Forum Moderators: buckworks
We have a relatively user-friendly process: After putting some product-items into his cart, the customer is led to a final "checkers"-page, with form-fields for billing address (as well as some optional fields for notes, alternative shipping address and contact-data).
So just one step and thats it: No login-procedure, because we sell on commission, no credit-card-data-security-issues, nada. This may sound as an invitation for abuse, but de facto it isn't: We have five figures of orders in total over the past years and noone ever made a joke with his best enemy. Note that this checker's-page is the only page where the visitor may get an overview over the products in his shopping cart.
I never analysed the checkout-process in detail before and have no page-specific logfile-analysis yet, but currently am thinking about redesigning the overall look of this checker's page in order to reduce abandonment. I have two figures: In April we had only 10% orders compared to the number of pageviews of this checkers page. This may sound high, but as I said this page is the only page where a visitor may get a general overview of his shopping-cart. The other figure is quite good, I think: 30% of all visitors who put an item into their shopping-cart at all, finally placed an order. And we received almost the same amount additionally via fax or phone.
The design of this checkers page is a candidate for the ugliest-webpage-contest: billing-address form field in the triangle of attention, shopping-cart-table with order sums top right, and additional form fields almost below the fold. No colours or images, just text and a default grey submit-button.
Approximately half of our visitors only view our additional service-pages and hardly ever put anything into their shopping cart. Among the rest we have an average of about 1% orders-per-visit, but our best landing pages convert with up to 6% and more.
With those rough figures given:
Do you think it is worth the effort at all to bring some colours to that page?
Do you think we may loose customers because of the overall improfessional procedures? (No login, no credid-card-payment possible)?
[edited by: Oliver_Henniges at 1:33 pm (utc) on May 5, 2008]
- Colors should serve their purpose -- help to structure the page, and distinguish between more and less important information. Colors should not be added just to make your page "fancier". The less distractions during checkout, the better.
- The simpler is the procedure, the better for your customers.
We avoid login during checkout procedure, but request password when customer tries to look at the order after order is placed (password is initially sent to the e-mail address entered during checkout process when customer tries to access order history page).
Yes, that is what I had in mind. But sometimes I fear that customers do NOT order because they miss the winky-blinky credt-card-images.
I had some few feedback from customers form Switzerland (a rich and modern country), who seemed to be somewhat annoyed to have to fill in the money-transfer-forms in their online-banking-programm.
