Gamification aims to increase engagement and create more loyalty through positive user experiences. Loyalty drives returning customers. It’s a loyalty risk if your checkout process is hard to complete.
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The least exciting part of the online customer journey must be the checkout process, for sure. However, in a relatively simple way you can gain a lot here, limit abandoned shopping carts and drive loyalty of your visitor.
Imagine: Your customer has already chosen the product and has already agreed on the price. Isn’t it important to secure that conversion as quickly and as simply as possible?
What is the problem of a boring checkout process with all kinds of input fields? It is just not fun to do. Combine the pleasant with the useful. A gamified process is simply more pleasant to complete. With subtle adjustments you can already achieve a lot and fortunately you do not have to reinvent the wheel yourself.
With a gamified checkout you set a goal, offer control, reward good behavior and deliver speed. By adding a gamified twist to the checkout process, you improve the necessary focus from your customer and limit the chance that he or she will be distracted and never finish the transaction again.
The checkout process is task-oriented and a number of things can be improved during this process. In the visual below you can see a number of thoughts and considerations that take place during the checkout process in the hearts and minds of your customers. By gamifying certain tasks you quite easily make checking out more pleasant. This also makes the overall customer experience just better as you remove friction.
A shopper who leaves the site even after the checkout has started? Make sure to avoid such a costly event.
A gamified checkout works. Just try it.
If you would like to learn more about opportunities to optimize your checkout process. Let EcomStream produce an analysis of your existing checkout, and see what can be improved:
Baymard Institute recently published a new report called “The current state of checkout UX”. This shows that 58% of 59 leading e-commerce sites, in Europe and the US, offer a good or an acceptable checkout customer experience. 35% are mediocre and 6% are downright bad.
Some of the issues that emerge from the report are as follows:
Passwords
Don’t make it too difficult. Do you still have a format that the password must meet? For example at least one capital letter and at least one special character etc.
Make sure you are clear about this before the customer enters his password. By asking the customer to endlessly re-invent passwords through “trial and error”, frustration increases and motivation decreases.
Credit card input field
Luhn validation makes it possible to immediately validate whether a card number has been entered correctly or not. It is completely irrelevant whether the customer pays with a Mastercard or Visa credit card, for example. Many customers are not even aware of that. For example, they simply take their “Rabocard” and do not even know whether this is actually a Visa or MasterCard. Preferably don’t even ask them. Just have them filling in their credentials in an input field called “Credit Card”. It even saves you extra space on the payment page.
It is also useful to indicate the spacing of the 16-digit number in the input field. So that’s four times a four-digit block. This limits the chance of errors as compared to entering 16 digits in succession without spacing. In fact, it is showing in the same format on the physical card as well.
Delivery date
A customer would like to know when he or she will receive the order. That is why it makes more sense to indicate on which date delivery will take place than when you indicate that the delivery is in 2 working days. Compare it to timetables of trains. It makes much more sense to be informed about the arrival time of the train at your final destination than about the arrival time of the train at the station where you board the train, right?
Countdown to cut-off
How much time do I have in order to be delivered tomorrow still? A customer would regularly ask himself that question. Speed of delivery is often very important. Delivering the next day is no longer a USP even. Give your customer insight into the amount of time that is left to be delivered tomorrow. It’s managing the expectations of your customer.
Pick up from the store
Omni channel retailers can differentiate themselves, and utilize their omni channel proposition, by mentioning store pick-up as an option to receive the order. So make sure this is prominently mentioned. The option to pick up the order in store should be presented as an extra shipping option to your client.
The order review page
Have all the details of the order been entered correctly, or does something still need to be changed? You should allow the customer to do this directly on the order review page. Taking the customer a few steps back in the checkout can cause confusion and frustration. Especially if some fields have to be populated once more.
