Once you have won the battles of getting consumers to your site and impressing them so much that they’re ready to make a purchase, the next step is to accelerate the buying process to allow your new customer to sail through the completion of the purchase. Here are three ways to keep sales on track once the decision to buy has been made:
* Let your customers make their purchase before asking them to register – Whether new customers simply want to make a purchase or their time is short and they’re in a rush, putting them through a long registration process will take them out of the buying mode to possibly question whether the purchase is worth all the extra work. Instead, once the purchase has been completed you can offer registration as a faster way to check out the next time they make a purchase from your site.
* Use breadcrumbs – A breadcrumb navigation bar, named after the “Hansel and Gretel” story, is usually displayed as a horizontal timeline across the top of the page to show consumers where they are in the purchasing process. Breadcrumb navigation both enables purchasers to see how close they are to finishing the process and allows them to go back to previous steps to make edits and changes.
* Show and tell consumers that their purchase is secure – Identity theft is a very real issue for consumers, so let them know that your ecommerce site is going to be a secure place to transact business by displaying current SSL information and a trust certificate from an internet security provider like VeriSign.
Once a visitor on your ecommerce site has made a decision to buy, be sure that you provide a fast, simple, and trustworthy path to completion. With all the work you’ve put in to get customers this far, the last thing you need is to lose them at the finish line.
* Let your customers make their purchase before asking them to register – Whether new customers simply want to make a purchase or their time is short and they’re in a rush, putting them through a long registration process will take them out of the buying mode to possibly question whether the purchase is worth all the extra work. Instead, once the purchase has been completed you can offer registration as a faster way to check out the next time they make a purchase from your site.
* Use breadcrumbs – A breadcrumb navigation bar, named after the “Hansel and Gretel” story, is usually displayed as a horizontal timeline across the top of the page to show consumers where they are in the purchasing process. Breadcrumb navigation both enables purchasers to see how close they are to finishing the process and allows them to go back to previous steps to make edits and changes.
* Show and tell consumers that their purchase is secure – Identity theft is a very real issue for consumers, so let them know that your ecommerce site is going to be a secure place to transact business by displaying current SSL information and a trust certificate from an internet security provider like VeriSign.
Once a visitor on your ecommerce site has made a decision to buy, be sure that you provide a fast, simple, and trustworthy path to completion. With all the work you’ve put in to get customers this far, the last thing you need is to lose them at the finish line.