Online Checkout: Optimizing the Experience with Booqable

All of your marketing, advertising, and website content leads customers to one final experience: checkout. A lot of thought and comparing goes into deciding to rent from your business over others with similar offerings. So, you want to make sure you get this final step right and reduce any friction that could potentially arise.

Getting your checkout flow as smooth as possible is very important; it’s the transition between your online store and the payment process. The default Booqable checkout is a great starting point, but as with everything, it can always be improved with customization that’s specific to your business and industry.

Let’s break down what you can do to optimize the checkout experience for your customers and improve the vital conversion rate.

How the Booqable checkout helps you succeed

With all plans, you get a checkout page designed to make the checkout experience as easy as possible for your customers. It’s presented as a clean, professional page that serves as a tremendous final touchpoint for your online store.

Once a customer has selected their items and rental periods, they are taken from the shopping cart to a checkout page where they can enter their name, email, phone number, and billing address. In addition, they can also view a summary of their order to double-check everything is correct.

When they have filled out the information, they click “Continue to payment” to be brought to the next step, where they can fill in their billing information via the payment method of their choice. This will usually mean entering credit card information or signing into their PayPal account.

That’s it! They hit “Pay” and get confirmation of their order on-screen and via email. Of course, checkout pages can be as long or short as you like, and you can add more fields if you need more information from your customers.

Editing the checkout page

The default Booqable checkout page is ready-to-go out of the box, creating a flexible and streamlined experience. However, there are some things you can edit to make it more suitable for your rental business’ needs.

Not every rental business is the same, and some require slightly different checkout experiences. For example, you might need more information from your customers if you’re delivering products to them. This requires extra fields to be added to your checkout so customers can enter this information.

This can be done quickly in your setting by editing the custom fields you want to show. For example, you can choose a name for the field, the type of information, and where you would like this to be shown.

You can also customize things like the button colors and your company logo to feel like it’s part of your online store. In addition, you can add coupon codes to give customers discounts and add terms and conditions, which they must agree to before completing the checkout process.

Eliminate unnecessary fields

Conversely, you can also consider removing some of the default Booqable checkout fields. For example, perhaps you don’t let your customers pay online because they pay for their items when they pick them up, so you don’t need to take their billing address during the checkout process.

In these cases, you should consider eliminating any unnecessary fields to speed up the checkout process for your customers. After all, no one wants to spend more time filling in information that’s not needed or won’t be used. So, why not just turn these fields off completely?

Of course, you are free to add and remove fields as you wish, and it only takes a few seconds to do within your Booqable settings.

Customer login accounts

Your customers will only checkout once for some rental businesses, but if you have returning customers, you can make it even easier for them. This can be done by allowing customers to become registered users. It makes sense that people who order from you frequently won’t have to re-enter their details every single time.

Otherwise, customers will always have the option to checkout as a guest if they don’t want to sign up for an account. For single users, asking them to stop what they’re doing and create an account can be avoided so they can continue to checkout quickly. It can even be enough to send them away. That’s why you can always allow customers to sign out as guests if they wish.

Keep customer on-site to checkout

By default, when someone wants to check out from your Booqable cart, they will be taken to a separate domain. The URL will usually look like storename.booqable.shop/checkout with “storename” replaced with the company name on your Booqable account. However, you may want to make it feel like it’s part of your main website.

If you want to use your own custom domain and are on the Booqable Premium subscription, you can create one by setting up a custom domain. You can enter your domain name in the Online store setting and create a custom CNAME record. The process for adding a custom domain is detailed in our help center here. This will allow the URL of your checkout to appear as checkout.yourwebsite.com, which is much more user-friendly.

Building an effective checkout

Like everything on online stores, the default settings are not always the best ones for every company. You must optimize the checkout page based on your industry, products, and audience to get the best possible results for your rental business.

Using the features outlined above, you can easily create a checkout process that works for you, whether adding fields, removing fields, creating a custom domain or giving customers the option to log in. Booqable helps you bring the familiar eCommerce checkout experience to your rental customers so booking is easier than ever.