I get interesting emails from time to time, like this one from an online toy store in Connecticut: “We’re having some conversion issues and lately we’ve actually been losing customers due to cart conversion issues on our site…. We have a lot of people putting items in the cart and then not completing the process.”
Knowing you have a problem is the first step toward fixing it.
Since I was intrigued by the problem, I visited the site and put some items in my cart. The site was above average, in that it had a small box on every page that showed the number of items and total price in the cart. Unfortunately, the placement of the cart information below the first screen of data made it hard to see.
When I went to check out, I encountered something unusual: a single-page checkout. In other words, rather than presenting a page where I could enter my data, followed by a page that showed me the final order and let me confirm it, I was presented with a single page for data entry.
Whenever I see a checkout process that differs from Amazon, I’m forced to wonder why. Amazon (and other large online retailers) spend enormous amounts of money to optimize the online shopping experience, and you ignore their example at your peril.
Like Amazon, this site dynamically displays cart information, although Amazon’s is very austere and shows only the number of items in your cart. More important, Amazon clearly displays its cart info near the top of every page.
Amazon also has a multi-page checkout process. New customers are asked for an email and a password, followed by shipping information, payment information and finally a page that recaps the order and asks for confirmation.
On the toy store site, the first thing customers see when entering the checkout process is a confusing and over-large box welcoming them to “Our Secure One-Page Checkout” and asking them to either login as a returning customer or fill out the remaining data on the page. While Amazon does the same thing, it devotes one page solely to this question. The additional information is distracting and may confuse new customers.
The second problem with this one-page checkout is that, although I’ve entered all the information on the page, it’s hard to see all of it at once. It also doesn’t tell me whether the site has received my information correctly. This is why Amazon uses a summary page. It gives me one decision to make before placing my order: Is the information I’ve sent to the site on prior pages correct?
The toy site’s one-page checkout also requests other, nonessential information: an “additional information” section, which asks for things like “Consultant Name” and “Trunk Party Date.” Most customers won’t know what these are, and they just complicate the process of filling out the form by making the customer make more decisions on one page. It also asks for a user name, letting you save your information. Amazon automatically creates an account for you when you place an order, and it uses your email address to access the account, saving you from having to remember one more piece of information to do business with its site (although you’ll still have to write down your password on a Post-It).
Finally, the one-page checkout fails to emphasize customer benefits like money-back guarantees (the site offers a 45-day guarantee) or the site’s attractive $5.95 flat-fee shipping. Assuring potential customers that your Ma & Pa e-commerce site offers the same expectations they have when shopping with more well-known online retailers has been proven to pay off in completed sales.
Another problematic feature is that the cart isn’t persistent. So, if I put two items in my cart, then close my browser, whatever was in my cart disappears. Again, Amazon does it the right way and preserves the items until my next visit to the site.
You need to buy stuff from your website, just as a new customer would. Unfortunately, few people can manage the beginner’s mind needed to see the problems. I encourage you to sit down with someone who’s never bought from you, and listen—just listen—as they verbalize the process they go through to complete a purchase. You don’t have to pay some consultant to do this for you, and it’s much more enlightening (and inexpensive) to ask someone to sit down with you and watch what they do. No coaching or explaining while they do it, though!
One thing I didn’t find out from this site’s owners was more detail on their cart abandonment problem. It might have been that people put things in their carts but never attempted to check out, or that they started but didn’t complete the process. It’s an important distinction. Based on my analysis, I suspect the second scenario, but I can’t tell you conclusively. If people put things in their cart but never check out, it’s harder to say what’s going on. They might be window shopping and the cart gets too expensive (this is probably why Amazon doesn’t make that number prominent in its little cart on every page).
Another downside of single-page checkout is that if a customer doesn’t click “Submit,” you get absolutely no information about them (unless you do some AJAX-style programming to capture partial data). So, it’s hard to do the obvious thing and just get in touch with someone who abandons a cart and ask them why. Everything else (including consultants) is just guesswork.
Smart companies build a checkout system that lets them follow up with customers who abandon their carts. Basically what this entails is ensuring you capture the customers’ email addresses when they begin the checkout process (as Amazon does). There are companies that will help you add this so-called “remarketing” capability to your website, such as Listrak and Barilliance (google “cart abandonment” for details). When people leave a cart behind, you can remind them via email, perhaps with a discount offer, to complete their purchase. Of course, this also requires that “persistent cart” I mentioned.
Small businesses are frequently at the mercy of their webmasters. Don’t let them foist a poor shopping/checkout experience on you and your customers; it will cost you many times over. And if you’d like a quick, informal evaluation of your e-commerce site, drop me a line.
Michael E. Duffy is an experienced and successful startup technologist who’s always on the lookout for The Next Big Thing. His personal website is www.mikeduffy.com.
