eCommerce Firms Fine-Tune Tech to Shave Seconds off Checkout

For consumers, a good checkout experience is one they can complete quickly so they can move on to the next thing they want to do.

For eCommerce retailers looking to serve those customers, the top measure of success is whether a customer who starts checkout completes the sale — and a big part of doing that is speed.

“If your checkout is going to take more than a minute, you’ve gotten distracted, you’ve gone and done something else, and that is going to take the cart conversion rate down, just from having to fill out forms and things like that,” Harry Chemko, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Elastic Path, told PYMNTS.

Offering a Choice of Payment Methods

Offering a choice of payment methods is a key part of this. Consumers want to be offered payment methods that are relevant to where they’re located and the kind of buyers they are.

“That’s why we’ve really gotten into that payment space as well, because we think that having that really integrated can be one of the most material things that retailers and brands can do to increase those cart completion rates and get them through quicker than ever,” Chemko said.

Increasingly, industries are also working to engage customers at the moment that they want to make a decision. In some cases, that means letting them buy things through ads on Instagram and other social channels.

Whether the customer is engaged in-store, online or on social channels, they expect the checkout to be as frictionless as possible.

“I think it’s a moment for us as an industry to start to challenge the concept of your traditional checkout process and think how you can take the friction out of that and make it a lot better,” Chemko said. “There are a few technologies around that are really starting to drive change there that are really material.”

Interacting With Customers in Different Ways

Retailers must also work to create a good experience for customers in the other ways that they may be interacting.

For example, when it comes to returns and other post-sale experiences, forward-thinking retailers and brands are looking to manage that as well, rather than just sending the customer to the carrier or another third party for information.

Returns don’t have to be a negative experience focusing on the fact that the customer didn’t want the product or didn’t feel it was right.

“If you can merchandise that moment properly by, for example, taking some great products out of your product catalog and offering up alternatives or giving them add-ons to something you might already own — those kinds of moments all of a sudden can turn that customer who may be a disgruntled customer into a customer for life,” Chemko said.

Voice is becoming another way customers interact with merchants, and Chemko said it’s “perfectly imperfect” — as it provides both positive and negative experiences, with the latter including unintentional activations of voice assistants as well as privacy issues.

With the investment that’s going into it, though, voice will draw a larger share of customers over time.

“I think that, from a medium, it’s how we are most naturally inclined to communicate as a species, so I think that’s naturally going to continue to grow,” Chemko said.

Chat is also taking off, both for customer support and expert guidance while shopping.

“I think it needs to get to the place where the chatbots are optimized with a real person there that’s able to give you some advice or help you with whatever decision-making process you might be having as a customer,” Chemko said.

Optimizing Technology Stacks

Looking ahead, Chemko said both consumers and eCommerce platforms will continue to adapt to the ebbs and flows of the pandemic — as evidenced by what’s happened with the stock values of some public companies in the space.

Brands and retailers that quickly put in place eCommerce platforms during the pandemic are now reaching their limitations and wanting to add more geographies, brands and lines of business into which they sell.

“I think that this is a great opportunity for brands and retailers to actually take a look at their technology stacks and really figure out how they can optimize that,” Chemko said. “So, we’re feeling a lot of energy in the space, but it’s more from brands and retailers thinking about how they can now optimize and do things a little bit better.”