But, I believe that conversion is cumulative, and every pixel of design you employ in your shopping cart contributes to the semi-conscious feelings of comfort and confidence that prospects get when they decide that your cart is safe and credible enough to do business with.

Many Conversion Rate Optimization practitioners would start by recommending that you run out and buy what is called a “credibility indicator“–some sort of flag or badge that indicates to prospects that you’re credible.  Some of the more popular credibility indicators are the McAfee certification and the Verisign security symbol.  This is not a bad approach, and some of our testing has proven that it can have a positive effect on conversion rate, but last I checked, it costs money to get this type of badge to place on your site.

I encountered a shopping cart today that didn’t have any security/credibility badges in the active window, yet I still felt perfectly comfortable converting on their website.  I’d like to use them as example (click screenshot to enlarge).

Groupon.com has quickly become one of the “darlings” of the FutureNow team.  We like their deals, we enjoy their copywriting, and now we like the design of their cart.

Let’s look at the reasons why this cart is so well designed that it doesn’t even need a security badge:

Reason #1: “I was a Late Stage buyer…” I’d already signed up with Groupon to receive coupons.  I’d already read several of their emails, and I’d clicked through to “learn more” about a particular deal.  I’d read the details, and I’d taken the call to action.  Late Stage buyers are always more primed to convert, and need less reassurance about your security or credibility.  Invert that statement and it reads “Early and Middle Stage buyers are less primed to convert, and need more reassurance about your credibility and security.”

Reason #2: Clean form design. The page I screencaptured has some really nice elements of form design, including large, legible fonts, field labels above the fields, clean and roomy layout, and a high-contrast call to action button.

Reason #3: Capture of Security Code. The form asks for my credit card security code, also called as the “CCV” number.  Whether it actually improves security or not, I always feel more comfortable when an eCommerce site captures this piece of data.  It probably helps them avoid fraud, too!  Does your cart capture this?  Hint: it should.

Reason #4: Fantastic Point of Action Assurances. All the FAQs in the right column are a tad wordy, but they absolutely reflect the “voice” of the overall Groupon experience, and they do a great job of avoiding “legalese.”  Check out the questions they address: What happens next? What about gifting?  Change/cancel?  Is this safe? Each question is answered clearly and confidently, and that builds my confidence.

Reason #5: Custom guarantee. Readers of my posts already know that I’m not a fan of “copycat credibility,” so you know I’m loving the “Groupon Promise” custom graphic and text.

The two key points here are:

1) Good design increases the persuasiveness of your website. Bad design does the opposite.

2) You don’t necessarily have to “pay out” for credibility. And if you pay for a badge of some sort, it’s not a guarantee that your conversion rate will go up.  As long as you overcome the challenge that sits between your prospect and a conversion, it doesn’t matter what approach you take.

I am disappointed to report that our online shopping experience at Target.com was, for the most part, a very frustrating experience. We already had in mind some of the things that we would like to purchase for our new apartment, but even being able to find these items from the home page proved to be a difficult task.  Essentially, we were late stage buyers ready to hand over our free dollars to Target provided that they could meet the product requirements that we were looking for.

For example, we knew we would like a bookshelf.  However, after going to the ‘Furniture’ tab at the top of the screen we didn’t find any options specifically for bookshelves. So, after scanning the page, we selected the ‘Storage and Organization’ option from the left navigation hoping to get some results.  What we found was an array of options totally unrelated to what we were looking for.

So…we tried again.  We went back to ‘Furniture’ and decided to search under ‘Home Office.’  Maybe this would give us what we were looking for. Finally, under a heading titled ‘Home Office Essentials’ on the left navigation we were able to find ‘Bookcases’ in small print.  After going to this link, we were given some more options to narrow down our search.  At this point, we had a pretty good idea of what sort of bookshelf we wanted according to size and probable color, so we went for the ‘Shop By Color’ option.

