In ecommerce, numerous critical touchpoints can make or break a sale, including product pages, the homepage, and site search. However, the most crucial point in the buying process is the checkout.

Checkout is the final hurdle in converting a shopper into a customer. Any hiccup or unnecessary step can deter a shopper from completing a purchase. Therefore, the checkout process needs to be streamlined, secure, and customer-centric. But what does that mean for your business?

A customer-centric checkout experience varies for every business but shares similar characteristics that can help optimize the process and turn prospects into customers. In this guide, we will cover:

• Why the checkout process is so important in the buyer journey.
• What a customer-centric checkout process looks like.
• How BigCommerce is helping merchants improve checkout.

Checkout by the Numbers

The ultimate goal of any checkout experience is to facilitate a sale. Whether you’re an HVAC manufacturer selling directly to businesses or a fashion designer selling clothes to consumers, your objectives are the same. All businesses aim for ecommerce success and strive to avoid the dreaded abandoned cart. The Baymard Institute found an average cart abandonment rate of 69.99%. The reasons for abandoned carts vary. Let’s explore how the checkout experience can impact cart abandonment for both DTC and B2B businesses.

Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) Sales

Several factors can contribute to abandoned carts in the DTC space. The Baymard Institute identified the top three reasons for abandoned carts.

Although these data points focus on different issues, they all relate back to customer experience. Hidden fees or extra costs negatively impact a customer’s experience. The account creation process hindered or slowed their experience, and their expectations for a speedy delivery were not met.

Customer expectations can vary based on several factors. A recent PaySafe report highlights the differences in online shopping preferences across age groups.

Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, prefers shopping on a smartphone over a laptop or desktop (72% vs. 68%). In contrast, Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, significantly prefer shopping on a desktop or tablet over a smartphone (78% vs. 27%). Depending on the age range of your ideal customer profile (ICP), you will need to optimize your checkout experience for different devices.

Additionally, different consumers have varying familiarity with and preference for alternative payment methods. Mollie reports that 87% of consumers find it important for retailers to offer their preferred payment methods when shopping online. Conversely, the Baymard Institute found that the absence of preferred payment methods can cause 9% of consumers to abandon their carts.

The graph below illustrates the regular and occasional use of alternative payment methods — such as in-app payments, mobile wallets, online cash payments, or prepaid cards — across different age demographics.

The data is clear: younger demographics like Gen Z and Millennials are much more likely to use alternative payment methods compared to older consumers like Gen X or Baby Boomers. Depending on their ICP, businesses may need to offer more traditional or alternative payment methods.

Tailoring your website experience to your ICP is not a new concept. But what do customer expectations look like for B2B businesses?

Business to Business (B2B) Sales

B2B industries, whether wholesalers, manufacturers, distributors, or others, have traditionally been more reserved regarding ecommerce innovation. Instead, they have held onto more traditional practices of invoicing, product search, and sales.

However, times are changing. The B2B industry is quickly realizing that the old ways may no longer suffice in the modern world. As customer expectations evolve, businesses must adapt how they present and sell their products.

A study from Avionos found that 97% of online B2B buyers experience some sort of pain point during the ecommerce purchasing process. Additionally, 85% of those buyers would turn to a competitor if their supplier’s digital channel can’t meet their needs.

What are those needs? In the past, transactions were largely offline. “When we think about ecommerce, we think about discovery and trade: finding the products you want to purchase and exchanging money for goods,” says Bar Geron, Co-Founder and CEO of Balance, a BigCommerce B2B payments partner. “On the trade side, businesses just went back offline, so everything in the experience was slick, but then it got stuck for between seven and 14 days.”

“That inconvenience is a massive force to bring in what we know from the DTC space — things like buy now pay later — inside of a payment experience that together can really digitize the whole B2B payment process,” he continued.

Digitizing the B2B payment process may seem challenging, but it really comes down to creating a customer-centric checkout experience. As ecommerce technology grows, B2B buyers are bringing their DTC-like customer expectations with them. While the process may differ slightly — such as paying on credit or customer-specific pricing — from DTC ecommerce, the sentiment remains the same.

Now that we have established the need for a customer-centric checkout experience, let’s explore what exactly that experience looks like for your business.

Continue reading the guide and download it now.

• Checkout by the Numbers
  • Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) Sales
  • Business to Business (B2B) Sales
• How to Create a Customer-Centric Checkout Experience
  • Optimize for Mobile
  • Allow for Guest Checkout
  • Follow User Experience (UX) Best Practices
  • Keep Security Top of Mind
• The Payment Process
  • Credit or Debit Card Checkout
  • Digital Wallets
  • One-Click Checkout
  • Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL)
  • B2B Payments
• BigCommerce Makes Checkout Optimization Easy
• BigCommerce APIs for a Customized Checkout 
• The Final Step

Number of Pages:

• 19 pages

Pricing: 

• Free