Conversion 101. Your checkout process should be simple, secure, and fast. Finding the right combination of these attributes will drive the highest rate of conversion on your e-commerce website. The slower and more difficult the process becomes, the more friction potentional customers feel and the less likely they are to buy from you.
Here are 10 checkout usability tips to reduce friction, increase conversion, and delight your customers.
Over the last two years at Software Advice, we’ve experimented extensively with site retargeting–a display advertising method that shows your ads to visitors who previously visited your website, but are now visiting other sites. When we first got into retargeting, we were familiar with pay per click and had gotten quite efficient at setting up campaigns with decent margins.
I just finished up Brian Massey’s new book, “Your Customer Creation Equation” and I thought I’d share a quick review. Here’s the one sentence pitch: Brian’s book is a practical resource that provides a systematic approach for turning your website into a customer generating machine. I’ve got a feeling that this is one of those books that I’ll continue to reference again and again. My copy is already chock full of notes and folded page corners.
There are hundreds… no, thousands of add-on apps and services that you can use to grow your ecommerce business. The problem is that there isn’t time in the day to test every new service that comes out. Fear not, we’re here to help. Every couple of months, we’re going to profile our favorite new apps for ecommerce professionals. For our first installment, we took a look at 9 apps that are helping ecommerce companies grow big and strong. Here’s our first set of great apps:
Ever since Wal-Mart began offering nearly every product known to man, the prevailing thought in retail has been that more is better. More products mean more opportunities for sales.
If someone isn’t interested in one product, they may be interested in option two or three. Whatever the case, you need to give customers more choices.
Inline validation is an opportunity for merchants to provide a fundamentally better checkout experience for their customers. Unfortunately, it’s an opportunity most retailers don’t take advantage of.
The problem with conventional checkout forms is that they wait until after a customer has tried to submit to validate the form for mistakes.
You know the story; you spend 10 minutes filling out a checkout form, hit submit, and get back a page that is completely blank because of an error. It’s frustrating for customers and undoubtedly causes a decrease in conversion.
Inline validation can dramatically improve your checkout experience and lower your cart abandonment rate.
By validating your checkout form in real-time, field-by-field, you are giving your users immediate feedback as to whether they’ve filled out each field with appropriate inputs.
Usability expert, Luke Wroblewski, documented some compelling data to support how effective real-time validation can be in an ecommerce setting. In a test he conducted with usability firm Etre, he found real-time validation caused:
· 22% increase in success rates
· 22% decrease in errors made
· 31% increase in satisfaction rating
· 42% decrease in completion times
In addition to his research, Luke also attests to the fact that he has seen real-time validation reduce errors by over 80% in other studies.
The end result is getting more customers through your checkout forms, faster and happier. Sounds like a recipe for increased conversion.
The downside of this for a lot of small to medium sized retailers is that they are at the mercy of what their ecommerce platform offers. In many cases, the cart platform maintains control over the entire checkout flow and merchants can’t intervene.
For retailers who have a proprietary cart or access to their checkout flow, let’s take a look at how inline validation should be implemented from a technical perspective.
Technical Implementation
Every checkout form has fields that need to be validated for accuracy on the client-side (in the browser), as well as fields that need to be validated server-side. The ideal situation is that every field on your checkout form is validated both ways.
Client-side validation can be done with JavaScript or HTML5’s built-in validation functionality. Potential drawbacks with using a JavaScript solution are that users can disable JavaScript in their browser. Potential drawbacks with HTML5 are that it is only supported by modern browsers. That being the case, validation should also be done on the server-side.
You should validate fields once a user has finished their input for a specific field and they have moved on to the next field. This action is called “blurring” a field. For server-side validation, you can utilize AJAX to send the field data back to your server to be checked for accuracy.
If the data looks good, return a response and show the user that the field has been filled out in a way that’s acceptable. If not, return a helpful error message and display it inline with the associated field (meaning adjacent to the field). If your server response takes more than one second, you might consider displaying a small spinner graphic to indicate to the user that something is happening behind the scenes and reassure them while they wait.
Here’s a great example of real-time validation from the new Twitter sign up flow.
Inline validation reassures users and makes the arduous process of filling out a checkout form a little bit more enjoyable. If you can reduce the friction people experience while buying from you, you’ll undoubtedly reap conversion rewards.
Welcome to the Rejoiner tips series! Here we’ll provide a short post outlining our recommendation for a particular aspect of shopping cart abandonment. Have a question you want answered? Leave it in the comments section and we’ll address it. We might even make it part of the series!
