We’ve all been there: waiting in line at the grocery store with one item behind someone with twenty. It’s frustrating. The checkout process in e-commerce can be frustrating too, and subscription businesses should do all they can to optimize and streamline this process for their subscribers. Why? Because eliminating friction from the checkout experience is a best practice and can increase conversions. What are some ways to do this?

Support a variety of payment methods so your subscribers always find an easy way to pay

A prospect who’s in the checkout flow wants to sign up for your subscription product or service. Make sure they can by supporting a number of different payment methods. While credit cards may be popular in North America, in other places, other methods such as direct debit or mobile payments may be preferred.

Letting subscribers pay using their preferred payment method streamlines the checkout experience and increase conversions. See what methods Recurly supports here.

Support a variety of international currencies

According to a forecast by Forbes’, by 2022, more than 17% of B2C sales around the world will occur online, up from one in ten in 2018. This rate of growth will equate to $5.8 trillion in transaction volume in 2022. To take full advantage of this global opportunity requires allowing people to pay in the currency with which they’re most familiar. This lets global subscribers and prospects know that you want and value their business.

Recurly supports a number of different currencies. For more information, view our documentation.

Offer a checkout experience in the subscriber's language and currency

Communicating with subscribers effectively and appropriately is essential for healthy subscriber retention and loyalty. Just as shoppers expect to be able to use the payment methods and currencies preferred in their countries, they expect marketing communications and checkout pages to be in their language too.

At minimum, your checkout flow and invoices should be localized. Language support can include not only different languages but different dialects within each language. Date formats also differ around the world. A fully localized experience includes automatically converting the date format (mm/dd/yyyy vs. dd/mm/yyyy) and currency format ($1,234.50 vs. 1.234,50 $) to match the locale.

Optimize checkout forms on desktop and mobile

Shopping cart abandonment is a persistent issue for e-commerce businesses. Consider the following average cart abandonment rates for the following devices, as reported by Barilliance:

  • Desktop - 73.07%

  • Tablet - 80.74%

  • Mobile - 85.65%

What these rates should tell you is that your checkout experience absolutely must be streamlined and optimized for mobile devices and tablets. You can do things like provide drop-down fields for information such as dates, enable tabbing between fields, and allow the subscriber to use information stored in digital wallets to complete the form. Read our blog to learn more about these tips.

Cardless free trials

If you offer a free trial subscription, consider making the trial “cardless.” Offering cardless free trials  eliminates the extra step of the subscriber having to add their payment information. Instead, let potential subscribers discover the value of your product or service via a free trial, then collect their payment information after they’ve discovered how much they like your service and want a paid subscription.

By delivering a streamlined, hassle-free checkout experience, you can increase subscriber acquisition, no matter where the subscriber is located or what device they’re using.