Q: What is best practice?
A: Best practice traditionally involves creating a seamless, secure, and user-friendly experience that minimises friction and maximises conversions. However, whilst these principles create a strong foundation, true best practice comes from tailoring the checkout experience to your specific audience and their needs.
So, what exactly does this mean? Understanding how your customers prefer to browse, subscribe, and pay — whether they favour one-click mobile payments, flexible subscription plans, or localised payment methods is critical.
A truly optimised checkout experience anticipates these preferences, removes barriers, and reinforces value at every step. By aligning the checkout process with your audience’s behaviours and expectations, you not only increase conversions but also build long-term customer loyalty.
Additionally, ensuring your checkout process is adaptable to evolving customer habits is key; offering guest checkouts, digital wallets, and payment solutions that integrate with emerging financial technologies can keep your business ahead of the curve.
A key development shaping checkout best practice today is the rise of personalisation. Customers now expect experiences that reflect their unique preferences, and the checkout process is no exception.
Personalisation can take many forms, from dynamically displaying preferred payment methods based on previous behaviour or offering tailored subscription plans that align with a customer’s reading habits.
Leveraging data insights enables more intuitive and relevant journeys to be crafted, whether that means surfacing limited-time offers on annual subscriptions for long-term readers or simplifying the checkout process for returning customers with pre-populated information.
Crucially, personalisation isn’t just about boosting conversions; it also strengthens brand affinity by demonstrating that businesses understand and anticipate individual needs.
Q: What does outstanding performance look like?
A: Outstanding performance has to be measured by results. Embracing a continuous improvement mindset means your checkout process will constantly evolve through a cycle of deployment, measurement, analysis, and optimisation.
By leveraging data-driven insights, friction points can be identified, solutions can be tested, and incremental changes can be implemented, ultimately improving efficiency, quality, and overall value delivery. A checkout process that consistently refines itself based on data and user feedback is far more effective than one built on static assumptions.
A successful checkout experience is one that evolves in response to real customer behaviour. It is not necessarily the one with the highest number of ‘nice-to-have’ features and available payment methods which may lead to customer indecision — nor the one with the fewest number of form fields which may result in an inadequate level of choice.
By tracking key performance indicators such as conversion rates, checkout abandonments and transaction success metrics, opportunities for targeted refinement can be easily identified. For example, opting to deploy a different iteration of the checkout experience based on the purchase funnel, A/B testing different payment methods, streamlining form fields, or optimising page load speeds can yield small yet impactful improvements that collectively drive higher engagement and revenue.
Companies that truly embody outstanding performance are those that understand the optimisation of their checkout journey is an ongoing process rather than a one-time fix. They leverage insights from customer behaviour, iterate based on meaningful data, and remain open to adopting new technologies and payment trends. There will likely be ideas and prototypes that do not come to fruition, but as long as the overarching goal is to deliver a greater experience for customers, they will continue to make meaningful progress.
Three top tips
- Embrace flexibility and variation. A one-size-fits-all checkout experience can create unnecessary friction for customers with different expectations. For example, a customer completing a store purchase may expect to apply discount codes at checkout and have flexibility around their delivery preferences, whereas a customer making an impulse purchase from an editorial website may be seeking a streamlined checkout process with the simple intention of placing their order as quickly as possible. Understanding these variations and optimising checkout flows accordingly is essential.
- Utilise meaningful KPIs. Tracking and analytics are essential for understanding the effectiveness of your checkout journey and how it aligns with your customers’ needs, but this is only half the equation. The real value lies in regularly reviewing conversion rates, checkout abandonments, and successful payments. By interrogating these metrics by customer segments, such as new versus returning users or by device type, deeper insights into behavioural patterns can be captured which inform data-driven decision-making thereafter.
- Clarity is key. Hidden fees, unclear billing cycles, and complex cancellation processes lead to frustration and churn. Customers are more likely to abandon the checkout process or cancel their subscription if they feel uncertain about what they are being charged for or encounter unexpected costs later on. Clearly displaying pricing, renewal terms, and cancellation policies upfront within the checkout process can mitigate negative outcomes downstream. A trust-based approach encourages long-term retention and minimises involuntary churn due to failed payments.
Jamie and the other contributors took part in a ‘Subscriber Acquisition Special – Q&A’ webinar on Thursday, 22nd May 2025. You can watch a recording of the webinar by registering here.
CDS Global, a subsidiary of Hearst Corporation, has been enabling recurring revenue organisations to manage their customers and optimise their revenue streams for over 50 years. CDS delivers solutions that successfully handle every single touchpoint in your customer journey across online and offline channels so you deliver frictionless subscriber experiences.
Email: jamie.nunn@cdsglobal.co.uk
Website: www.cdsglobal.co.uk
This article was included in the Subscriber Acquisition Special, published by InPublishing in April 2025. Click here to see the other articles in this special feature.
