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We all buy products online but sometimes we don't realize how much work companies like Amazon have put in to make their checkout experience as seamless as possible. If you're a business who's thinking of selling products online, whether physical or digital, then thinking about your checkout experience should be one of your top priorities. There's nothing worse than bringing a potential customer to your site and then losing a sale because they got frustrated with your checkout process.

I want to cover 4 core ideas that can help you design a checkout experience that will delight your customers and inspired them to purchase more products from you.

1. It Should Be as Easy as 1, 2, 3

Your checkout process should be divided into logical steps that a customer can easily understand. For example, this could be a sample checkout process:

1. Confirm Purchase Items (Shopping Cart)
2. Create an Account/Checkout As Guest
3. Enter Billing Address
4. Enter Credit Card Information

The above example contains 4 steps starting from the shopping cart. You can remove or add steps but showing them as a logical sequence is really effective. This gives your customers an idea of what to expect and to know where in the process they currently are. As in everything, you want to remove unnecessary information until your have the bare minimum amount of steps needed to complete the purchase.

There's a lot of debate whether you should do your checkout process over multiple pages or in one page. I won't recommend a specific style since you can A/B test both of these formats and find the right one for your business. Whether you do a single page or multiples pages, you still need to keep the logical sequence visible and even offer some kind of progress bar that clearly outlines the checkout process.

2. Do You Need All Those Input Fields?

Once you got your sequence or steps down, then you need to think about what customer information you need or want to collect. What information isn't crucial to your checkout process? Do you need a secondary billing address? Do you need their middle name or how they would like to be addressed? The less fields that you have, the higher conversions you can get.

You don't want to mentally burden customers with a huge list of fields when you only need a few key ones. There's been a few companies which are experimenting with not even taking a billing address and just taking the credit card information. Doing this can increase the number of failed credit card charges that you get but its something that you could experiment with.

3. Feedback is King

Next, be sure to provide positive and negative feedback throughout the checkout process. This could be as simple as green arrows if a customers enters a valid email address or if they enter a valid billing address. It could also be used to tell a customer that their credit card number is incorrect e.g. less than 16 digits.

This kind of feedback can help decrease the frustration that your customers might experience by catching errors before they click the final "Pay for My Order" button. You should then take this one step further past the checkout process and be sure to send notification emails confirming their purchase and any other important information.

When customers are purchasing products online, they usually prefer having more information than not having enough information about their purchase. Don't spam them but be sure to send crucial information to their email address.

4. Deliver the Goods

This brings us to the last point which is how to deliver the goods to your customer. If you have a physical product then you could think about sending them updates as items are being packaged, shipped, etc. This will keep them up to date on when they can expect to receive their purchase.

If you're selling digital content, then you really need to think about how your customers will access the content. Should they get a download link through their email? What if they never get that email, is there another way for them to download that file? If you're doing video content, perhaps you want your customers to stream the content which could be done by giving them user accounts.

Make it simple for them to understand what they need to do to access their purchase right away. I seen too many companies make it really hard for a customer to access their digital goods killing any chance of having a repeat sale from that customer.

Once you have a solid checkout experience, start testing different variations and see how they improve conversion. Always be testing should be your mantra. What other ideas or principles do you use when designing checkout experiences?

Author Bio
Ruben Daniel is with Edukaans, a video platform that makes it easy to sell video content. Be sure to visit our blog for more educational content on how to make money from your digital products.