As a store owner, you are tasked with providing the best experience possible for your customers. It can be difficult to stay ahead of your competition and provide new and interactive ways for your customers to shop online.

Going back to basics, I have compiled my personal top 5 checkout mistakes I see time and time again. These are by no means the only mistakes — some may not even consider them mistakes. They are simple things that may help you convert more customers and increase satisfaction.

1. Hidden fees and charges

Nobody likes to get to the final stage of a checkout process and find they have been hit with an additional $30 tax or extra shipping fee.

I find the best approach is to be up front and alert the customer to any additional money that may be required early on in the process.

There are many ways you can notify your customers of shipping, taxes and fees. For example, if you have a free shipping option — why not place a few banners on your website promoting it? If it does not include international shipping then go the extra mile and add the wording “Excluding International Orders” or “International Orders add $10.00". At a glance, customers can see what sort of money they will be paying. When the customer sees the fees during the final stage of the checkout process, it will not be a shock and they are less likely to rebel and leave your website.

2. Asking for too much information

We live in an age where information is the key to power and it worth its weight in gold.

I have seen many websites take this a little too far and ask a million and one questions when making a purchase.

My advice on this is to ask as fewer questions as possible of the customer. The less information they are required to provide, they quicker they can make their purchase and be on their way.

Alternate methods can be used to acquire additional information from your customers at a later date. It may be possible to segment your customer based on what they have purchased or even offer them incentives of discounts, freebies etc if they take the time and fill out additional information on their account.

Remember — it is a relationship between you and the customer. Instead of asking hundreds of questions, take a step back and develop the relationship. It your customers trust your website, they are more likely to provide further information to tailor their shopping experience at a later date.

3. Online safety

Generally customers are becoming more savvy and know what to look for when shopping online.

The problem is that hackers and those our to do no good are also getting smarter. I am sure you may have heard of a few stories from family and friends who have been victims of an online scam or fraud. The media is constantly running stories of online scams and victims of cyber crimes.

This does not help when you are trying to sell goods and services online that require credit card details or personal information.

You need to take the time to make sure you have met your commitments to provide a safe shopping environment for your customers.

Many people think this is just throwing in a few security badges, with a few tag lines about security thrown in for effect. Security is a big deal and you should take the time to understand how you are protecting your customers information.

A few tips:

1. Answer commonly asked questions about security and provide a link from your checkout page
2. Consider having your website audited by a 3rd party security company and providing a seal of approval
3. Use a trusted SSL provider with a well recognised site seal
4. Explain to the customers what information is being collected and how it will be used in the future
5. Outline a grievance policy in the event something does go wrong and the sites security was compromised
6. Survey customers a few times a year and give them an opportunity to discuss any security or online safety issues they may have that you can address.

Most of all, make sure as the store owner you understand how the security of your website works — it will help a great deal when discussing any concerns with customers.

4. Load times

With internet speeds increasing around the world, customers expect a fast, fluid shopping experience.

When a website is taking 10 seconds to add a product to the cart or load shipping options, customers can start to loose interest and loose confidence in your website.

The most important pages on your website to keep lightning fast are your category, product and checkout pages. Have your developers focus on these pages and optimise them as much as possible. There have been some interesting tests run on this. One of the more popular ones is that Amazon discovered it was loosing 1% of sales for every 100ms additional load time the customer experienced.

Testing your website regularly and setting performance benchmarks are good ways to ensure your website is performing at its best. Websites such as WebPageSpeed.Org offer tools to measure your websites speed and gain insight onto elements that may be slowing it down.

5. The mobile experience

With the sheer volume of mobile phones on the planet, its not hard to believe that mobile commerce is on the rise, and has been for a while now.

It is vital that your checkout process works on a mobile phone. Let me rephrase that — it is vital that your checkout process works well on a mobile or tablet.

Take the time to design an easy to use and intuitive mobile shopping experience. Think about all the problems a customer may face on the smaller screen.

Again, test test test. I have seen many sites claim they work well on mobiles only to find the checkout button is partially covered by a banner preventing me from processing my order.

If you take the time to go through your website analytics, isolate your mobile traffic and focus on increasing your websites performance for the majority of devices, you will not be disappointed.