i liked your article here, very good, short, sweet and pack with valuable nuggets.

I may have misunderstood #4 slightly but I will stick to my guns regarding credit/card payment being messaged to the user as the first step. We’ve seen nothing but the opposite across countless ecomm and lead generation clients. The same point goes for shoving as many fields above the fold as possible. Again, the user may have little comfort with your form or checkout process. It seems that our results based on clients may differ, which beckons the point of more testing vs. Best Practices. Different users on different sites = different motivation. I don’t know that I’ve seen any holy grail in the testing we’ve done but the 80-20 rule is certainly employable for what most term Best Practices, but again it’s a dangerous line to cross for most without fully testing.

Remember your checkout and sign up is your business (and often the ignored part of it!). You pay to get traffic to your site, now you need to understand and maximize your ROI through testing, understanding and optimizing your registration and checkout flows.

Testing is essential and needs to be run concurrently to make conclusive decisions that will help your business long-term. If you can’t test on your own, employ the experts to do so.

Fyi, this form is less than desirable (for future comment sections). In missing the required text (better call out), I received an error message and then lost my entire post. That’s a lot of friction for a non-highly motivated user to overcome.

It is amazing just how many online retailers mess this up – we have a huge sellers of CDs here in Australia that made me go through 9 steps just to buy a single CD! If it hadn’t been a gift (& signed CD only available there) I would have left and never come back!
And thanks for using ‘web savvy’ in your post

(btw Jeffery – I’m not an expert (yet) but thanks for writing ‘Wating for your Cat to Bark’ it’s definitely going to get me there a lot sooner than I would otherwise!)

Cheers, Mikey

1) It’s rarely been our experience that CC information should be collected first.

2) Placing most fields on one page sometimes works but needs to be tested. Often users react better to a more segmented and fluid approach the the form fill-out processs. Above the fold is always a good rule though, limit users’ work!

3) Agreed, status indicators are a must.

4) Sign-ups is another area that has to be tested. We’ve seen users react better to pre-CC sign up and post-CC sign up. It’s entirely subject to the form and should be tested.

Everybody has their own ‘best practices’ but these are opinions and shouldn’t be rolled out so liberally without adequate testing. Remember your checkout and sign up is your business. You pay to get traffic to your site, now you need to understand and maximize your ROI through testing, understanding and optimizing your registration and checkout flows.

Measure and follow the steps of the visitor and you know where the pain is.

Cheap pain solver, google has launched their new analytics programm. Check video on http://services.google.com/analytics/tour/index_nl-NL.html