Another difficulty we experienced was navigating through the product pages.  There were limited pictures for each product, making our decision a difficult one.  At this point, it was only because of our abundance of gift cards that we trudged on through this process, as finding and selecting our particular product in mind felt more like a battle then being guided toward what we had in mind.

Possibly the most frustrating part of this online shopping experience was our experience during checkout. Target only allows four gift cards to be used at checkout.  If not all of the cost is covered by the gift cards, they obviously require an additional form of payment.  The most concerning aspect in this process for us was that at no time during the checkout process were we told what was covered by our gift cards and what was being charged to our card. This lead us to complete check out and void the same transaction three times before we felt satisfied that Target was not charging our credit card the full amount of the purchase!  Their web analysts must be confused by that data!

This is just another example of a website failing to speak adequately to the late stage buyer ready to buy.  Rather than being able to easily navigate through the site in order to find a product we already had in mind, we had to actually dig for the product.  Target also failed to give us confidence in the product we were buying with more product images to ensure us of the actual quality of the product, not to mention our troubling experience during the checkout process.  If our Target bookshelf wasn’t essentially free for us newlyweds, we would have been tempted to avoid online shopping with Target altogether in exchange for a less time-consuming and more enjoyable experience with another company.

Now, the point of all this isn’t to beat up on Target or their Web Team; their struggle is our struggle: how to provide intuitive navigation and browsing pathways through a large catalog site and make converting easy and fun!

Editor’s Note: Whitney isn’t new to the FutureNow team, but she’s new to the blog with her inaugural (inblogural?) post.  Welcome, Whitney!

Let me use an example. There is a climbing gym in Salt Lake City called “Momentum.”  [Note: This company is not a FutureNow client].  Let’s pretend that we know their traffic source mix:

• 15% of their traffic is Direct
• 68% of their traffic is Search
  • 38% of Search is Paid Search
  • 30% of Search is Non-Paid Search
• 17% of their traffic is Email

At this point, we should break down each of these traffic sources into segments based on different channels or campaigns.  Let’s come up with a scenario for their Paid Search traffic (CPC).  Let’s say that we’re able to break down their campaigns into three different buckets:

1) Some of the paid terms sending traffic to their site are brand specific; for example “Momentum” and “Momentum climbing gym.”
2) Some CPC terms are non-branded, but are specific to the qualities that Momentum has to offer, or location; e.g. “Salt Lake City climbing gym.”
3) Finally, some of the CPC terms are very general; e.g. “climbing gym.”

From this list, we can tell what group is more likely in the “late stage” of their buying process.  By visitors searching for brand-specific terms, they are showing us that they have a specific interest in the company, their products, and their services, and therefore this traffic should be the easiest to convert.  This is where we should first focus our attention when trying to improve our web site’s performance.  Where is the first place we should look to increase results for the late stage traffic?  The shopping cart and checkout, of course!  Start optimizing your shopping cart today by tackling these 5 questions visitors have while they are in your shopping cart.  Or, use these 10 tips to improve your shopping cart performance for your late stage visitors.

The analysis you do before starting your conversion rate optimization efforts needs to be nearly equal parts Art and Science.  Don’t rely on industry benchmarks or the metrics from other case studies; your analytics data should drive the planning, prioritization, and implementation of changes to your site.

Figure 1

The Holiday (online) gift shopping saga continues!  First, I was buying water bottles, and now I’m shopping for a gift card to send to some relatives.

Instead of taking you through the somewhat exhausting 11-step purchase process I went through for the sake of “convenience,” this post will just call out a few of the interesting high points and low points (with suggested optimizations) on the emotional roller coaster that is online shopping.  While the theme is a holiday gift card buying experience, you’ll see that the challenges are applicable to many shopping carts year-round.

First, arriving at the site’s homepage, I wasn’t very impressed with the placement of their gift card banner (see Figure 1).  On December 15th, you’d think they could give the gift card option a much more prominent presence on the homepage. File this one under “lost opportunities.”  The fix: Put it above the fold in the active window.

