How Convertim was created and why e-shops need radically better checkout

After 18 years of building Shopsys, the leading Czech e-shop developer, I also decided to launch the Convertim startup - a platform for optimising the purchasing process in online stores. In this article I will explain to you my motivations and why I believe that soon millions of European shoppers will be using Convertim.

Lockdown memories

For the beginning of this story, I have to go back to a time that was not easy for anyone - the spring of 2020 and the lockdown that took place in our country. These were the weeks when I became a hardcore user of online stores (global e-commerce statistics confirm that I was not the only one). However, I must admit that I experienced so much frustration from what the shopping experience offered me. I don't blame platform vendors for how they programmed their checkout solutions. After all, they could not have foreseen that in the spring of 2020 we would start buying everything online (including food and toilet paper), every day, day after day. I even walked the dog with a mobile in my hand.

Providing personal data over and over

What frustrated me the most was having to provide the same data over and over. A typical example of this type of data was my shipping and payment preferences, and my billing or delivery address. Unfortunately the forms didn’t provide, for example, suggestions of a location based on typing the first letters of a town or street to at least speed up this process.

Some online stores wanted information from me that was completely nonsensically. Several times I was asked to provide the delivery address several although I selected the pickup point before. The form field validation was also annoying as it indicated an error but not what to correct.

Not to mention the fact that when, during the ordering, refreshing the page or a temporary interruption in access to the wi-fi would mean I had to start the whole tedious process of ordering dog food from scratch.

Fear of touching checkout code

On the other hand, as a former web store developer, I realise that checkout is hard to customise and improve and every e-commerce development team has an overfull backlog of other issues to prioritise. Even senior developers are afraid to customise the checkout codebase because any minor mistake can lead to fatal drop of received orders.

From a business point of view, checkout is the last step on the conversion funnel. However it is the most important step. Despite this, on average 30% of shoppers who click “Proceed to Checkout” on the shopping cart page aren’t able to finalise it. This is a wasted potential that costs companies a significant loss of profits.

Let’s do it better

Therefore, in the Q1 2021, I started the first concept work on an application that would try to solve all those mentioned issues.

I assumed that an important element of the new shopper experience would be password-less sign-in (verification using an SMS code). I wanted shoppers to never repeat filling in their data if they had already shopped at the online store before. Moreover, their shipping data, shipping preferences and payment preferences should be accessible to any e-shop they give permission to. All of this was supposed to reduce the checkout phase to one activity - clicking the buy button.

The vision was implemented in an application called Convertim, which in Q3 2021 was implemented as a pilot at EMOS (read case study), and in the summer of 2022 at Agátin svět (case study). More projects are under implementation or in A/B testing at the time of writing this post.

The new checkout experience also included further functionalities, which we have implemented in Convertim. This includes:

• Password-less sign up and sign-in
• Mobile optimised interface
• Geo-localisation or Geo IP localisation
• Address suggestion
• Inline map with pickup points and brick’n’mortar stores
• Clear data validation
• Minimum data inputs
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Join checkout experience revolution

If you manage an online store and want to boost you sales, have higher conversion and higher average order value, join our checkout experience revolution! Take full advantage of the possibilities offered by the rising commerce trend.

The cost and time implementation of Convertim is similar to implementing another payment method or courier, but through connection to Convertim you get plenty of out-of-the-box integrations with payment gateways and couriers.

For early-bird customers with a turnover of over EUR 4 million per year, we are also able to implement A / B testing of their current basket/checkout system with Convertim’s checkout free of charge.

Order your personalised demo now and find out how Convertim can boost your ecommerce sales today.

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