Lessons from the purple notebook
I keep notes about conversions in a purple hardcover notebook, and the checkout tweaks below are a few of them. Normal conversion rates vary among types of products and industries. My experience is with luxury games whose conversion rates are usually pretty low, so optimizing the site is key to the store’s success. A few of basic mistakes are listed below, and hopefully they won’t come across as too self-evident.
Don’t place a registration page before checkout
Never require a customer to register before checking out. Don’t even present them with an option to checkout as a guest. If you want to avoid drop-off, don’t create the opportunity. Few things annoy me more than stores that think their users want to register as members - doing so is customer averse and thus conversion averse.
No one needs the discount umbrella store to remember their financial information. On the other hand, I’ve met a merchant whose store is entirely community driven (he sold wrestling action figures) and he has plenty of repeat buys. The discount umbrella store would do better with a newsletter signup checkbox. If you’re the action figure store and you’re absolutely sure that you want users to register, allow them to check a box at the very end of their checkout form that creates an account.
Taking advantage of the cart summary page
Think of the sections or fields in your checkout as having differing weights, where fields that imply a greater commitment to the purchase (like credit card number) have the greatest weight. Ideally, you want to ease a customer into checking out by showing him the fields with the lowest weights first. This soft-sell approach is a pretty simple way to increase conversions.
You may be familiar with the aggravating trend where customers get part way through your checkout and abandon. While some level of abandonment is normal, you can decrease it by giving them a better estimate of the grand total up front. They’ll be looking for two things - coupons and shipping estimates.
Of all fields, the coupon code has the lowest weight. Put the coupon entry at the cart summary page so that customers don’t have to click through to a second or third step to figure out what their savings will be. Give customers the opportunity to input their postal code and update the summary with a shipping estimate. Make sure to implement a solution that doesn’t refresh the page every time a change is made to the summary, whether it be coupons, shipping, or item quantity.
Points of assurance
Add points of assurance at checkout, especially with regard to their email address and financial information. Along the same lines, reassure the customer of your checkout’s security by including “secure icons” (Hacker Safe, BBBOnline, Satisfaction Guaranteed, Truste, etc).
Listing contact information on the checkout form reassures customers that you’re dedicated to customer support, and in some cases that you’re legitimate store and not a fly-by-night operation. With services available like Google Voice there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to list a telephone number. Telephone numbers in general are an amazing way to increase conversions and you should already be displaying one on every page of your store.
Quick note about SEO
There are plenty of other tweaks you can make and I may eventually go through some more. Assuming there are no major technical issues with your checkout, increasing qualified traffic to your site is undoubtedly the best way to increase conversions - and the best way to drive qualified traffic to your site is undoubtedly SEO. That’s a topic for another post, however.
