Checkout Flow Test Case For eCommerce Website or Store

eCommerce Checkout Flow, as the name indicates it’s a sequence of steps that a prospect needs to follow to pay for the product they want to purchase. If it’s as expected, it may lead to increased conversions. 

So, if you are here to know about eCommerce Checkout Flow, the process to check it, guidelines to increase conversion, a path to write test cases for the checkout page, and more, you are at the right place. 

This post will put forward almost every detail relevant to the Checkout Flow Test Case. 

Keep reading! 

As we know, eCommerce or online buying and selling trends are expanding daily, so are the eCommerce retail sales. But, being engaged in the eCommerce business, are you realizing you are not catching up with the expected revenue, even if analytics showcases high traffic and increased visitors to your online store? 

Well, high traffic can be the reason for window shopping, but what about cart abandonment? Why are the prospects leaving your store abandoning their cart?

If you search on Google asking the reason behind the cart abandonment, it will emerge with numerous reasons. One main reason among these would be the confusing and lengthy checkout process. You may avoid some of them by using the right strategies, but this one is just unavoidable, and the eStore owners need to consider it. 

Sometimes, the customers abandon the cart because of their mood change, but it doesn’t happen every time. Once a visitor adds products to his cart, it’s clear that he can become a potential buyer. But, losing these prospects may only be your outlook. To not let them go abandoning their cart, you need to perform ecommerce website testing and checkout flow design is a part of it.  

What Is eCommerce Checkout Flow?

The final step of your site’s purchase process is eCommerce checkout. 

During checkout, both the customers and the eCommerce store are the participants who check their pockets and pass details to each other. In that period, two things take place; first, visitors convert into buyers, and second, product ownership changes. 

The first aspect is just a conversion that yields money for the business. 

To make the checkout process seamless, increasing conversion, one must know that he should follow the proper guidelines ( we will talk later in this post).

If an eCommerce business designs a poor checkout flow, it may lead to the abandonment of an online cart. Let’s get deeper to understand it better. 

Why Is Poor Checkout Flow The Riskiest Reason For Online Cart Abandonment?

However, there are many reasons for online cart abandonment; we will check out some major below:

• There is a sudden rise in overall cost (after adding shipping and other charges).
• Payment security is not trustworthy.
• The buyer caught up with a better price somewhere.
• Cash on delivery (COD) is not available. 
• The checkout process is complicated or too long.
• Future purchase experiment.
• Ineffective check-out process.
• An error occurred, or a website crashed.
• A website needs a new account creation.

Let’s elaborate on some significant reasons below:

1. A Poor Checkout Flow Will Spoil The User Experience

Every customer needs to follow a checkout flow to purchase a product. So, if you design a poor checkout, it will annoy them. 

2. Checkout Is Relevant To Money; Therefore, Buyers Are Cautious About It.

While making a payment, every buyer is concerned. So, a long and non-impressive checkout will leave them demotivated and won’t complete the purchase. Hence, they will abandon their cart even if they need your product too hard. 

3. A Poor eCommerce Flow Will Affect All The Purchases.

The products you sell on your site will demand following a checkout flow to complete the purchase. Therefore, a poor checkout may risk the sale of your products. 

4. Checkout Flow Is The Basic Process Of Online Purchases.

Any flaw of this process would be an error impacting the entire purchase process and the online selling mechanism. 

So, you shouldn’t take any risks, and you should emerge with a simple, impressive, and trustful checkout flow for your eCommerce store. 

How Do You Go Through Checkout Flow?

Checkout flow starts with clicking on “Add to cart” and ends post-payment (or Thank You page). We need to follow every step while crafting a smooth journey, motivating buyers to purchase. 

A seller needs to target the below two things in his checkout flow process:

• Accumulate customers’ details, like email, name, phone number, shipping address, etc., to run personalized ads, promotional outreach, or ease future orders.
• Allow customers to pay for the products they choose to buy and collect their payment details.  

The checkout flow should include the below steps preferably:

1. Pre-Checkout Process

Akin to the checkout process, the pre-checkout one also holds importance. You need to start encouraging decision-making on the product page. 

Offering all the essential information a customer would need for a product page plays a significant role in assisting them in making a buying decision. 

2. Add To Cart

Only potential buyers add products to their cart, which is the first step of a checkout process.

The visitors come to your eCommerce store to buy your products, and they add the products to the cart they want to buy.

3. Billing Info

Using the information, like product name, in-stock number, cost, etc., the store owners produce an organized and well-published receipt along with the delivery charges and the payable amount. One needs to maintain transparency amongst both ends. 

