The busiest time of the year for retail sales is just around the corner so before there are sales flying in from all directions its time for online merchants everywhere to check that their shopping cart and checkout process is functioning correctly.

Nothing puts off a potential customer more than a complicated process and if the shopping cart or checkout freezes or hangs for too long forget the sale. My recent article Why do people abandon online shopping baskets? gives a number of reasons you may lose the sale at the checkout so I won’t go over old ground.

If you have more than one way a customer can checkout test them all, many sites now have several different ways to checkout such as Worldpay, Paypal, Google Checkout, just because one way is working correctly it doesn’t follow that they all will be, and just because it works on your super duper PC it doesn’t follow that it will work well on something less powerful, also test the processes using various browsers ie7, ie6, Firefox and Opera as a minimum.

Importantly from an affiliate point of view please ensure that all different checkouts on your site are tracking all affiliate sales, because the better the conversions the higher the likelihood that affiliates will stay loyal.

Affiliates you can help the merchants out, if you purchase something online (or attempt to) and there is a checkout problem or the sale doesn’t track, don’t be shy let someone know because it may be something that the merchant is unaware of, there are plenty of points of contact, such as the network, the merchant, the affiliate manager.

Just to reiterate its far better to sort out any problems now rather than finding there is problem in the middle of November when sales are coming out of your ears (or not if the checkout is broken), its going to be a massive Christmas for online shopping the Internet’s busiest retail period ever, lets make it a profitable one all round.

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Categories: Website Usability