Lost Sales Question

How does the number of clicks to checkout affect sales

[joebobsr]

I was perusing on old magazine article last night (2002). It stated that for every click from product selection to checkout you lost 50% of users (you would go from 1000 buyers to 1 if the user had to wade through 10 pages to buy). The article didn't explain how they arrived at this statistic or it's source so I thought I'd bring it here.

What is the abandonment percentage you're seeing for each click between product selection and the checkout?

Does anyone have any experience with shortening the checkout process and seeing the reverse increase in consumated sales?

[AsleepATheWheel]

>for every click from product selection to checkout you lost 50% of users

No where near that amount if you make things clear to the user. If you keep the pages informative, with clear objectives, I'd of guessed that the average drop off would be closer to 5% per click to start with. This would quickly increase as the number of clicks got higher.

Paul

[otc_cmnn]

The moral of the story is that short and simple is best. don't sweat about the percentages. If you have sperate pages/ clicks for customer billing info, then shipping info, then coupons pages, then shipping, then credit cards, and whatever the hell else you are loosing customers, even if that number is 5% it is TOO MANY. Simplify your checkout process.

We took our 'out of the box shopping cart system' (OSCommerce) and twiddled the check out process down to two pages:
A) enter shipping/billing/credit card info
B) Confirm everything is correct

Our sales increase overnight

[cbarling]

A couple of weeks ago I received a copy of the DoubleClick report based on over $1bn of ecommerce sales and involving hundreds of millions of unique visitors.

I don't know if it is biased to larger sites, but I imagine it is.

However, I thought that the overall average figures would still be of interest:

- 9.4% of visitors add to cart

- of these, 58% start checkout

- of these, 58% actually buy

This gives an overall conversion rate of visitors to orders of 4.9%.

(By the way these figures slightly contradict each other but they are as they appeared in the report. I think that one of the 58%s is wrong, but the overall conversion is probably right).

Chris