4. Shipping Info

In this step, the buyer enters the information, like shipping category (time to pick), address, and more used for delivery purposes. 

5. Shopping Method

The buyers pick a payment mode in this step. They can select any option, like internet banking, online payment, COD, or online wallets (such as Amazon Pay and Paytm), which are available on your eStore and as per their convenience. 

6. Secure Payment

The buyers who don’t choose the COD option undergo this step. 

It is one of the crucial stages of the checkout flow. Here, the potential buyers pay the total cost of the product they need to buy to the seller using a payment gateway. 

The visitor adds his card details, verifies his purchase through OTP(One-Time Password), and next clicks for payment. 

7. Confirmation

This step demands the buyer’s final consent for the payment. This confirmation is essential to avoid any factor that attacks the buyer’s mindset. Even if the client is ready to pay, it’s not like you can pull money from their wallets. 

8. Thank You Page

Your checkout flow would be incomplete without a “Thank You” page. 

In technical terms, buying or selling products can be attained without this page, therefore take it as an option. 

It’s a good thing to include the “Thank You” page in your checkout flow, and it offers a brand confirmation about the purchase completion to the buyers. 

This page would display your gratitude to the buyers for purchasing your product from your eCommerce store, which is essential for personal bonding. 

eCommerce Checkout Flow Design Guidelines For High Conversion 

Many potential buyers just abandon their cart because of the tricky and lengthy checkout process during purchase. Do you want to take this risk?

Obviously not! For that, you need to take extra care while crafting an effective UX-centric checkout flow for your online store. 

As we know, at the last step of the checkout flow, we earn money. Hence, it needs to be flawless, smooth, and easy for your visitors. 

Below, we will know the best checkout flow design methods to increase conversion and revenue. 

How Do You Write Test Cases For The Checkout Page?

Let’s review the chief designing strategies that one need to design a robust checkout flow:

1. Make An Eye-Catching “Add To Cart” Page

You need to ease the purchasing path of your visitors. When a customer looks for a product to buy, he needs to complete the purchase quickly. You should make the “Add to Cart” button look different and noticeable. 

Also, after the customers add a product to their cart, they should get an easy way to reach their cart anytime while browsing. 

Sometimes, the buyers change their minds or mistakenly add products to their cart. In those cases, they should be allowed to remove the products they don’t want to buy from their cart. You can’t force them; you can just motivate them. 

2. Create A Transparent Billing Page

You shouldn’t fool your customers in any way. So, don’t play tricks on them. Your customer will smell that, and it may risk your profit in the end. 

You should create a billing page to offer every detail to your customers regarding the cost in the best and fairest way. It should reveal product name, quantity, price, delivery charges, discount, tax, and the total amount payable. 

A good billing page will make potential customers buy more. 

Some eCommerce stores’ billing page offers free delivery above the purchase of Rs 500. It’s an amazing and valid technique to attract customers to buy more. 

3. Hassle-Free Account Creation Or Guest Checkout Options 

Customers come with different natures. Some keenly create an account, while some want to invest fewer efforts to create one, and the rest don’t want at all to create an account. 

You need to optimize your checkout page that may suit all.

Some eCommerce stores allow a direct login through phone number or email for dedicated buyers, whereas some provide a login option through Google or Facebook accounts.

Such log-in options through Google account or social media come with pros and cons that are a different topic of the discussion entirely. 

But, a good checkout flow is the one that can offer every option a customer looks for and finds helpful.

Also, compelling your customers to create an account may lead to cart abandonment, which would be a considerable loss. So, offering those prospects from losing, you can allow them to purchase without any account creation, and you can achieve that through guest checkout. 

A way of making payments without any need for account creation is known as guest checkout. A customer who uses guest checkout to purchase just has to provide his email for shipping-relevant notifications along with the shipping address. All such details are offered to the store owner, but no account creation takes place using them. 

Permitting your visitors to purchase without creating an account would reveal your generosity, which may impress your customers, motivating them to create an account in the future. 

4. Prioritize Payment Security

During purchase, payment is the essential stage. Here, the buyer is always cautious, and therefore you need to make sure that your payment page is safe and secure. 

You should choose to design your payment page with the original logo of the payment gateway cards, and it will help build your buyers’ confidence. 

Despite using the word ” Pay,” you can use “Secure Pay” simply in the click bar, which will keep the buyers reminded that the payment is secure.

