Four ways to increase conversion at…

Now that travel is on the road to recovery, you’ll want to ensure that your checkout page isn’t scaring travellers away.

No matter how excited someone is about the prospect of an exciting trip, a nightmare checkout page can still scare them off. Increasing sales conversion on your checkout page could be as simple as breaking down a few barriers that may be a quick fix that you wish you’d discovered earlier!

Use analytics software

Working closely with online Travel Providers for nearly a decade, we’ve found a few ways to ensure your customers’ payment journey is efficient and hassle-free. The quickest way to identify any problem areas within your website is by using software such as Google Analytics, which provides extensive metrics for detailed reporting, including sales conversion rate at checkout and shopping basket abandonment. These features enable you to highlight precisely which website pages make visitors lose interest and abandon their booking.

Once you’ve identified the webpage or pages deterring buyers, take a close look at the design, as well as the amount of content and requirements from the visitor on each page. The focus is on conversion at checkout, but it’s worth investing time in improving the entire customer journey. Are your customers exhausted by the number of steps, clicks, and pages it takes them to reach your payment page only to be met with exhaustive requirements at checkout?

Appeal to international customers

Where your customers are based? You may want to explore whether the exit rate at checkout shows a correlation to any particular geographical location. Does your website offer any languages other than local? Alienating international customers will halt revenue.

The same applies to pricing; international customers will want to see exactly how much they will be charged in their local currency. Worldpay found that 25% of people would not complete a transaction if they did not understand the price in their local currency. It is even more prevalent if you try to attract Chinese or Indian travellers, where 1 in 10 will not make it past the homepage. There are plenty of payment processors that accept all major currencies, and at the very least, adding a currency exchange pricing tool can have positive results. 

More is better when it comes to terms and conditions

Are your terms and conditions displayed clearly ahead of checkout? Customers like to know where they stand and feel secure should anything affect the delivery of their booking after payment. Be transparent and reassure; less is more certainly doesn’t apply to your terms and conditions!

Only request information that is crucial to the booking

Requesting exhaustive billing information can also intimidate potential customers. Is the date of birth crucial to a booking? Only request what you need to confirm the booking and provide confirmation that all details are used securely. Consider implementing auto-fill forms too. Card security is a big concern, understandably. Appealing to as many customers as possible requires you to choose recognisable, widely used payment methods but these must be secure, widely used and ideally sit within your website. Don’t forget that a small percentage of website visitors will abandon a purchase because their intent was only ever to browse, for example, to ascertain an idea on pricing. 

Try to keep it simple. With some minor, inexpensive tweaks, you will see significant boosts to online conversion and, ultimately, to your profitability.