Ineffective checkouts are the single greatest cause of e-shopping failures, costing the industry an estimated US$6.5 billion in lost sales. But there are easy fixes.
This article is an excerpt from Creative Good's Holiday 2000 E-commerce report. Download the full report for free.
How would you react if you walked into a store, found something you wanted to buy and brought it to the cash register -- but the store would not let you pay? You'd probably get frustrated and walk out, never to return to that store.
That's essentially what's happening online -- and at a tremendous cost to e-tailers. In Creative Good tests of several well-known e-commerce sites, checkout was responsible for failure to complete an online order over 40 percent of the time.
This is a huge failure rate for one feature -- consistently poor performance across multiple sites in multiple categories. If every site made simple improvements only to the checkout process, the worldwide e-commerce industry could gain over US$6.5 billion, including US$3 billion in North America.
While customers in our tests encountered other difficulties on the sites we tested, problems with checkout were the greatest cause of failure in the buying attempts we saw. Many times during the tests, we saw customers successfully find a product, decide to buy it and successfully add it to their cart -- all in vain. Checkout was too difficult to complete. Frustrated, many customers gave up and left the site.
Failures during checkout were due to three main causes:
- confusion over "Return" and "New" customer paths
- difficulty creating an account
- ineffective error messages
In all these cases, sites failed to make it clear what customers needed to do and how they could advance in the checkout process. Shoppers failed to buy because the customer experience was too difficult.
Read on for examples and simple solutions to the problems we saw.
