We have been using, recommending and providing support and service for Woocommerce since it’s inception back in 2011. In fact, InfiniteWP, WP Time Capsule, and WPMerge are all powered by Woocommerce. We love Woocommerce for a lot of reasons. But what we were sold on, all those years ago, was how simple it was to get up and running. It gives us the control and flexibility without the bloat of other e-commerce platforms. We haven’t looked back since then.
But one thing that we were concerned about and incessantly customizing was the checkout flow. Being the usability geek that I am, I couldn’t help but optimize the stock Woocommerce flow for our clients during our pre-IWP times, when we were running a dev shop. I would constantly keep looking for ways to improve the user experience of the Woocommerce Checkout. We would merge the two name fields, namely, First Name and Last Name into a Full Name field but save the first name separately in the DB so that we could address our customers using their first name in the emails we send. I remember us developing a ZIP lookup module so that we can pre-fill the City and State fields automatically. Every extra, unnecessary click removed from the user’s road to the completion of the purchase mattered.
As the culmination of all that obsessive effort along with numerous learnings from industry-leading UX experts over the years, I present to you Cartimize. A venture specifically focussed on the usability and user experience of e-commerce sites. And where else to start but with our beloved Woocommerce. I, Amrit, one of the 3 founders of InfiniteWP, will be focussing on this but will still be overseeing the design and usability of InfiniteWP. The other two, David and Yuvaraj will stay the course, fully focussed on building and improving IWP.
Starting with Woocommerce, we have built a plugin that we think every Woocommerce store needs to use if they understand the impact usability has on conversion. If we focus only on checkout usability issues, solvable through a better checkout design, then the average e-commerce site can gain as much as a 35% increase in conversion rate just by making design changes to their checkout process. Once you have a look at the UX improvements that the plugin does, am sure you would agree. 🙂
Simplifying Checkout Forms to Avoid an Overwhelming appearance.
Use a Single ‘Full Name’ Field.
Hide ‘Company Name’ behind a link.
Hide second ‘Street address’ field behind a link.
Auto-Detect City and State Immediately After ZIP-Code is Provided.
Explain why you need the users’ phone number.
Hide Order Notes field behind a link.
Inline error validation of form fields.
Use ‘Shipping Address’ as ‘Billing Address’ by Default.
‘Billing = Shipping’, Not the Other Way Around.
‘Delayed Account Creation’ in the Guest Checkout Flow.
Make the coupon section much less prominent.
Read more about these improvements
