With retailers increasingly searching for ways to improve their website conversion rates, one of the first places where attention is focused in on a site’s checkout process, and with good reason.

With 66% of laptop users and up to 82% of smartphone shoppers abandon the checkout, it’s a key concern to online retailers.

Baymard institute’s recent research from October 2016 discusses some of the reasons for shopping basket abandonment with the following responses from US adults.

  • 61% thought extra costs were too high, such as shopping, tax, fees.
  • 35% said the site wanted me to create an account
  • 27% found it was too long and complicated a checkout process
  • 24% couldn’t see/calculate the total order cost up front.
  • 22% said the website crashed or had errors
  • 18% didn’t trust the website for credit card information
  • 16% said delivery offered was too slow
  • 10% said returns policy not satisfactory
  • 8% thought there weren’t enough payment methods offered
  • 5% had their credit card declined.

Many of these issues are in the online retailers ability to control and resolve, with many being fixed through design changes and reducing the length of the checkout.

Klarna  Group works with 65,000 merchants worldwide and has the mission to become the world’s favourite way to buy.  The Klarna checkout aims to maximise conversion by making it as easy as possible for customers to make a transaction online, because web-shoppers only have to enter the minimal amount of information in as few steps as possible. “When it comes to conversion, clicks matter – especially on smartphones and tablets. Less steps to payment means more customers.”

The Klarna checkout is designed and tested across all devices, and an iframe is used the checkout into a retailers ecommerce store, but the online retailer has the ability to adjust the colours of elements like buttons, text and frames for example to match your website’s branding.

Laura Otten, Senior Project Manager at Williams Commerce says “We’ve recently implemented Klarna on a Magento Enterprise ecommerce store.  The installation of Klarna on Magento was straight forward and the support from the Klarna team was very good during the installation as well as the deploy.  Whilst it’s certainly early days for results, we think Klarna was smooth to implement and presents a  cost effective option for the client. ”

A key benefit that Klarna  is the fact they offer all major payment methods, meaning merchants can access them via one supplier in a single, integrated solution, plus according to Klarna, they assume the risk, meaning merchants are paid, even if the customer does not pay Klarna. When it comes to security, Klarna say they are great at risk assessment and therefore they can accept more purchases, giving retailers peace of mind when it comes to payment security.

Those online businesses who focus on checkout usability have the chance to gain significant improvements in conversion rates.

If you’re interested in implementing Klarna on your Magento store, give the Williams Commerce team a call today to discuss your business requirements.