriers use to optimise their last-mile delivery accuracy.

Reduce the risk of cybercrime

As technology has advanced, so too have the devious methods of cybercriminals who have become more creative and brazen in their attempts to swindle e-commerce businesses – especially as shopping season approaches.

Online business owners can eliminate the possibility of cybercrime on their platforms by integrating solutions that automatically enter and validate a customer’s information securely and accurately. This will not only mitigate deliveries going to the wrong person but also reduces the cyber risks of financial crime and online fraud on your platform.

The Fetchify difference

Fetchify is a pioneer in SaaS address lookup and data validation solutions, and we’ve been helping e-commerce businesses increase their conversion rates and boost their profits for the past 15 years.

We process millions of data transactions each day for thousands of clients ranging from small e-commerce startups to large household brands such as Heinz and RBS. Our flagship products: Address Auto-Complete  reduce friction on checkouts, leading to increases in conversion rates of up to 40%, and helps reduce failed deliveries by as much as 75%.

We are proud to offer 30+ fit-for-purpose plug-and-play integrations with search algorithms that are twice as fast as our competitors. We enjoy global coverage in over 250 countries, with businesses from a variety of industries benefitting from our bespoke offering.

If you’re looking to boost conversion rates, eliminate failed deliveries, minimise human errors, and provide a seamless experience for customers on your platform, then look no further than the experts in data validation and address finder solutions – Fetchify.

The best part is you can try out our Free Trial before committing to our services. Our excellent technical and customer support team is on hand to answer those burning questions you may have. Make sure to Get in Touch  and experience the Fetchify difference – like thousands of e-commerce businesses around the globe!