The customer experience doesn’t end with product discovery — it plays out at every stage of the journey, especially at the critical checkout moment. And that’s often where everything can fall apart. With 7 out of 10 shopping carts abandoned, the checkout process remains one of the most sensitive areas in e-commerce.
While part of these abandonments can be recovered through follow-up marketing actions, the real leverage lies upstream… right on your site. Transparency on stock availability, upfront shipping fees, a smooth checkout process, simplified account creation — every detail matters when it comes to avoiding last-minute frustration.
In this final episode, we break down best practices to turn visitors into buyers by removing friction and delivering on your promises right up to the order confirmation. With a real-world example from La Foir’Fouille and its highly localized Click & Collect offer.
Optimise your purchasing funnel
The customer’s experience begins with their arrival on the website and must be optimal throughout their journey. Every step makes a difference to whether or not they will convert.
This is without doubt one of the cruellest figures in e-commerce, but several studies of the market are clear: 7 out of 10 baskets are abandoned, across all sectors. If you believe the specialists, a third could be retrieved via re-targeting techniques (emails/texts/telephone), but for the rest, it’s your site that you need to work on in order to reduce this rate.
Fevad (the federation of e-commerce and direct sales) has its own list of principal reasons for these abandonments. If we exclude the functional checkout factors which are linked to your site’s commercial policy, such as payment choices, shipping fees etc, these reasons all relate to the shopping experience on your site. It is therefore well before the checkout process that the decision to confirm or abandon most of your baskets will take place.
Throughout the purchase process, transparency is essential in order to avoid customer disappointment at the checkout. This can take several forms. When the product is listed, it’s vital to make clear the actual availability of the product. The fact of choosing to present a product to a web visitor already commits you to some extent to its delivery. In the same way, delivery costs and estimated delivery times must be provided as early as possible in the process.
Once in the final checkout stages, it’s important to reduce the number of possible exits for the customer, in order to avoid disrupting the purchase process. Ideally, you should reassure the customer about the length of the process via a progression bar, and offer them the option to engage with the customer support team via chat or telephone.
One point to be aware of is the infamous “create an account” step. This is often lengthy and off-putting, so some sites now provide the option of creating a “guest account”, with far fewer fields than a full customer account. Using Facebook or Google logins can also help with pre-filling certain fields. To make this stage as painless as possible, Zalando chose, on mobile, to divide the creation of an account into several little steps with just a few fields to be completed in each.
Reducing the rate of abandoned baskets is a real objective to pursue over time and a good way of improving the customer experience. It can also remove friction on your site. However, you should always keep in mind that some basket abandonment is inevitable between a simple show of interest from a visitor and a conversion that has not yet taken place.
Real world example
We work with Foir’Fouille, a leading provider of home furnishings and a party goods specialist, helping them to develop their Click & Collect offering.
This customer has more than 80,000 SKUs, spread evenly across 250 stores, with each store offering from 3 to 4,000 SKUs.
We have worked together to avoid the disappointment that arises when products are displayed which then turn out not to be available in the customer’s region. Our solutions work natively to allow an individualised view of the product at the point of sale.
On the basis that any product displayed on the site must currently be available in the customer’s delivery area, we have set up a high-frequency update of product availability to ensure that the promise to the customer is kept. Cheat code 7 disappointments.
Key n° 6
Avoid last-minute disappointments.
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