In short: If you think this is valuable, please share it via a link to this page. And if you’d like more, you can encourage me to finish my book about checkout optimization! You can also tweet this or share it on Facebook.
Over the course of the last few years, I have been in and out of the details of conversion rate optimization. My career at a digital marketing agency affords me the privilege of working with some of the top brands in the world. I am equally lucky to know some great entrepreneurs with very small businesses. Among the fascinating things that I get to see every day and across the spectrum is how much of an impact a small improvement at the checkout makes.
Simply, more sales equals more sales. Given finite resources to optimize a thousand different things, I’m awestruck that the shopping cart is not a greater focus. And as sites have changed in incredible ways over the last few years, shopping carts remain unchanged.
In 2009 I thought about this issue and started researching attributes across a number of shopping carts. It was a story of small diversity and great uniformity. I started writing a book on the subject, but I shifted focus to double down and grow a separate business. (Which has been extremely rewarding and I now get to work with a growing group of talented, bright, extremely funny people that are accomplishing amazing things for the world’s coolest brands, but that’s another story.) A couple of months ago, I came back to the idea of checkout optimization, and thought it would be really interesting to compare my 2009 research to the current state of things.
And that’s how this infographic came to be. My hope is that this is useful to anyone curious about shopping cart design patterns, or perhaps someone looking for a standard to measure up against. Let me know what you think, and you want more like this, you can sign up here.
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Awesome, tweeted!
Thank you for creating this. It is going to be extremely helpful for presentations.
Thanks for posting this – its excellent. I’d like to add this to our blog (with of course, credit to you guys) with some feedback of our own if that is okay? I was getting ready to do a similar post but would love to reference your efforts instead.
Hi Kate,
Please feel free to republish with a link back to this page. Thank you and look forward to your thoughts!
it’s excellent. A very good infographic.
Thanks for the infographic. As an admin I’ve had to spend a continual amount of time trying to improve conversion rates. And I’m not just referring to “sales” conversion, but all aspects of the funnel. Getting someone from the landing page to the cart (or checkout).
I agree that not enough time is spent trying to focus on improving conversions for the final and most important page(s) of all, which is checkout.
I’m looking forward to your book coming out, but there’s a couple of points I wanted to throw out there that I hope you’ll consider touching on before publishing. Some of this may seem too granular, but I’m curious how these aspects are dealt when averaging the “checkout experience” across sites.
1) Font size. How this affects user experience? Designers seem to love small fonts (11px) but is it problematic to users?
2) Modifying form fields. How many sites mess with them for aesthetic reasons (CSS border color, border width) in order to get them normalized across browsers, and how many dare not touch them no matter how ugly they look as-is?
3) Security seal placement. I’m not referring to the value of having them or not. I’m talking about optimal placement. Most sites I see, put them in the page footer. But how about flanking the checkout form, or specifically the billing address fields? If a site is well-known this probably doesn’t matter, but for start-ups that haven’t built up enough trust, can it make a difference?
4) Button text. Maybe meaningless, but is “Place Your Order” (amazon’s) more frequent than “Place Order”, “Complete Order”, “Finish Order” or “Submit Form”?
5) Terms and conditions. Tick a checkbox, terms in a textarea, or text stating that placing the order constitutes terms agreement. Checkbox seems most dominant, but I’ve surprisingly seen folks abandon checkout after being presented with an error that they need to tick the terms checkbox. And this is after they’ve already entered their billing data, which tells me they’re getting tripped up, and don’t know how to fix it.
Thanks again, Nicholas.
@TJ
Thank you for the feedback!
I’d be interested to hear about your experiences, what has worked, what hasn’t, etc. I’m going to dig into the data a bit and see if I have statistic-based answers to your questions. I appreciate the support and the kind words.
Quick thought on the check box: I see that you’re using a normal form check box. Have you considered using a check block instead that has a very clear active / inactive state? You might also consider using an image to draw attention to the box with a custom message, or showing a model window with the option to accept terms if a submission is made without that field being completed.
I’d be happy to brainstorm this a little bit more… maybe we can set up a test and present the findings.
Hi Nicholas,
There’s a couple of things I’d share about our experience. I assume most websites will take the time to look at their competitors’ checkout process and other sites not in their niche to see how they approach the sales funnel to the actual checkout form. But I don’t think it wise to assume any one site has “the answer”, even if they’re dominating their vertical. You never know how much thought was put into an approach, so you really have to implement what works best for your site and your audience. And that comes by testing things out.
So, here’s some things I’d share about our trying to optimize the conversion funnel for the marriage name change site. And just because this works for us doesn’t mean it’ll work for others.
1) Showing the price early in the conversion funnel increased the bounce rate, which hurt conversions. Showing it later, resulted in the opposite effect.
2) Having a secondary call to action (ie, Learn More) decreases the sales funnel and hurts overall conversions. I understand the rationale for having it, but you’re splitting, and possibly squeezing, the sales funnel, which can be damaging. Do what works best for you.
3) We’ve had worse response rates from “Sign Up” and “Register” buttons. The words “sign up” and “register” seem to be repellent. We’ve had better success with less “committal” words that lead to the same “sign up” page, but just doesn’t say “sign up” in the anchor text.
4) Requiring CVV and not requiring CVV appears to make no difference in conversions.
5) Security seals site-wide, above the fold, appears to have had a net negative effect. Security seals near the end of the conversion funnel did not have a negative impact, but not enough to determine if they are contributing.
6) Virtually no one clicks the trust/security seals. No matter how prominently placed they are, they just don’t get clicked. That doesn’t mean they’re not useful though.
7) Green EV SSL (which we use on another site) was a waste of time and money. It did nothing.
As for the checkbox, I assume you’re talking about having javascript dynamically replace it with an on/off toggle graphic? I like it in concept, but not in practice. Similar to the modal–interesting idea, but potentially risky.
I’m just wary about deviating from the norm. Terms & conditions checkbox is pretty intuitive. It’s tried and trusted. I wouldn’t want anyone to spend time figuring out how this new whipper snapper form control works and leaving out of frustration, which is why we’ve resorted to the old standby javascript alert if they forget to check it. It’s ugly, but it gets the job done. I would likely want to try inline error notices as an alternative, but I’m also cautious about introducing too much JavaScript razzle dazzle into a form since we have a bundle of users who still use IE7, which is painful for us to maintain support for, but necessary.
Regards,
TJ