How Postcode Lookup API can improve your conversion rates
If you sell and ship products online, one of your biggest goals should be increasing conversion rates during checkout.
Why? Because people in your checkout are at the end of your sales funnel — they are already qualified. These pre-customers are so tantalisingly close to contributing to revenue that you can’t afford to lose many of them.
Abandoned carts are common in e-commerce because a percentage of customers will always pull out of a sale. Your job is to make it as easy as possible for those who want to buy to do so, and one trick is with postcode lookup API.
What is postcode lookup?
Postcode lookup is when you type a postcode into a search field, and it recommends a series of addresses. This process automates typing in an address, walks customers through the checkout and speeds up time to payment.
Postcode lookup is helpful to customers because they don’t need to type out an address, speeding up their checkout experience. It’s important to note that major retailers, from Nike to Amazon, use postcode lookup in their checkouts.
Why is postcode lookout worth it?
There are various scenarios where postcode lookup makes life easier:
- Customers don’t have an account with you
- Customers don’t use auto-fill or auto-complete
- Customers can’t copy and paste into the address field
You also need to look at the benefits postcode lookup API brings to doing business:
- Easy to integrate with pre-made API
- Enhanced address accuracy
- Fewer order modifications
- Fewer undelivered items
- Qualify orders with delivery boundaries
These benefits are in addition to the many ways postcode lookup API improves conversion rates, which we’ll take a closer look at now.
How postcode lookup improves e-commerce conversions
When it comes to e-commerce, time is money, and postcode lookup is directly linked to saving customers time.
In Deloitte’s 2020 report “Milliseconds make Millions”, it is found that an 8.4% increase in conversion rates for retail sites came from a 0.1-second improvement in mobile site speed, and customers also spent almost 10% more.
“Arguably, the most critical part of the journey is within the checkout environment,” the report surmises on the customer journey, “Consumers are sensitive to a 0.1s speed increase in both one-click and two-click scenarios.”
These figures reference page speed, but because page speed is directly linked to user experience, postcode lookup API is hyper-relevant – checkout speed affects a customer’s perception of website speed, and in turn, influences their perception of the quality of your business (which affects conversion rates).
Here’s how postcode lookup API improves conversion rates in more detail:
- Save customers time
Why waste your customer’s time if you don’t have to?
It takes an age to type an address (10-15 seconds), which might not sound much, but your web pages probably load in under 2 seconds!
People don’t have time to waste. The nature of the internet means people want rapid experiences. If your checkout takes 60 seconds to complete now, it will take 30% less time for people who use the postcode lookup feature.
- Take advantage of no auto-fill
Auto-fill is a handy feature that auto-fills checkout fields like name, email, address, postcode, and passwords (if saved and verified). However, some people opt out of auto-fill, or have it turned off with no idea it even exists.
Customers that don’t use auto-fill stand to benefit most from postcode lookup. By using postcode lookup in your checkout, you can help a specific customer demographic that isn’t necessarily as technologically capable as others.
- Speed up time to payment
Faster checkouts have higher conversion rates because customers have less time to contemplate their decisions. By speeding up your checkout, you speed up time to payment, pushing through sales you might otherwise lose.
Speed is critical to conversion rates, and no greater example of this can be found than buyer’s regret. Because postcode lookup keeps customers moving and reduces the steps it takes to buy, you limit the opportunity for buyer’s regret.
- Avoid costly address errors
Address errors cause problems because they are not always rectifiable. Many e-commerce businesses today have automated sales-warehouse-shipping systems that keep orders going with no ability to manually correct orders.
The effect this has on conversion rates is simple – address errors often mean cancelled orders if the customer notices the error and returned orders if they don’t. Either way, the opportunity for cancellation increases exponentially.
- Provide a professional image
All major retailers have checkouts with postcode lookup. Visit Nike, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and ASDA, and you’ll find the feature.
The short and long of it is most people expect to see postcode lookup in checkouts because they have become accustomed to seeing them.
By integrating postcode lookup into your checkout, you tick the box. Customers won’t be frustrated by the lack of a feature they use everywhere else, eliminating a common problem that smaller e-commerce stores walk into – obsolescence.
- Versatile use cases
Postcode lookup API is a versatile feature you can integrate into various places in your e-commerce website. The most obvious place is the checkout, so customers can type a postcode and select from recommended addresses.
Less obvious places for postcode lookup include delivery calculators and geo-boundary and area coverage checkers. Any place on your website where you would ask for an address is a place you can use postcode lookup API to improve customer experiences.
- Reduce abandoned carts
All these roads lead to one thing – fewer abandoned carts. Abandoned carts are the bane of e-commerce owners because they are difficult to diagnose.
Heatmap tools like Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity record user sessions, giving insight into abandoned carts. Our experience with abandoned carts and heatmaps tells us that the address field is a common cause of abandonment.
The main reason for this is it takes too long to write an address, and not only do people write it, but they read it back several times. This process develops doubt in the customer’s mind, sowing the seed for an abandoned cart.