Businesses spend thousands of dollars if not more every year, to optimize their e-commerce process. With good reason because one small tweak like replacing the checkout button with a more prominent one can significantly improve conversion rates. That’s an easy way to add a healthy increase to your bottom line. There is a lot of study and testing done on the checkout process for one time payment and physical products. But these best practices apply for recurring, membership sites too. Here are some of the things you want to keep in mind when designing your membership site.

Photo by Pam Roth

Lead Buyers Through The Checkout Process

Give people an idea where they are in the checkout process and what steps to expect next. This way they won’t be so nervous about moving to the next step and wondering if they will make a mistake and be charged for it. Keep in mind that they are taking a big step by committing to a monthly payment. Even though they know they can cancel anytime, the idea of monthly payments can make someone more uneasy than when purchasing a one time payment product. So re-assure them by guiding them through the process and letting them know they are in good hands.

Clearly State Total And Recurring Price

This is particularly true when you are running a promotion, have a pricing structure where the first payment is less than subsequent payments or have multiple levels of membership. One of the biggest complaints about recurring membership sites is the difference in subsequent recurring payments. So much so, that it has attracted the attention of the authorities. Protect yourself and be considerate of your members. Tell them clearly and plainly what they are to pay now and what price they will be paying after the first 30 days. Even if the price is the same it really helps to reassure people they won’t be paying more later.

Prominently Display Help Or Contact Options

Things happen. The power goes off, Internet goes down or someone may knock on the door and your customer doesn’t complete the checkout process immediately. When they come back, the session may have expired and they have lost their place. Every step of the way, display options how your customer can get help from you if something goes wrong.

Trust Seals And Security Badges

It has been seals and badges like those from Hacker Safe and Verisign have been known to improve conversion rate. Because they are a third party verification system, this lends credibility and shows customers that you are concerned about protecting customer’s information.

Consistent Design

This sounds so elementary and it is. But sadly, there are many membership sites that don’t make an effort to brand their pages. The checkout, login, account management pages and membership site is a mish-mash of designs, causing much confusion for members. Worse, it also reduces your conversion rate because people see a totally different check out and login page than the sales page. Take care to ensure the flow from sales, to checkout and login flows properly and doesn’t surprise people.

If you are using aMember to manage your membership site, you can edit the templates to brand your checkout process and match it to the rest of your site and membership area. But if you are intimidated by it, get a copy of our aMember Design Customization training. It will guide you every step of the way and you’ll have a seamless checkout process in less than 1 hour.