The usability of your checkout procedure has a direct effect on any chances your small business might have for increasing site sales and conversions—an “error” message during a customer’s registration process can easily mean the end of a sale, right then and there. Linda Bustos (ecommerce expert at GetElastic) states, “Filling out forms is already a tedious process – having to fill out correct fields again because a server system is incapable of persisting the data on errors is unacceptable to most customers.” Simple tasks matter—even if they only take a customer a few seconds to do themselves. Treating a customer’s time as “valuable” by expediting the checkout process (i.e. remembering entered data, automatically entering in information for the customer) will only help your business. If your registration/checkout form is incapable of automatically filling in city and state information after a ZIP code is provided, a customer is further deterred from being satisfied with purchasing from your site. 

Check out Linda Busto’s article, 3 Often Overlooked Checkout Usability Guidelines, to learn more about the ways in which you can improve your checkout procedure, and ultimately improve site sales.

-Christopher Lin, Lexity