With email open rates on the rise, the chance of someone reading your email these days is pretty good. But there are a few things you can do to help those chances; We’ve already covered setting the right tone and choosing the best subject line, now we want to talk about a lesser thought about topic – the sent from email address.
When you’re creating your shopping cart abandonment campaign, one important thing to think about is ‘who are your emails going to come from? No reply? Info? Joe from accounting?
Our recommendation:
Use a real person’s name in the sent from field versus your company name. The fact is, a lot of people just have unanswered questions when they abandon your site. Give your potential customers an opportunity to get questions answered by making the interaction personal. Use your abandonment emails to get feedback from customers about why they didn’t convert. Do this by using a REAL email address as the sent-from address. You might be surprised what you learn.
According to KISSMetrics, 40% of people will abandon a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. More striking, a one second delay in load time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. ONE SECOND! That’s crazy!
To help you speed up your site and reduce shopping cart abandonment, we’re giving you a few quick tips and tools:
Use SEO Technical Best Practices
Practical eCommerce wrote a great article, “How to Increase Page Speed and Help Search-Engine Rankings” where they cover various ways to analyze and improve your site speed. A few tips include:
Optimize Images
A large image can significantly slow down your site’s load time, leaving images blank and users frustrated. Compress your images correctly and you should see performance gains.
Move Javascript & CSS to External Files
One of the oldest and most basic technical SEO recommendations, moving on-page CSS and Javascript snippets out of the header and into their own external file can make a big difference on load time.
Use Webmaster Tools & Analytics
Google now provides data in both Webmaster tools and Google analytics to let you know how your site is performing. Be sure to take advantage.
Limit Redirects
Another SEO best practice is to limit the number of redirects on your site. Not sure if your site has redirects? A tool like Screaming Frog can scan your site and report on its performance. Once you know where redirects are happening, you can adjust your links to make sure they are pointing to the proper page.
Improve Site Caching
The less calls the server has to make the better. CMS systems like WordPress offer a number of caching plugins to help reduce server load and speed up your site, giving your users a better experience and reducing abandonment.
Checkout Google SiteSpeed Tools
Google does a really nice job providing you information on the performance of your site. Their page speed tools provide insights into how your site is performing and will also offer suggestions to help you fix any issues. The nice thing about the plugin is that you can get real-time data.
The bottom line is site speed plays a big role in the user experience. So why not give your visitors the best experience possible and close those leads!
Many online retailers are just learning about shopping cart abandonment and the benefits it can have. We wanted to make the learning process a little bit easier for you.
We’ve compiled 17 of the best blog posts on shopping cart abandonment to help you learn and give you some great ideas to get started.
1. Infographic: Tips To Avoid Shopping Cart Abandonment
Summary: Cool infographic from Monetate breaking down the shopping cart process and offering do’s and don’ts to help decrease abandonment.
Top tip: Don’t force customers to register & Don’t hide shipping costs
2. How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment: 10 No-Brainers
Summary: Get Elastic gives us 10 obvious ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment on a site.
Top tip: Use persistent cookies to keep your cart alive
3. Do Your Users Have Shopping Cart Abandonment Issues?
Summary: KISSMetrics explores why users abandon through this infographic.
Top tip: Show delivery and payment options up front at the beginning of the checkout process.
4. 20 Tips to Minimize Shopping Cart Abandonment, Part 1
Summary: ClickZ offers an oldie but a goodie. A great post from Bryan Eisenberg (featured in our 30 CRO experts to follow on Twitter post) with some unique tips on how you can minimize abandonment on your site.
Top tip: Placing a thumbnail image of the product increases conversions by as much as 10%
5. 3 Tips for Managing Shopping Cart Abandonment
Summary: Practical eCommerce offers three best practices for running an abandonment campaign.
Top tip: Email cart-abandoning consumers shortly after they leave a site.
6. Stopping Shopping Cart Abandonment
Summary: UX Booth discusses three areas you should reexamine in your checkout process.
Top tip: Not all States require sales tax SO it’s important to let the customer know if there will be tax before the last page of checkout.
7. Few e-retailers pursue shoppers who abandon shopping carts
Summary: Internet Retailer discusses how the top 1000 retailers are dealing with shopping cart abandonment.
Top tip: Limit the discounts offered. Implement a ladder of markdowns.
