Open Checkout – A Great Solution to Innovate Checkout Experience

 Customers are likely to shop more from stores that provide a seamless checkout experience. To address the need, Bigcommerce brings the opportunity to streamline your website with the Open Checkout feature. It means that BigCommerce sellers can now innovate their store’s online checkout processes without compromising the speed, security, and simplicity.

According to Statista, over 88% of online shopping carts were abandoned by customers in March 2020. And a complicated checkout is one of the primary reasons for shopping cart abandonment. Therefore every online store needs to ensure that their customers are served with a highly personalized and hassle-free purchasing experience by providing a smooth and hassle-free checkout process.

Why is hassle-free Checkout important for your website?

According to a report, around 21% of the US online shoppers abandoned their carts due to too long/complicated checkout that pushes them away in no time.

If an online checkout process isn’t quick and straightforward, there might be high chances of losing potential customers. And cart and checkout abandonment can cause about 70% loss in overall sales on average.

Seeing the need for a seamless checkout experience, BigCommerce, the leading open SaaS eCommerce platform, launched an open-source extension of its native checkout solution. It indeed was meant to empower merchants to design a fully-customized checkout experience.

About BigCommerce’s Open Checkout

On 17th November 2020, BigCommerce, one of the most trusted Open Saas eCommerce platforms for well-established and fast-growing businesses, launched an open-source extension- Open Checkout. The primary reason behind this global rollout of the extension is to help BigCommerce merchants with the flexibility to define their Checkout page and build a genuinely differentiated checkout experience for their customers.

“By opening up the presentation layer, brands of all sizes selling on BigCommerce can create unique experiences that resonate with shoppers,” says Jimmy Duvall, chief product officer at BigCommerce.

Furthermore, the Open Checkout extension leverages the same production source code that empowers the native checkout solution. So if you are a BigCommerce seller and were using Checkout SDK earlier, it is speedy and easy to upgrade to this version. Hence it is an excellent opportunity for Bigcommerce sellers to apply updates easily.

The Open-checkout, being an excellent opportunity for BigCommerce merchants to provide an easy checkout process, also offers several exclusive features. Before jumping to Open-Checkout’s characteristics, we will first glance at cart abandonment, its causes, and its consequences on the website.

About Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment happens whenever a potential customer/shopper starts a checkout process by adding items to the shopping cart but drops out before completing the purchase. And shopping cart abandonment is always on the top of the mind for online stores. Besides, it is said that the cart abandonment rate is an essential metric for an eCommerce website to keep track of its overall sales and revenue.

Consequences of Shopping Cart Abandonment

Opting out from the checkout process can not only push your customers away but can also hamper your website reputation. It will show them a path to your competitor’s site, which might offer a more direct and quick shopping/checkout experience as compared to you.

Furthermore, increased shopping cart abandonment results in a negative user experience/ratings, which is another significant impact for other shoppers to leave their online checkout process half-way. Hence, to avoid abandoning the shopping carts, retailers need to understand their customer’s needs; and provide a seamless checkout experience.

Reasons for Shopping Cart Abandonment

If you are concerned about improving your checkout process, you need to understand why customers leave their carts. Here are some of the primary reasons for shopping cart abandonment –

• High additional cost. Unexpected costs in the form of taxes, shipping, or other fees can easily put off your customer’s shopping mood. And they are most likely to leave their cart abandoned before checkout.
• Forced account creation. A big turn-off for customers can be forced account creation, which can break the purchase cycle. Instead of forcing shoppers to register, merchants offer a guest checkout facility.
• Time-consuming, complicated checkout. Online shopping for most customers is the most convenient shopping mode, but complicated checkouts can push them away. Any additional or time-consuming checkout step can hurt the customer shopping experience.
• Security concerns. It is another primary reason when customers need to be assured of guaranteed safe checkout. And failing to provide safe security checkout leads to cart abandonment.
• Lack of payment methods. Customers shopping online prefer the convenience of using their preferred payment methods. And if your website doesn’t provide sufficient payments, shoppers are more likely to abandon their carts.

How will Open Checkout be helping you?

With Open Checkout, you can create custom checkout with bespoke integrations, unique styling, and localization. “Buy online and pick up in-store” is the trendiest custom checkout feature, and Bigcommerce merchants can enable this feature with Open Checkout. Besides this, the following are other features that you can enjoy with this extension –

• Modernized B2B Buying: streamline B2B purchasing by inserting custom fields for operations like entering account information, collecting payment later, submitting orders, or paying using purchase orders.
• Branded Checkout Pages: Design a cohesive brand experience throughout your customer’s journey by adding custom JavaScript applications and CSS rules.
• Customer Group Rules: Present a unique interface by using customer group rules. It offers features like specific pricing, shipping, and payment methods on the checkout page.
• Adapt to New Retail Environments: Optimize checkout pages to provide pick-up from shared locations like brick-and-mortar stores and lockers; or facilitate modern delivery options such as buy online, pick-up in-store.

How will CedCommerce help you?

Already own a BigCommerce based online store or new to it, if you are thinking of multi-channel integration, CedCommerce’s professionals are at your service 24/7.

Whether it is onboarding your store on the marketplace to upgrading your store with recent updates like Bigcommerce Open checkout, CedCommerce’s experts will guide you throughout the process. Being the Official Development partner, CedCommerce is here to help you with store development, theme customization, marketplace integration, store migration, and so on.

So, reach out to our professionals right away and know how to customize your customer’s online checkout experience effortlessly.