Let's discuss the launage used on cart page and the checkout process - Customer psychology

[Brittany_Witt]

I have a feeling that when customers see “Checkout” on my cart page that this is the final step in the checkout process when, in reality, they’re just proceeding to the next step, which is filling out their shipping address, and it may be deterring them from clicking this button.

I feel like some customers might think that if they click this button their card will be charged and the sale will be final.

I also want to mention that there is about 15% of customers who will input coupon codes in the “Note to Seller” section which confirms my belief that some customers may think that clicking this “Checkout” button is the last step of the checkout process and they don’t understand that there’s more information they need to fill out before the sale is final.

Obviously, the goal is to get as many customers past the Cart page as possible, especially for the Abandon Checkout emails to trigger.

I want to know what you all think about this particular button saying “Checkout”.

So, I want to change the label of this button to something else to imply that this is not the last point before the sale is finalized, but I’m not sure what to re-label it.

For now, I re-labeled it to say “Proceed to Checkout”, but I want to know what you all think of this re-labeling and what would you all re-name this button, or would you leave it as “Checkout”?

I look forward to the discussion!

[PaulNewton]

When you take a cart to the checkout in a store do you think your done and just leave?

Do you ever see people take a cart to checkout and just keep going without scanning, paying or interacting with staff?

People know the algorithm for completing transactions in real life even if they cannot articulate them or even bother to ever think of them in discrete steps to intuit them in a virtual transaction.

I feel like some customers might think that if they click this button their card will be charged and the sale will be final.

For first time purchsase, how would their card be charged if they haven’t provided that information yet?

How would a store even know where to send the items?

If customers have magic thinking ignoring the logistics of reality there’s going to be very little you can do about that without serious UI/UX work, testing and feedback.

Don’t feel it, validate it ask customers directly, analytics, heatmaps, ab testing , etc.

If your demographic is technically illiterate that could be a correlation in which case there’s going to be very little you can do in terms of consumer education without some serious effort.

I also want to mention that there is about 15% of customers who will input coupon codes in the “Note to Seller” section which confirms my belief that some customers may think that clicking this “Checkout” button is the last step of the checkout process and they don’t understand that there’s more information they need to fill out before the sale is final.

Confirmation bias - your trying to correlate two different opinions of two different problems as having a single predefined assumed source. It could be , it could not be, it could be two separate issues with a relation, or it could be two completely different problems that having nothing to with the main assumption your making.

Don’t do that , measure it get actual data.

Add a Discount code box to the cart page and measure the change.

For now, I re-labeled it to say “Proceed to Checkout”, but I want to know what you all think of this re-labeling and what would you all re-name this button, or would you leave it as “Checkout”?

If you have high traffic use a tool like google optimizely to run an ab test on changes like this.

ab testing tends to not work very well with low traffic or low conversion rates as that stats skew too easily and can be misleading if you don’t know how to interpret results.

Alternative flows to test is to use a cart drawer/popup if your theme has on. Or customize the purchase experience to just send customers directly to checkout and skip the cart entirely; this will mean no notes and pretty much every purchase will be for a single item.

If your personalizing individual products you should be using item properties instead of the cart note.

[Brittany_Witt]

Thanks for your feedback,

I just wanted to open the discussion about the language customers see and may perceive when going through the checkout process.

I don’t have any issue and I’m not assuming anything, just pure speculation. Giving examples of what I’ve observed is just my way of opening up the conversation about this to see if others may relate to this and what their thoughts are on this.

I’m well aware of all the rigorous UI and UX testing I could do but this isn’t really an issue for me to begin testing all these different elements. Again, I just wanted to have a dialogue about a specific button, and possibly the perception of language throughout the checkout process. More of a birdseye view general discussion of the topic.

With the older generation and the growing tech and “Buy it Now” options, customers typically keep their cards/address saved on their browsing system for faster checkout and you can literally checkout with just a click of a button these days. This is why I wanted to have a discussion about this particular button saying “Checkout” when they are actually not checking out when they click that button.