How to increase conversion rates with Place Autocomplete

Has COVID-19 boosted your web shop or increased cart abandonment? Or maybe both? If so, now is the time to pay attention.

COVID-19 has accelerated eCommerce by several years

Online shopping was growing fast before COVID hit, but the pandemic pushed even more consumers online. In fact, eCommerce skyrocketed during the first half of 2020. In Sweden, online retailers experienced a 49% growth in the second quarter of 2020, Finland saw a soaring 60% increase in online orders at the end of March, and in Denmark the Nordic postal service ‘PostNord’ experienced a 30% increase in package deliveries. On a more global scale, the coronavirus contributed an additional $105 billion in U.S. online revenue in 2020, accelerating ecommerce by no less than two years.

It may not be a surprise that online shopping increases when offline stores are shut down. However, according to Deloitte, consumers will continue to embrace eCommerce and avoid physical stores, and by doing so, they will continue to accelerate a digital shift. But this is all good news if you own a web shop, right? 

Your checkout process makes customers leave without buying

The recent eCommerce development is both a blessing and a curse for online shops. While more people are shopping online, consumers are also getting more demanding and if their expectations are not met, they will seek alternative offerings. In fact, a quick google search shows that the shopping cart abandonment rate can be as high as 84.27%, according to a SalesCycle report. The primary reasons for shopping cart abandonment are extra costs (like shipping, taxes, and fees) and forcing customers to create an account. However, a complicated checkout process is also a dealbreaker. More than a quarter of online shoppers abandon their cart if the checkout process is too complicated. 

Research from the Baymard Institute shows that the average eCommerce store has 23.48 form elements and 14.88 form fields for new non-account customers, which is both overwhelming and intimidating for customers. According to Baymars, “a fully optimized checkout flow can be as short as 7 form fields, with a total of just 12 form elements”. For instance, your checkout form should have a ‘full name’ field instead of a ‘first name’ and a ‘last name’ field. Likewise, there should only be one ‘address’ field instead of several separate fields for street name, number, zip code, and city. But there is more...

With just a few lines of coding, you can improve the user experience even further and increase conversion rates at the same time.

Optimize your user experience (and conversion rates) with Place Autocomplete 

Place Autocomplete is one of the best features you can add to your app if you want to provide a better checkout experience for your customers. With Place Autocomplete you can turn your address form input field into an address autocomplete bar for time-saving type-ahead predictions. Setting up auto-filling for address forms can help reduce cart abandonment and make address entry easier, faster, and more accurate for your customers. 

When your users type a destination into Place Autocomplete, you want them to find what they’re looking for in as few characters as possible. Place Autocomplete allows you to use location bias and location restriction to improve the quality of predictions and keep customers to the right geographic area. If you only ship to customers in specific countries or regions, you can set a property called ‘ComponentRestrictions’ to eliminate predictions outside “your” countries. Furthermore, you can use the language parameter to return results in a certain language.

Using Place Autocomplete is a cheap and effective way to improve user experience and eliminate the third biggest deal breaker when it comes to cart abandonment - a complicated checkout process. The price of using Place Autocomplete depends on your needs and volume range. Our Google Maps experts have extensive experience working with Google Maps and know all the best practices to give you the most value for your money. If you want to know how you can improve your user experience and potentially increase conversion rates, reach out to us today.