Whilst looking at several client's sites, not to mention my own,
I started to compare the abandonment rate of each of the checkouts
to see how they varied. As you can expect, there is a lot of
difference in overall visitors but what does vary is the percentage
of Checkout Drop-outs.
What I mean by a Checkout Drop-out is the people who on arriving to
the checkout on eCommerce
websites, they proceed no further and leave the site. Not good
for any Website Owner to see people leave without a 'thank you,
come again' or 'sorry you're leaving' cheer. It might startle
people to know that the average drop-out rate on an e-commerce site
is around 60%. That does sound rather large but there can be so
many reasons why this might be the case. Factors such as being in a
highly price competitive market or the delivery charges are
examples of why people decide to go elsewhere. I found a really
good article on the e-consultancy website about the possible
why customers abandon the checkout.
The sad reality though is that there can be a multitude of reasons
why this happens. Take a look at the graph to see some of the
reasons why:
This however, was taken from the results of
a survey of online shoppers by Marketing Sherpa and WebCredible.
Unfortunately for the website owner, we cannot get this level of
understanding from the web stats analysis. Instead, we need to pay
attention to our customer's behaviour and apply the golden rule of
e-commerce success - trial and error. Sometimes a small change such
as moving an image to a different location can have such a huge
impact on overall conversions.
Using webstats software such as Google
Analytics, you can see a 'Funnel Visualisation' of where people
drop-out of the goal conversion process. This can allow you to
pin-point the area that could do with improvement and then make
changes to see if this makes a difference. With some A/B testing
(also an option in Google) this will allow qualitative analysis to
directly see what affects conversion.
Improving the shopping process should be paramount to any
e-commerce website. This should also be treated as an evolving
process as needs and competitor services are always changing and
being added to. There can be many different ways to improve the
conversion rate of the checkout, and I've happened to mention one
in a previous post about
registration. A concise list of some of the important factors
in improving the checkout process can be found in the blog
conversions matters. Happy reading and think about that all
important bottom line!



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