You enter a shop in Grand Bazaar. You are looking for a better pot to cook. That red one is probably what you need. As soon as you start to examine the product, that cunning seller approaches you. He then starts telling you all the properties of the product. Even though you can’t understand everything, it sounds like this has a lot of good properties. You ask for the price and while you think about other properties that you may need, that shrewd seller packs the pot as soon as he grabs it away and goes to the checkout and waits for the money. Of course, negotiation is a tradition so he goes down for 10 bucks and the sale is over. Meanwhile, all those compliments, on point personalization, assuring expressions such as it just fits you (in clothing sector) are like the product recommendations we digitized or like e-commerce checkout process.

Classical e-commerce checkout process

Now you can select your username, password, shipment address, billing address, name and surname, choice of a gift pack and whether or not you want to receive marketing e-mails.

On e-commerce websites, the greatest leak happens during the cart checkout process. Is it the checkout process for you too where you lose most of your users? Do you lose your users in username and password or shipment windows too who evaluate your website, find your price somewhat reasonable, add it to the basket and start with purchase action?

e-commerce checkout process from Amazon

Say, we put the ‘continue as a guest’ option and did some optimization in the funnel. This is time though, do you have leaks at id number and shipment address steps? At every stage of this 4-step process, the parts we lose just like the rockets sent into space are actually customers ready to pay. They are there to purchase and we lose these customers our customers, at every step after they click the “buy it now” button.

Shall we do a prioritization for this 4-step e-commerce checkout process?

You gained your visitor’s trust until this step and from now on whatever you do for this checkout process which began with the customer making the “purchase” decision is going to affect you negatively. By whatever I mean anything. Every window you show and every question you ask is a reason for the customer to give up the purchase. Especially in this process, all the guidance to increase trust or all the info you give is nothing more than softening the dissuasive factors.

If only we could have that cunning seller’s setting in the digital environment where we first get the costumers’ money and then he can ask further questions. If only we could even say that we are the guarantee of this product.

Maybe we can’t do this but why not receive the payment first?

The customer comes to the website, surfs, finds the product or may even be directed to the product via some ads, reaches necessary information, evaluates the price and finally clicks the “buy it now” button. Let me repeat, s/he clicks the “buy it now” button.

Afterward, we request the money.

one page e-commerce checkout example

Why wouldn’t we request it? Is it trust? they already came to Grand Bazaar before reaching this point and is already convinced that this is the right place. Maybe chose this store because of the signboard or its name and entered. And said: “I want to purchase”. I, personally, don’t see any problem regarding the trust issues in e-commerce.
Actually, we even overcome this trust issue with this approach which was caused by asking the user for a username, password, mail address or ID number.

If the person purchases using his/her credit card which means if completes the third step of this 4-step process at the beginning don’t worry is going to complete the rest with a conversion of 99%.

Shall we do A/B Testing?

Is there anyone courageous enough to do an A/B testing? I am volunteering to run this process for free. If there is such a brave fellow to do that let’s roll! The only thing we will do is to bring the 3rd step of this 4-step process to the first step. If it’s a 3-step process, then let’s make the 2nd step the first of those. No matter how many steps this process has let’s handle payment in the first step. A/B testing for a very important process like this one can be realized in a high-traffic e-commerce website. However, it looks like it will be quite challenging to make this radical test in this old checkout process. If someone does something crazy like this and shares its results, s/he can buy me a drink according to the results.