Your Site Leaks: Stopping User Drop-off At Checkout

As visitors move through your site and enter the shopping cart area, they become increasingly valuable to you. But too often marketers take for granted visitors who have already clicked an “Order Now,” “Purchase” or “Sign Up” button and assume that they are now safely on their way to converting.

In fact, the Razorfish Site Optimization team typically sees almost 60 percent of these customers dropping out of the process. Chances are, your site loses customers like a leaky bucket loses water. That’s bad news, considering 1) the significant marketing investment you’ve made to get them to that point, and 2) that at this stage each lost prospect is lost revenue.

The good news is that it’s possible to plug those leaks and significantly improve both customer satisfaction and your site’s overall business performance.

Plugging Those Leaks

1.     Help users avoid errors. While it’s an obvious best practice of order form design, far too many sites do not adequately indicate which fields in a form are required. Sometimes some required fields are marked while others are not. Improvement in this one area can produce big gains.

An international wireless carrier recently implemented recommendations (many related to required form fields) from a Site Optimization study of their checkout process. After implementing our recommendations, conversions from their home page increased nearly 100%.

2.     Provide clear error messaging. Not all errors can be avoided; however, strong error messaging can improve the chances of users successfully fixing their errors and converting. Recently a travel client implemented Site Optimization’s recommendations aimed at reducing the impact of errors on the lead generation form. After simplifying fields and improving messaging, error rates declined 15%. Users who did receive error messages were 60% more likely to fix the errors and complete the form. And the page’s conversion rate jumped 30%.

As a best practice we recommend showing all error messages together at the top of the page and in-line with each affected field. Make sure the error messages are easy to understand, reducing guesswork. A classic example of a bad error message is: “Username is invalid.” This leaves the user with no clear course of action. Instead, state how it can be fixed: “Please enter a username between 4 and 8 characters with at least 1 number.”

3.     Determine the optimum checkout funnel length and guide users through it. Checkout processes have varying number of pages, but what is the optimum number to drive the highest completion rates? Since every checkout implementation has its own answer, use testing to determine the optimum process. Then always communicate the process length and user commitment (time and energy) required with messaging and progress bars. In short, make the process as transparent as possible.

Site Optimization conducted an A/B test on a domestic wireless carrier’s checkout process to understand how a 3-step funnel compared to a single-page checkout form. The 3-step process recorded an increased conversion rate which equaled a multi-million dollar impact to sales. In this example, users were motivated and invested by the third step in the process and were more likely to overcome errors than users within the 1-step funnel.
The Take-away

Granted, likening your Web site to a leaky bucket is an oversimplification. However, before running out to buy a brand-new bucket – redesigning your Web site – first consider repairing the leaks. (For the record, we’re definitely not opposed to new Web sites.)

Increase revenue and gain more customers by helping buyers avoid errors and better recover from the errors they encounter. Optimizing the length of your process and communicating progress can also help customers through to conversion.