Matt Mullenweg put it best when he said that “it’s day one with WooCommerce.” It’s doubly true in the case of WooCommerce checkout, which is rife with excessive fields, pages, and password-locked accounts. You don’t need to take our word for it either, just consider the fact that almost 70% of online carts are abandoned.
When you leave aside the matter of price, which is a separate discussion entirely, the root cause of cart abandonment is frictional checkout. Each additional second that a checkout process lasts, a customer is less likely to make a purchase. The keyword here is second, as seconds make all the difference in the world of e-commerce.
So what’s the answer to the checkout dilemma?
Some will instinctively point to the utility of autofill, but it’s essentially a band-aid feature, still subjecting consumers to the mishmash of checkout fields, pages, and — in the worst offenses — login screens. Making your customers create an account on your store is, indeed, the worst solution imaginable.
No one wants yet another set of credentials to keep track of, even if the next purchase they make will be significantly more convenient. That initial checkout barrier is all they need to decide never to visit your store again.
A great many merchants believe that they can alleviate the cart abandonment issue through an email automation plugin. Plugins like WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery, created by CartFlows Inc, are exclusively focused on winning back customers by automatically sending out emails to those who left them behind in the checkout page.
An OptinMonster plugin delivers the same functionality with added features, like popups and a newsletter delivery system. But for those who take one look at a checkout screen and never even bother to enter their email, this solution misses the mark entirely.
Perhaps an equally substantial sum of merchants spend hundreds of dollars or the equivalent in time on a highly modified multi-step checkout flow that offers upselling. CartFlows Inc, the company behind the aforementioned cart abandonment recovery plugin, is most famous for its funnel builder. The trade-off is simple. With each item you try to upsell, you’re introducing friction into the checkout process.
CartFlow’s plugin is great, but too often merchants double down on a fundamentally misguided approach to checkout by introducing further complexity and unfamiliarity into the equation, which are the bugbears of consumers.
One solution stands above the rest. These days, giving customers the ability to check out with just one click is the single most effective measure against cart abandonment. On WooCommerce, the PeachPay plugin delivers just such a solution.
The first time a customer clicks the button generated by the PeachPay plugin, it generates a streamlined form that is already easier to fill out than 90% of checkout flows out there.
But the plugin obviously doesn’t stop there. All the customer’s information will be available for 1-click checkout the next time they click the button, no matter what site they clicked it on initially. And the best part is that it’s free, with the price built into the standard Stripe transaction fee.
Merchants need to simply opt into a waitlist that allows the PeachPay team to ensure that everyone has a smooth onboarding experience. The wait isn’t even a long one either, just 1-2 days, after which time a team is assigned to your specific site to ensure successful integration.
In conclusion, then, the best course of action a merchant can take to solve the frictional checkout dilemma is PeachPay’s passwordless one-click checkout solution. Merchants can get set up in minutes, let their customers check out in seconds, and see the results in just a few days.
