Ideas for a Smarter, Faster World

To improve conversions, focus on providing relevant and persuasive content based on a sound understanding of visitor intent. Persuade on every page. Link pages together to guide visitors along the way. Hold their hands, and anticipate their every move. Make them feel comfortable and in control.

The more time a visitor spends on your site, the more likely she is to buy. Shopping carts experience the highest drop-off in the first two or three pages. Once they’re into the process, drop-off rates decline precipitously.

More e-Commerce best practices:

1. Reduce the number of steps. Combine the logical steps first (shipping and billing address information as an example). But don’t make brevity a goal in it of itself. Once the user completes the first page of their journey, they are invested. Presenting a long form with a dozen or more fields to fill out is intimidating and typically results in a higher abandonment rate.  Know that once the user completes that first page, they are more likely to finish the job.
2. Manage expectations. If you’re asking for more than five minutes of a user’s time, consider communicating that as a courtesy. Once they’re in, always let the user know where they are (tax software like TurboTax do a really good job with this). Add visual cues to checkout procedures. Use headlines and breadcrumb navigation to show shoppers where they are (and enhance SEO!).
3. Give them someone to call. Keep contact information prominent and include it on each page (credit card companies do a lousy job with this). To lower abandonment rates, place a customer service phone number in a clearly visible location with the text “Prefer to order by phone?” Sites that provide this assurance tend to perform better than those that don’t.
4. Let users easily modify cart contents. Keep the contents of the cart accessible and easy to find, wherever you are in the process.
5. Don’t require registration to checkout. If you have the ability to offer what is often called a “guest checkout” feature, do so.
6. Remember users when they return. When a user leaves and comes back—even as a guest—their cart should be waiting for them. Remind users of abandoned carts via email or through your CRM program.
7. Make error messages clear. Red is fairly universal, but not the only solution. Just ensure the treatment of your error message is visually distinct.
8. Clearly display your security and trust seals. Customer privacy concerns are paramount. Give buyers this assurance.
9. Only cross sell relevant products. Cross sell after items have been added to the cart but before the checkout process. Group products and show related items. Relevance = Trust.
10. Measure and refine. Test different combinations. Make small, incremental changes based on user behavior to see which ones produce the best results for your store and shopping cart.

We’d love to take credit for all of this thinking. We can’t, and must thank thank these sources for helping us to organize our thoughts.

Resources

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/23/designing-for-the-user-experience-in-ecommerce/
http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/02/26/amazon-shopping-cart/
http://www.getelastic.com/measuring-cross-sell-success/
http://www.ecommnewz.com/2009/07/22/decrease-cart-abandonment-with-a-sturctured-checkout-process/
http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/tackling-the-shopping-cart-abandonment-rate
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/28/12-tips-for-designing-an-excellent-checkout-process/
http://econsultancy.com/blog/1828-ten-ways-to-improve-online-checkouts
http://www.elated.com/articles/10-ways-to-improve-your-store-checkout/

Tags: eCommerce, shopping cart

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 4:13 pm and is filed under General, Usability, strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.