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!