The 2020 Holiday Shopping Experience: Quick Wins for Improving eCommerce Checkout

With more consumers shopping online this year than ever before, the pandemic has redefined holiday commerce. In 2019, shoppers spent more online in the weeks leading up to Christmas, increasing eCommerce sales by nearly 20 percent over the prior year. This number is expected to surge this year as the pandemic drives most shoppers to stay home. In total, it’s estimated that holiday shoppers will spend nearly $180B online this holiday season, an all-time high.

The checkout process is a critical, and sometimes painful, part of the customer experience and often the deciding factor as to whether a visitor makes a purchase or not. According to RetailDive, nearly 90 percent of online shoppers will abandon their carts if checkout requirements are too onerous. Incredibly, more than half will leave that retailer forever, a stunning reality that underscores the importance of customer experience.

Collectively, it’s clear that online shopping is a critical battleground for consumer brands as they compete for customers and sales in a challenging environment. These quick wins can help ensure consumers have a smooth experience shopping on your site this holiday season:

To ensure your site can cope with a large number of eager festive shoppers, complete a thorough analysis of performance issues experienced during peak trading. Issues such as outages should be resolved, and you should discover the tipping point, adding memory if necessary.

Slow page load compromises user experience and sends a negative signal to search engines. To combat these issues, use page speed monitoring tools such as GTmetrix and Monitis, and perform regular checks on your pages. Any sustained patterns of speed decreases should be investigated further until the problem is resolved.

Poor UX can be the downfall of many retailers. This isn’t something businesses can afford, especially around the holiday season. Review your site’s UX and make it as easy as possible for customers to complete address delivery and billing forms across devices.

Mistakes and typos in mCommerce sites are common and fat fingers on small devices can make form filling tricky. Type-ahead address verification technology can help improve user experience and ensure accurate delivery details are captured while quickly and effortlessly gliding users through the checkout process.

With millions of consumers unable to celebrate in person this holiday
season, gifts purchased online are a significant stand-in for the love,
friendship, and merriment they celebrate each year. The customer experience begins when a consumer first touches your site so make the process merry by taking steps to ensure your site offers consumers a seamless, fast experience this holiday season.

Matthew is a location technology veteran with over 20 years of experience in helping global businesses reach their customers globally. Matthew is a director at GBG and responsible for strategy and innovation for GBG's location intelligence solution, Loqate.

Matthew’s also a retail and eCommerce expert, having worked with leading eCommerce brands at Loqate such as Nordstrom, Sephora, Kohl’s, Ralph Lauren & Michaels. Prior to joining GBG, Matthew co-founded Global Address (later acquired by Trillium Software) and helped to create a single platform model for a global location validation service.