As ecommerce professionals know, each additional step in the checkout process is an excuse for a customer to abandon the purchase. Forced account creation and a complicated checkout process account for 41% of order abandonment.
As a result, ecommerce professionals do everything they can to reduce friction in their funnels by streamlining the checkout process in every possible way.
A streamlined, user-friendly ecommerce process has become something customers expect – checkout processes lacking features like address autocomplete, autofill and mobile optimization can cause frustration and greatly increase order abandonment rates among customers. These techniques are increasingly vital and directly affect user retention and customer satisfaction.
What is Places API?
Google Places API provides location awareness, local point of interest search and autocomplete to streamline the ecommerce process. Below are a few ways that Google Places API optimizes the checkout experience to reduce order abandonment and enhance customer experience.
Places API taps into largest point of interest, business, and data base in the world, which is updated over 10,000 times a day.
Autocomplete
For example, a user is purchasing an item and is required to input their address. With Autocomplete, which comes free with Google Places API, the user only has to enter the first few digits of their address, and Places API will populate a dropdown menu with full address results.
According to the Baymard survey, half of test subjects complained about auto-detection missing from retailer’s checkout experience.
Location Biasing
When providing address results, Places API will automatically bias predictions towards the user’s location, so that addresses that are closer will be more likely to appear. For example, if a user is placing an order in New York, then addresses from the New York area will populate first.
Form Autofill
If the user is filling out an address form, Places API will autopopulate the rest of the form fields.
Ensuring Order Accuracy
Less keystrokes means less mistakes. When a user types an address incorrectly, Places API will automatically detect and correct the mistake, ensuring that packages are never directed to the wrong location.
Seamless Mobile and Tablet Experience
With order abandonment rates on mobile devices even higher than on desktop, every tap can be a barrier to completion. Companies that aren’t optimizing both their site and checkout process for mobile are sustaining significant losses to business.
Instead of creating a slow, tedious mobile checkout experience, Places API is already fully optimized for mobile in order to provide user-friendly, fast checkout. The same applies to tablets – Places API provides a simple implementation into existing iOS and Android mobile and tablet applications.
SADA Systems, as a Google Cloud Premier Partner and 2014 Google Maps Global Partner of the Year, has gained insights from a vast array of customer implementations and use cases, fine-tuning the the checkout process. These strategies, such as grouping keystrokes and timestamp based usage, improve not only the end-user experience, but also provide additional cost-saving benefits for the vendor.
To learn more about customizations available for Places API and to optimize your checkout process, contact googlesales@sadadev.wpengine.com to learn more. Click below for a full Places API overview.
