5 Not so obvious checkout improvements which apply to all types of site

With checkout abandonment increasing to a staggering 48% in the UK according to Coremetrics, there is a clear need for many retailers to pore over this report and extract the key insights.

The Econsultancy Guide to Checkout Optimisation report is structured around the different steps of the process and contains 70 tips. The best feature of the report IMO is a checklist in the appendix which lists all 70 with prompts of what to look for when comparing to the competition. If you run an Ecommerce site print this out and fill it in!

In my brief review I highlight 5 of the less obvious tips which I picked up, which apply to most types of site.

Let's start the review with...

What we don't like / what's missing?

The report has a fixation on abandonment (naturally), so focuses relentlessly on reducing this rate, so missing some opportunities.

I believe that recommendations on any site process should address both the challenges and the opportunities.

The opportunities that seem to be missing or only touched on briefly are:

• increasing brand preference
• using social proof, i.e. customer recommendations or testimonials to increase reassurance
• encouraging email and social network registration
• upselling in the checkout
• using voucher and discount codes
• using post transaction pages 'persuasion windows" to encourage future purchases

To be fair Mike justifies the exclusion of some of these opportunities when he says

While travelling through the checkout process, the customer should NEVER be distracted away from the transaction they are in the process of completing, for example by presenting them with promotions "€“ the place for "shopping" is either before the checkout has started (right up to and including the basket page), or after the purchase has been completed "€“ i.e. on the order confirmation page and in confirmation emails.

I'm not so sure about that rule of thumb - I'm sure many customers, me included, suffer dissonance and exit the checkout before returning with more in the basket!

That said, this is an excellent, accessible report by Mike Baxter a consultant who specialises in Ecommerce so knows checkouts inside out - he completed over 30 audits in 2009!

5 checkout optimisation recommendations

Here's the recommendations I found most useful...

1. Make baskets persistent across multiple sessions. According to the report, even after a basket has been abandoned and the customer has left the site, as

many as 33% will come back and purchase later20. The report recommends that...

"As a result, losing information on basket contents would seem an almost certain way of losing revenue".

2. Check opt-in to email marketing by default. I've been recommending this ever since 2003 when the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations law specified it was permissible within the UK.

What I found interesting here was Mike's comment that "anecdotal evidence from e-commerce companies suggests

that retailers can gain between three and five times as many opt-ins if the default is "opt-in"

(passive not active).

3. Form textbook alignment. The best of both world's is what Walmart do - top alignment for short forms and right alignment for longer forms.

4. Create the perfect checkout button. Most use the noncommittal "Next or continue", Mike recommends incorporating a call-to-action which shows the next stage, e.g. "Proceed to Secure Payment".

5. Create multiple goal funnels in analytics There is a useful section on using Analytics focusing on Google Analytics. The report recommends best practice of defining a login-to-purchase

pathway for returning customers and a guest checkout for new customers. Some sites also have a register pathway for new customers.

It was good to see the report refer to "the joy of segmentation" and recommend segmenting new and returning customers.

The report says:

"The most useful segmentation metric for checkout improvement is new versus returning customers "€“ not offered by Google Analytics out-of-the-box, but it is configurable".

This is true, you need to setup a custom variable for customers to do this, but an easier (but less accurate) approach is first time against returning visitors.

Both approaches rely on cookies which may be deleted of course.

So all-in-all a great report - relevant for most site owners, but a must-read for managers of Ecommerce sites.