Still Not Loving the ASOS Checkout Process

We featured ASOS before on the blog when we gave them a Badge of Honor a couple months ago. We were really loving the “reverse filtering” capability they offer on their site! But today, I want to talk about an area of the ASOS ecommerce site that I’m not so in love with: the checkout process. Now, Econsultancy wrote an article praising many of the features of this checkout. Apparently the updates ASOS made to the checkout reduced their cart abandonment rate by 50%. That’s great, but I still think there’s room for improvement in a few key areas.

ASOS used to allow a guest checkout, but not anymore. The site forces customers to create an account when they checkout, but they word it in such a way that you don’t feel forced. You either sign in as an existing customer, or click the “New to ASOS?” section. The fact that they don’t say “Create an Account” is clever, because people tend to think of a lengthy registration process and it causes them to abandon their cart.

Okay, so I’m new to the site. I fill out the form and create a password. One thing I do like here is the progress bar along the top. It’s nice that it tells you how many steps are involved in the checkout, and how far along you are in the process.

That’s it for the compliments though, because there are a few things I don’t like. First, I can’t see my cart as I’m going through the checkout process. I like to be able to see what I’m buying so that I can be confident in my purchase. With ASOS, I have to fill out my billing, shipping and payment info first. At the very end, after I’ve done every other step, there is a place to verify and edit my order. It would be nice if there was a message somewhere to tell customers at which step they will be able to view their cart. Plus, when you do finally see the cart on the last page, it doesn’t even show any images! It’s just a list. Not too helpful…

If I do want to actually see or edit my cart, I can click the “Edit Item” link. But this redirects me back to the shopping cart page. At this point, I’ve been taken out of the checkout. When I click on the “Pay Securely Now” button, I have to sign back in to finish my order.

To me, this is pretty annoying. I would suggest adding the capability to look at and edit the items in the cart at any point in the checkout process, without being logged out and redirected back to the beginning. Sure, this checkout process might reduce cart abandonment rates, and admittedly it does have some nice features, which the Econsultancy article delves into in detail. But there are still some aspects that could be improved for this to be a truly great checkout.