In e-commerce, the checkout process is the final phase of the purchase on an e-commerce site. During this stage, the customer confirms his purchase, enters his payment details and confirms the order.
What is the most important part of a physical store: the entrance, the shelves, the warehouse? Each of these places is important, but the most important is the cash register. Here, customers pay for the products they have chosen, in cash or with a card, and the business receives the money for the payment of these items.
Just like physical stores, online stores have a process where the confirmation of the products or services chosen by their customers and the payment is carried out. This process is called checkout .
To understand in detail this part of an online purchase, in phone library this article we will explain what a checkout is and what it means in e-commerce , how the process works, what the different types are and how to optimize it to increase your business sales.
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What is checkout in an online store?
A checkout , or payment page in Spanish, is a type of web page of an e-commerce (online store or marketplace ), in which a customer is shown how to complete the payment process step by step.
The checkout page appears when the customer is ready to complete their purchase. This page will ask for a series of data to complete the order, show them a series of payment options and an overview of their shopping cart.
To better understand what checkout is , let's look at an example with the EsperanZa store :
Example of a checkout page from Tiendanube EsperanZa.
E-commerce website owners need to be very careful and customize the checkout page based on their customers’ feedback. One thing you should know is that the percentage of abandoned carts is usually high, approximately 81%.
A large portion of potential customers will browse your store, add products, but when it comes time to checkout or confirm their purchase, they are likely to leave your site for one reason or another.
However, this is a constant in e-commerce and should not be considered as a disadvantage, but rather as an opportunity to lower this percentage by making the purchasing process easier.
How does the checkout process work?
Despite being a simple and familiar process at first glance, there is a great deal of complexity behind the checkout of an online store . This process consists of several steps and actors, which as a customer or owner of an online store you sometimes do not see, however, each one is important.
The basic flow of the debit or credit card checkout process is as follows.