"Google Autocomplete" for address forms in the checkout flow makes for a simple and rapid checkout encounter for clients and it is finally coming to the Shopify platform.
You put in a bunch of work into making an enjoyable customer experience in other areas of your site (homepage, product page, etc) but checkout is and always has been a friction-full area of an e-commerce site. The magnitude of fields, typing, clicking, and verifying in the checkout make it tedious and people can type in wrong information all the time leading to returns and frustration. This turns out to be much more evident for clients on portable devices as well as the screen size is small and entering data into those fields is very manual.
As part of improving Shopify's customer experience and helping achieve higher conversions, Google Autocomplete is starting to roll out to Shopify’s checkout pages over the coming weeks, at no additional cost. This feature will soon be automatically enabled in your store.
Here’s what it looks like:
Type a few characters, it does the rest
Now, when customers arrive at checkout and start entering the first few characters of their address, Google Autocomplete will instantly finish the job and pre-populate their address. Wrong addresses and re-typing are virtually eliminated.
Simple update delivers powerful benefits our testing of Google Autocomplete showed an increase in conversion rate, and almost 20% time savings and error reduction on mobile. You save time by no longer dealing with incorrect addresses and the resulting problems, giving you more time for fulfillment and other business-building tasks.
Success as a merchant means getting a million details right, and Shopify is continuously working on improving every single one of them for you.