Why an Optimized Mobile Checkout Can Boost Your eCommerce Sales (We’re Sharing the Notes From a Live Magento Webinar)
Together with Magento Commerce, RedStage, and retailer Scrubs & Beyond, HiConversion held a webinar for online merchants. Objective: to learn more the state of checkout in eCommerce, how it’s been underutilized, and what you can do to make your checkout experience smarter in 2020 (there’s a video recording embedded at the end of this article).
The speakers on the webinar were Andrew Figgins, Digital Commerce Product Owner at Scrubs and Beyond, Benjamin Shapiro, Solutions Engineer at Redstage, and our very own Ben Virdee-Chapman, VP of Marketing and Product at HiConversion.
In case you don’t have time to watch the whole thing (it’s about 45 mins. long) – we’ve also put together this quick re-cap. It includes all the key points from the webinar, customer stories, and experiment data that should serve as the perfect intro for your first foray into checkout experience optimization.
Why focus on (Mobile) Checkout sales now?
Today’s shoppers spend 39% more time shopping on mobile devices, and visitors who have a negative experience on mobile are 62% less likely to buy from you in the future.
In addition, eCommerce spending is up 30% since March, with smartphone screen-time up 30%.
“By using the data, we’re able to point customers directly to where they’ll get the most value out of their shopping experiences.”
– Benjamin Shapiro, Solutions Engineer, Redstage
Buying on handheld devices is only getting more popular each year, which puts pressure on brands to deliver mobile shopping experiences that are just as good, if not better, than their desktop counterparts.
Our approach to tackling this issue was to focus on the most important step in the buyer journey – where they make the final decision to buy or not to buy – the checkout.
Optimizing Mobile Checkouts through a program of testing is having a huge impact.
Here are 3 example experiments merchants have ran over the past few years working with HiConversion and Magento Commerce…
- ZIP code autofill: increased RPV by 4%
- Displaying cart total in header: increased mobile revenue by up to 29%
- Hiding chat in cart and checkout: increased RPV by up to 7%
Note: We use revenue per visitor (RPV) because it’s a great way to roll up traffic, conversion rate, and average order value into one high-level metric to judge your performance upon.
Checkout: THE most critical part of your website.
Checkout used to simply be about collecting money from your visitors online. Once you or your agency set it up and it generally worked, you pretty much forgot about it. As long as it did the job of collecting money, that was good enough. This made it a blind spot for many teams – you didn’t know it was a problem so you weren’t really looking at it.
Since the beginnings of eCommerce, the approach has been…
Step 1: Drive more traffic to site
Step 2: Send visitors to checkout
Step 3: Convert customers
Not a lot of attention was placed on the performance of the checkout itself, making it a game of “don’t worry about checkout optimization, just send more visitors through it.”
However, any improvement to that checkout has a direct improvement on revenue because it acts as a toll both on your site. This got us thinking, especially after working with the MOI and seeing hundreds of checkouts on all different types of sites, that the best types of checkouts we see today are those that are unique to the brand.
What does that mean? Top performing merchants were interested in knowing how their customers like to actually buy.
The next generation of mobile checkouts.
The current state of checkout is complex, making it difficult to judge how well yours is actually performing. How do you know how you compare to the rest of your industry? A new problem has arisen – no one is on top of their checkout experience. Additionally, the tools and data available to most teams is limited to a “one size fits all” approach.
That makes them no longer viable.
But, there’s a new skill emerging – the skill to meticulously manage your checkout experience. Your brand is unique so its demands a unique checkout experience, which could mean anything from…
- The type of payments you offer
- How your checkout is positioned in your customer journey
- Where to engage visitors with the cart
- Millions of other variables and combinations
It all starts with the ability to measure where your checkout is today. However, in the busy eCommerce world, nobody really has time for this.
How do merchants grow with improved checkout?
With eCommerce sales of medical essentials up nearly 450% during the COVID-19 pandemic, Scrubs and Beyond took this opportunity to better align their shopping experience.
Andrew Figgins, their Digital Commerce Product Owner, was tasked with the mission of improving the brand’s checkout experience.
Not only that, but he had to be quick enough to analyze, isolate, and fix the problems before losing customers to the competition during this crucial period.
“I needed to quickly figure out why our checkout wasn’t converting, and I wanted the voice of the customer to speak more loudly to me than theories.”
– Andrew Figgins, Digital Commerce Product Owner at Scrubs and Beyond
Being that most eCommerce teams rarely have the resources to add more duties, let alone conduct deep dives into their checkouts, Andrew needed a way to compound his efforts.
After an initial Google search that yielded an overwhelming 5 million results, he came across the Mobile Optimization Initiative (The HiConversion powered experimentation community for Magento merchants – aka MOI).
Within a few weeks of collaborating with HiConversion’s team of analysts, Andrew was able to run a full analysis of Scrubs and Beyond’s site performance and deploy multiple successful experiments.
The insights Andrew uncovered accelerated his progress toward reaching the goal set by his CEO, and they didn’t stop there.
Read the full story on Scrubs and Beyond’s growth during the economic downturn.
Enduring Today’s Economic Challenges by Optimizing Your Checkout [Full Video]
In this webinar, we discuss how an optimized mobile checkout experience can drive your conversions and customer loyalty in a time of economic challenge, with topics including…
- How Scrubs and Beyond reinvented their mobile experience
- Using mobile testing to boost business returns in an uncertain economic climate
- Tips for building and deploying a frictionless mobile checkout experience
What does HiConversion do?
Simplified: We’re an eCommerce conversion rate optimization platform. Years ago, our founding team realized that eCommerce optimization had huge potential for brands selling online by most weren’t taking full advantage of it.
In the spirit of helping brands get to know their customers better and what motivates them to buy, we created HiConversion. It’s a platform merchants use to learn more about their shoppers, try new ideas to boost sales, personalize their sites, and much more.
HiConversion isn’t just A/B testing – it’s an all-in-one solution that brings eCommerce teams together. Our secret sauce is the machine learning we use in the background. It can predict and automate how tests are run, and can even allocate traffic to experiments that are performing better. The patented algorithm allows merchants to experience revenue lift even while they are testing.
Everything we do is verified by real merchants, guided by human experts, and powered by AI.
Together, we call it eCommerce Intelligence™.
