iknowthe.net | Internet and Ecommerce Consultant

Following on from my last post – here’s my tips on good online checkout design:

• Give the customer clear information about the product and provide (at the least) good sized pictures.
• Allow your customers to contact you at every stage or the checkout process – make sure you show your phone number on the page.
• Make the path to purchase as short as possible. The quicker the customer can buy, the more will do so.
• Don’t make the order process too lengthy — collect only the information you need.
• Show a progress bar through the checkout, or add encouraging phrases such as “almost there, we’ll just need your card details on the next page”, so the customer can see they don’t have much more work to do.
• Don’t distract your customers. Trying to cross-sell unrelated products or collect marketing information will hurt conversion.

Most of the problems I see are caused by a site that ignores one of more of these rules. And you might have a great site, supported by great marketing and SEO, but if your site is let down by your checkout process – your bottom line will be seriously hurt.

I’ve been doing lots of analysis on a clients site and their checkout process in particular and in order to give them some comparables for their site conversion results, I found the this information on Ecommerce site conversion rates. It’s a bit buried in the web so I’ve put it here:

Its interesting overall conversion rates are so low but I have to say this is often the case in my experience – but for comparison here are the top performing sites for ecommerce conversion rates.

Way to go QVC – know thy audience. Although this high rate is probably because their site visitors have already been pre-sold the item by watching TV and are coming deliberately to buy, rather than to browse. In which case its maybe not such a good stat – I’ll have to take a look at their site….
Interesting, and depressingly, overall conversion rates are going down.

Are consumers browsing more, or are bad ecommerce site proliferating? I think its the latter and I’ve got my work cut out actually