Anything that complicates or slows down the online giving process translates into fewer completions and dollars raised.

Here’s some real ‘nuts and bolts’ advice you can apply today, before you go to your thirteenth committee meeting on ‘Eliminating silos in our fundraising department’.

[Now don’t get me wrong … depending on the size and state of affairs in your nonprofit, bringing that project to successful completion will undoubtedly yield bigger benefits. I’m just offering this tactical advice in case you need some lower hanging fruit!]

The advice, via an article titled 11 of the smoothest commerce checkouts on the web, comes Graham Charlton, editor in chief at Clickz Global.

Graham provides very specific examples from eleven commercial websites, each illustrated with a screen capture. He also comments, again with specifics, on couple of sites that could do a better job — Zappos and Boots (the latter is his pick for very worst if you want to see what to avoid). And most of his advice would apply to nonprofit donation ‘checkouts’.

The sites he’s included are:

Domino’s — there’s even a ‘zero click’ mobile app that after a ten-second countdown, orders your favourite pizza. All you need to do is open the app and wait ten seconds … how cool is that?! I can see it now … open your Greenpeace app and in ten seconds it taps your bank account for $25!

Lowe’s — getting the order, then the account set-up

Threadless — all on one page checkout

Amazon — makes repeat purchases sooo easy

Barbour — use a progress indicator (i.e., you’re at Step 2 of 3)

Schuh — display security/trust signals

Crate & Barrel — does it all right

Nordstrom — another one-page checkout

Superbalist.com — use of pop-ups to entice account registration

AO.com — clear contact data for resolving problems, tracking orders

Joseph Joseph — selling the benefits of creating an account (i.e., expediting/simplifying future orders)

I urge you to check out the examples. But if you’re in a hurry, it all boils down to these tips:

Helpful time-saving features: 

• Address lookup or predictive entry tools.
• Copying shipping address to billing address to save time.
• Making account creation a part of the process i.e asking for this at the end rather than the beginning.
• Guest checkout.
• Clear error messages which help users to solve issues.

Sources of friction to avoid: 

• Forced registration before checkout.
• Too many steps.
• Unnecessary form fields.
• Unclear error messages.
• Problems with form validation, such as strict rules on format required for data entry.

Good advice you can put into practice today.

Tom