"The Best Checkout Button"

[jsinger]

Excuse me if I'm a little batty after two days spent looking at checkout buttons on about 120 ecommerce sites. Naturally I started with the biggies, Amazon, Target and Walmart.com being among my favorites. In my quest, I selected tennis shoes from Endless and a nice bra from Victoria's Secret. (I didn't actually buy it)

I noticed some trends and some lack of trends: Often the "Checkout' button has morphed into the "Secure Checkout" button over the past few years. Many sites, including Amazon, now gently ease the shopper into the buy decision with "Proceed to Checkout." But plenty of sites still just use a plain button that says only "Checkout."

Important buttons on Amazon's Endless match the color of the page. Most other sites prefer a jarring contrasting color, most often red. Zappos uses orange. Arrows are common.

A few people have devoted even more time to the subject than I have. Here's an interesting study:

http://www.pitstopmedia.com/sem/perfect-checkout-button

Here's an eclectic collection of checkout buttons from some of the web's biggest commerce sites:
http://www.pitstopmedia.com/sem/checkout-buttons-design

(note: I have no connection to pitstopmedia)

[edited by: lorax at 11:37 am (utc) on Feb. 9, 2009]

[Essex_boy]

Superb ! Superb !

Thanks for posting

Im going through the process of working on a site thats about to start out with adsense, this is just the sort of thing im looking for.

[MrHard]

Interesting, but it is possible to overthink such things just because you want to see an improvement somewhere. It might as well be the checkout button where more sales lie.

[jsinger]

One of WebmasterWorld's best ecommerce threads: "Does Your Buy Button Suck?" by hannamyluv 53 posts on a similar subject from December 2005:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[MrHard]

Let's don't go overboard with this "buy button" focus.

Clear, large, alluring product photos are far more important.

In terms of priority, creating the "World's Most Effective Buy Button" comes near the end of the list. If you've done everything else well and your price is good, customers will gladly take the extra second or two to find a mediocre buy button.

So you are on the final step, everything else is perfect, if we could just get the buy button right everything would fall into place perfectly?

[edited by: MrHard at 9:13 am (utc) on Feb. 8, 2009]

[Wlauzon]

The BUY button is but a small part of the overall site.

But it takes like 5-10 minutes to add a better one in most cases.

If it adds 1% to sales, I would think that a few minutes is worth it.

[jsinger]

The "Add to Cart" and "Checkout" buttons are certainly vital. But one could argue that the lowly-- often smaller, dowdy and pallid -- "Continue Shopping" button might be as important, and no one ever discusses that one.

On Amazon's Endless, for example, a shopper has to do a fair amount of searching to go beyond that first pair of shoes. Are we all THAT eager to make any sale?

Here's a rare exposition on the "Continue Shopping" button:
http://www.getelastic.com/continue-shopping-usability/

[edited by: lorax at 1:19 pm (utc) on Feb. 10, 2009]

[rocknbil]

I notice that most of these are graphic buttons of input type="image". On a more basic level, one of accessibility, I prefer something like this:

<input type="submit" id="submit_button" Value="CHECKOUT">

... With the buttons styled via background image. Accessibility and graceful degradation take precedence over sales metrics, IMO.

I don't think I'm missing the point, I'm just saying there are more important issues than the ones raised by this study.

[MrHard]

Let's don't go overboard with this "buy button" focus.

Clear, large, alluring product photos are far more important.

In terms of priority, creating the "World's Most Effective Buy Button" comes near the end of the list. If you've done everything else well and your price is good, customers will gladly take the extra second or two to find a mediocre buy button.

Why did you write this then?

[trinorthlighting]

The best check out button to use is the one people click on most! We did some A/B/C/D testing a while back and really did not find too much of a difference. If a person wants to buy they will buy and find what ever check out button you use. Those were are results at least.