8. Seven Ways to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
Summary: Practical eCommerce covers the top seven ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment based on a study from comScore.
Top tip: 21% of buyers said they decided not to shop at a given site because of security concerns. Communicate your commitment to security.
9. Cart Abandonment Analysis: Rosetta Stone
Summary: Ok, this is ours but we threw this in because of the reception it’s gotten. Plus it’s nice to see examples of what other companies are doing.
Top tip: Offer social proof.
10. Top 3 Tips For Preventing Shopping Cart Abandonment
Summary: A few different ideas beyond the email to help deal with abandonment from James Francis.
Top tip: Reinforce the purchase. For example, if your product is about how to quit smoking, place an image of a happy, smiling, healthy family alongside the order form.
11. 8 Ways to Boost Ecommerce Shopping Cart Conversions
Summary: Hubspot covers a few abandonment best practices and gives real life examples of companies doing it right.
Top tip: Include user reviews. 63% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews.
12. Beyond the Cart: 5 Process Abandonment Messages to Implement
Summary: A great post that looks at other remarketing opportunities for abandoning customers.
Top tip: Consider giving customers a “wish list” functionality and then delivering an email message stream that promotes the items they’ve singled out.
13. Reasons and Solutions to Shopping Cart Abandonment
Summary: GoECart explores why people abandon and shows why their shopping cart solution can help decrease that. We don’t have any affiliation with GoECart but it’s cool to see a company positioning their platform this way.
Top tip: People want to comparison shop.
14. 7 Simple Ways to Decrease Shopping Cart Abandonment
Summary: Inc.com covers some easy ways an online retailer can decrease shopping cart abandonment.
Top tip: Either show stock levels on the product page itself or alert the customer when they try to add that item to their cart.
15. Online Retailers: Fixing Shopping Cart Abandonment
Summary: An exploration from Forbes into how and if companies are dealing with abandonment and even the biggest are failing
Top tip: Abandonment campaigns or series are much more successful than one off emails
16. Wipe Out Shopping Cart Abandonment
Summary: Entrepreneur.com covers a couple abandonment basics and how factors like security concerns can drive customers away.
Top tip: Keep shipping costs in line with customer expectations.
17. Examples of Shopping Cart Abandonment Emails and Best Practices
Summary: A short write-up of best practices and two abandoned cart email examples from real websites.
Top tip: 2-3 emails works the best
Missing an article? Let us know in the comments.
Photo Courtesy of emutold
A couple weeks ago, we talked about the various CRO challenges facing organizations today and how you can overcome them. The thing is, we know that selling conversion optimization within your company can be tough but what you may not realize is there are a lot of places you can be doing it…and maybe already are. Let’s look at three simple opportunities.
This could be the most obvious one but it’s also one of the easiest. Changing a subject line, adding a new call to action…those are tests you can be doing without any help and believe it or not, simple changes can help improve conversions.
Here are a few additional testing ideas for emails:
The goal here is to keep track of the data, evaluate the results and make changes based on your findings. Just because people generally open emails in the morning doesn’t mean that’s when YOUR customers do. Learn what your audience is doing and what they respond to.
Pay Per Click Campaigns
If you’re running PPC campaigns, you’re already doing conversion testing. With PPC campaigns you use different ad copy, keyword types, you schedule ads for different parts of the day and you target specific parts of the country. You are already testing.
So why not start testing landing pages as they can play a big role in improving conversions? The great part about a paid search campaign is the ability to send a select group of traffic to a specific page. You don’t have to wonder if the page will come up in organic results or how they’ll find it because you are directing traffic there based on what people are searching for.
A/B testing with Google Adwords is pretty simple and you may find one page converts substantially better than another. Be sure to check out ‘The Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page’ for some ideas.
On-Site Forms
Do you gather information from your website visitors through forms? If so, there’s a big opportunity you may not even realize.
Back in February we covered ‘5 Best Practices for Creating Forms’ where we noted things like “your form should be simple”, “you should tell users what’s required” and the “email field should be at the top of the form”.
If you tried even one of those things, you’re already involving conversion optimization in your marketing plan, especially if your conversion is filling out the form. If your conversion is an actual purchase of something, people still have to fill out a form right?
Check out these 10 Best Practices for Creating Awesome Online Forms.
In the end…
The fact is, conversion optimization is most likely already in your marketing plan. It’s up to you to start really testing things and finding what works best for your business.
Check out our 40 Do’s and Don’ts of A/B Testing for tips on getting started.