5. Use Two “Place Your Order/Continue” Buttons On The Billing Page.

Ease your customers with two “Place your Order” buttons, one at the top and the other at the bottom. If a billing page becomes lengthy with various products in the buying list and you include that button only at the top of the page, the users would need to click that. So, provide your users a seamless experience by having one more button at the bottom of the billing page. 

6. Avoid Confusing Your Users During Checkout

The best ways to boost revenue are upselling and cross-selling. But you can’t pull them in the middle of the payment process as it may make the buyers move away. 

Such marketing techniques are used majorly on cart pages or product pages, but it would be best to implement these on the “Thank You” page. 

7. Offer An Overview Of Your Checkout Steps

Buyers are always in a hurry when they are specific in terms of the product they need to buy. So, provide them an overview of steps they need to follow to get the ownership of the product by showcasing pictorial steps. Upon completion of each step, they might experience a sense of achievement. 

8. Add Reviews And Star-Ratings In Your Checkout Flow

The best way to give the best quality assurance of your product is to add start ratings and reviews. Approximately 91% of the buyers prefer checking reviews before completing their purchase. 

You shouldn’t delete the reviews from the checkout flow and place them on the billing page (recommended) beside the product page. 

9. Checkout Flow Optimization For Mobile Users

Generally, buyers spend more time on mobile phones than desktops or laptops. Therefore, eCommerce sales would be achieved more through mobile phones and are constantly increasing. mCommerce is essential and should be considered the most.

Most of the shopping is done through mobile phones, that’s why it becomes important to make checkout flow well-optimized for mobile phones also. 

You can keep your eCommerce better with perfect mCommerce, especially the checkout flow. For that, you need to check and confirm screen dimension, scroll length, loading speed, etc., ensuring the mobile phones’ adaptability. 

How Can I Improve My Checkout Flow?

You can focus on five areas to enhance your eStore’s checkout flow, which can directly reduce your cart abandonment rates.  

1. Reveal Shipping Costs

Showcasing the shipping costs at the end of the checkout process may increase your cart abandonment rates for sure. 

As per the recent records, about 50% of shoppers abandon carts because of extra costs or shipping charges. 

During checkout, hitting the customers with unexpected shipping charges can go ahead of just high cart abandonment rates, breaking trust.

So, the best way to get over this is to indicate the rates as the shoppers add products to their cart or append the “Calculate Shipping” function where shoppers can enter their zip code and review an estimated cost. 

This way, you can earn your customers’ loyalty and trust.

2. Lower Down “Click Energy”

When customers are specific about what to buy, they want to buy it quickly; some want to complete and submit forms with no issues, while some expect no broken links, error pages, or 404. 

The customers hold a limited amount of “click energy,” which decreases as they crawl your website until their capacity gets exhausted. So, you need to ensure that you offer a straightforward shopping experience to your customers so, at the checkout page, they still hold enough click energy to complete the checkout process. 

3. Append A Progress Indicator Bar

Checkout flows with various steps or pages may prove useless and tedious for online shoppers, especially when they don’t know how many steps they need to follow to complete their purchase. 

And here, a simple progress indicator bar turns into a practical tool. It assists the customers in checking the steps in the checkout flow and ensuring the number of steps they need to follow to complete their purchase. 

4. Conduct Experiment With Changes To Digital Experience

The best way to experiment with digital experience and observe what makes your audience response is to run A/B tests. This way, you can integrate your upcoming DX improvements as per your learning.

Yes, it’s tough to decide what to test. And here, Session Replay comes up to save you. You can go through a few users’ navigation sessions through your checkout process and know about the elements causing friction. 

5. Allow Guest Checkout

Many customers prefer guest checkout to create an account. And, approximately 3/4th of eCommerce websites don’t make this option a leading one. But offering guest checkout for both mobile and desktop can significantly help reduce cart abandonments and make the purchase path seamless for the customers.

Conclusion

The guidelines discussed above are a must-follow rule if you want your eCommerce store to attain growth and success. 

A lengthy and complicated checkout flow may result in lost potential buyers. So, being an eCommerce store owner, you wouldn’t want to lose them. So, be sure that you craft a well-designed checkout flow that follows the guidelines (above-mentioned) and facilitates the customers to complete their purchase quickly and seamlessly. 

Well, we have tried hard to put forward essential steps for designing a perfect checkout flow. Still, it’s not much; you need to try more and append them to your must-follow list to save your potential customers from abandoning their shopping cart.

Frequently Asked Questions about Checkout Test Cases for eCommerce website