For online retailers, one of the single greatest opportunities for improvement exists in the checkout or purchase process. Exploring the usability in this part of your site using web measurement often provides significant return on the time invested.
Your web site could present customers with the exact product(s) that they want to buy, but if they are unable to navigate your checkout process, all the personalization in the world won’t matter. The checkout process is arguably the most critical step in the conversion funnel and for sites with considerable scale, moving the conversion needle even slightly will lead to significant incremental sales.
A “usable” checkout process is simply one that makes it easy for your customers to buy from you. The process is intuitive as well as efficient, and customers do not question the security of their information or the impending fulfillment of their order. So how do you know if your checkout process is usable? Let’s explore the most common steps in a checkout process and focus on key usability concepts.
Most retail checkouts work the same way: you add products to the cart, click " Check Out,” identify yourself somehow, provide shipping and billing information, pay, and you’re done. Because so many checkouts are similar, a handful of time-proven strategies are worth discussing.
Imagine you are at your favorite retail store. How would you like to walk to the checkout counter with each product you wish to purchase, one by one? More often than not, this is exactly what consumers encounter at retail sites. For sites that average more than one item per order, this usually creates a situation in which customers hit the famed “Continue Shopping” button and find themselves back at the home page. To determine if this is a potential problem for your site, there are a few data points that are important to consider.
In addition to items per order, data such as the following may indicate that you should consider either improving the intelligence of the “Continue Shopping” button or modifying the add-to-cart process so that customers are not forced out of their shopping experience and are simply informed that their product has been added to cart:
Customers frequently purchase more than one color/size of the same SKU.
There are natural product pairings within your product mix (e.g., printers and printer paper).
Your “may we also suggest” program on the product detail page is fairly successful.
The conversion rate for customers who use the “Continue Shopping” button is lower than those who proceed directly through the checkout process after adding their first product.
This step is an important bridge between the shopping and buying processes, and can make the difference between a pleasant and a frustrating customer experience. Two concepts to focus on here are making it easy for customers to create or retrieve their account information, while also providing the option to proceed anonymously.
Determining how usable your login process is can be quite simple. First, make sure that each of the three visitor segments (new account, logged in, and anonymous) can be tracked separately. Overall checkout process completion rates for each segment will provide a baseline and will likely point toward the low-hanging fruit. For existing customers, you should also assess the impact of interacting with the “forgot password” and/or the “forgot username” links. If these interactions significantly reduce the probability of completion, the retrieval functionality employed should be revisited.
The more onerous this step appears, the more likely a customer is to depart entirely. Attrition is likely high on this step, particularly for those customers who arrive at a blank form, so a critical measurement to look at here is direct site departure. These customers probably don’t even start to fill out the form. If your analytics solution provides information on form field interactions for completers as well as abandoners, this is a key usability metric for this step. In addition, you should test the impact of side-by-side forms to avoid scrolling. And, if you aren’t providing customers the option to easily use the same address for both billing and shipping (for example, by checking a box), by all means, do it!
Form field validation errors are another driver of site departure at this step. Again, your analytics solution may provide information about which errors are received as well as the impact these errors have on form completion rates. In the absence of this data, one proxy for determining whether errors are a problem is the average number of times this page is refreshed (ratio of page views to visits). This would likely indicate a customer was attempting to fix errors and resubmit the form. Improving the messaging around how to format answers as well as the error messages themselves will reduce the frequency and impact of these errors.
There are many substantial opportunities to identify potential usability improvements at this final step in the checkout process. This step is also a significant attrition point, often because it is the first time customers are seeing their order total. While providing estimates of taxes and shipping earlier in the process (for example, at the “shopping cart”) will definitely shift attrition, it will also lower it because customers’ expectations will be more effectively managed. The higher conversion rates should come from fewer direct site departures as well as fewer steps backward in the process to lower shipping costs (for example, choosing a different shipping method, removing expensive items, or removing heavier items).
Data indicating that customers are moving backward to edit shipping or billing information may provide insight into further opportunities for improving usability at the " Billing and Shipping” step. In many cases, customers miss the option to use the same or different addresses the first time around. Likewise, the form field concepts discussed in the previous section also applies to the payment method component of this step.
In summary, by analyzing the behavior of customers who are not moving forward in the process, you will uncover your usability challenges. Very simple modifications to your checkout process will likely result in significant gains, so before you engage in strategies to increase the volume of orders moving into the checkout process first, make sure it is easy to navigate.
—Brett Hurt, Marianne Llewellyn, and Eric T. Peterson
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