Seamless Checkout
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Kirstie
It would be great if we could have a one click checkout like Amazon or a 'buy now' to make it much easier for customers to purchase product.
We have feedback from customers that the Citrus-Lime websites are lengthy compared to Amazon/other platforms.
If you see a product you want on Amazon you can purchase it in one click and in under 5 seconds.
If I go onto our website, from the basket to checkout/completion it takes over 80 seconds on a phone and 55 seconds. This is also for someone who has an account, the billing and delivery addresses have to be re-entered as they are not saved. I believe this is far too long for the majority of people shopping online.
Any way to speed up the checkout process would be really beneficial.
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Chris
I would like to see the option of Express checkout, especially if the customer is logged in on our site. For us the only negatives would be we could miss upsell and remarketing opportunity when their data is held off site. But the uptick in conversion rate, especially on mobile, would likely make up for that.
I see customers struggling to get to the Checkout stage on our site, they get stuck in the basket clicking on the apple pay logo or the delivery options. Once their a few still struggle to redeem points.
I'd choose ease of use and then speed, for our customers.
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Toby Kaiser-Arnett
For those of you in the US, how do you handle shipping costs? It's so expensive to send $15 bell or out of the range all together for a battery. How do you obtain discounts on shipping within the US?
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Stripe (who we support) has a payment process called Link (this is effectively similar to what SHOP use, as I understand it), which can significantly speed up checkout.
The drawback is much higher card processing fees — think ~1.5–2.0% even for debit cards. The upside is that the customer never needs to enter their card details and, from memory, the billing address is auto-filled.
We do support Stripe, but for most merchants we offer more competitive pricing via CitrusPay (powered by Adyen).
Link also has a notable drawback around authentication. If the customer does not have access to SMS or email, checkout can be blocked entirely, as Link requires a 2FA step to complete the purchase. This applies to SHOP as well and regularly catches me out personally. When it works, it’s excellent; when it doesn’t, you’re stuck.
Stripe effectively maintains card tokens for users who have previously shopped on any Stripe-powered site. Those tokens can then be reused to complete purchases with other Stripe merchants.
For Click & Collect, a delivery address is not required, but a billing address is still needed so fraud and authorisation checks can complete.
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Eamon Barrett
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime the issue with Click and Collect is that there is a box to enter the Collection Location and this has caused confusion. Shouldn’t this self populate for the store the customer is buying from? Apologies if I’m missing something here.
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
It’s worth noting that we’ve considered an Amazon-style “Buy in one click” approach using Apple Pay directly on product pages. This is very easy to implement — we’ve already built it — but our concern is that it drives down items per transaction and increases returns.
These decisions have been strongly influenced by our customers. Feedback consistently indicates that as a group they prioritise high-quality customer service, well-informed purchasing decisions, and reducing returns, particularly given the higher-value, more considered nature of the products they sell. Based on this, we felt that a one-click default wasn’t the right approach — though we’re open to revisiting this if we've got this wrong.
We also deliberately push customers through the basket (cart) page. This step could be skipped, but the basket often contains important information such as:
• Delivery times
• Promotional messaging (e.g. Starbuys)
• Context that helps customers complete purchases confidently
If I could summarise the view — shaped directly by customer feedback — is that most purchases are considered, high-value transactions, where the quality of information provided materially improves customer outcomes (e.g. the service provided) and reduces avoidable returns.
Happy to debate this so we strike the right balance between checkout speed and keeping the consumer informed.
It’s also worth noting that with SHOP, I’ve personally managed to accidentally purchase a bike while researching the platform, which then had to be returned. It’s that fast — extremely easy to purchase unintentionally. It very much depends on what the goal is, if we're selling low value clothing items you'd want it faster for ski's and bikes it might be the consumer needing to spend a minute on checkout removes time consuming problems down the line.
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Eamon Barrett: Can you give me a screenshot (just to the sure we're talking about the same thing), I'll get that addressed.
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Eamon Barrett
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Eamon Barrett: Once we have the consumers postcode, we show a map and distance to the collection location, what would you suggest instead? Just showing the store address with no map or distance?
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Eamon Barrett
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime We had a small number of customers have to call us pre-Christmas as they were struggling with what they were meant to populate in that field. My preference would be to show store address with no map since, most likely, that customer knows who and where we are and just wants to have the product be ready for them to collect?
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Actually I think you just saying that its confusing as its not obvious what is going on?
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Kirstie
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime - I do a lot of online shopping and haven't yet come across LINK so will look out for it and set up an account with them to see what the process is like. Personally, if I was blocked at checkout whilst using SHOP, I would then go the slow way via the basket and entering details, if that is what it took to checkout. I don't think the value of the item you're buying comes into it re a seamless checkout/SHOP/LINK. I just want to get from a to b as painlessly as possible in the very limited time I have!!
Re the card charges, it is what it is I suppose! Lastly, I am not sure why I haven't received any emails or notifications to say that there had been replies to the initial post. If this is doesn't happen, it would be really handy!!
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Eamon Barrett
We have also had this feedback, particularly around the Click & Collect process which still requires a 'Delivery Address' despite it being C&C. Overall, a faster checkout experience could only benefit everyone.
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Kirstie
Eamon Barrett - totally agree.
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Kirstie
* it takes 55 seconds from a desktop.
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Scott
Completely agree, we are getting more negative reviews over our checkout process than anything else! This may be unfair in that it does work and has been focussed on by Citrus-Lime but the fact is it’s slow and clunky compared to what else is being commonly used now thanks to Stripe, Shopify and as you say Amazon and a turning point has been reached where that is the new benchmark
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Kirstie
Scott, thank you. I really appreciate your comments and totally agree. Amazon have certainly created a new benchmark and Shopify have with SHOP and customers want the process to be as quick and seamless as possible. It needs to be a couple of seconds, not running into minutes.