Clicking the gift card banner brought me to a much better page.  The top of the results was stacked with colorful Holiday-themed gift cards, and I was reminded about the selling proposition of “never expires” and “always the perfect gift.”  The scent is getting better, and I click the gift card with the most appealing design.

Figure 2

On the details page for my potential gift card, it’s a mixed bag (see Figure 2).  On the plus side, the copy is decent.  On the minus side, the 3 competing calls to action are somewhat odd in color, and it’s not clear which is the “primary” call to action.  Also, after I added the card to my shopping cart, the “added to cart” message was WAY too subtle. That message needs to be super obvious, and drive people to either checkout or keep shopping.

On the “view your cart” checkout page, it was all bad news (see Figure 3): a free shipping promotional message displayed in red text makes me think there has been some sort of error.  The fix: NEVER use red text in the shopping cart if it’s not an error message, even if red is part of your brand’s color palette.

Figure 3

After clicking to move forward in the process, I get the standard login screen, which is kind of a pain, but overall I’m giving it the thumbs up because they placed “guest” checkout first on the left, then login second on the right (see Figure 4).  Readers, have you tested the order of these elements on your login pages?  Have you tested removing these pages altogether, and allowing a “passive” login and passive registration during or after checkout? Something to think about for 2010, yes?

After continuing as a guest, the billing and shipping information page was simple, clean, and usable.  Good job, website!

Figure 4

The next page covered shipping method, gift messaging, and gift packaging, and it was another page that had some good and some bad.  The good was that you could preview the gift packaging in a popup window (see Figure 5).  The bad was that the gift message was restricted to 200 characters, but it didn’t tell me how many characters I’d typed so far. This gave me the lovely error message you can see in Figure 6.  Note that the error message is the same color as the promotional free shipping offer!  This type of error condition is avoidable, and if you can avoid an error condition in checkout…DO IT! The fix: add an inline validation script that tells you how many characters you’ve typed in real time.

Figure 5

Figure 6

The next step was payment, and it was a relatively painless screen, but it could’ve been optimized with a 3rd party security badge.

The final step (phew) was the review and confirm screen, and this screen had a huge usability issue.  I call out usability issues especially when the software makes the user responsible for something that it (the code) could take care of behind the scenes.  Again, if you can avoid an error condition in checkout by writing better code, DO IT. See figure 7 where the website tells me to only click the “submit” button once.  If I accidentally click twice, I just bought two items instead of one!  Guess what, BB&B?  It’s 2009, and you can disable the submit button after 1 click while delivering a “processing” message and thanking me for my patience.  DO IT. (Note: If you happen to have an account at Bank of America, you can watch the behavior of their final sign-in button.)

Figure 7

OK, sorry for the rant.  I’ll end on a high note by congratulating the merchant.  The confirmation page asked me if I’d now like to create an account post-purchase, and I really like that approach.  I’d like to see more of that post-purchase sign-up happening in 2010.

The lesson to take from all this is that the highlights increased my motivation to buy, and the stumbling blocks decreased my motivation to buy.  Checking out online is a cumulative process; if I accumulate enough error messages and bad experiences, I’ll leave.  While the concept of persuasion is extremely powerful in optimizing your online marketing ads, the checkout is all about usability, clarity, and a smooth customer experience. It’s hard work, no doubt, but my latest experience shows that the vast majority of sites still need to be focusing some resources in checkout.

I have a certain younger sister-in-law who is a freak for the actor who plays “Edward” in the Twilight movie saga.  I undertook the mission to buy the “Edward” water bottle that was sold through Burger King when the movie first came out.  So, I went to my local Burger King, walked up to the front counter, and VERY QUIETLY asked if they had any Edward water bottles left.  Go ahead and snicker now if you’d like.

I was informed that not all locations had even gotten sent water bottles, and they had none.  The kind lady behind the counter gave me a promo pack, saying, “maybe you can order it online somehow.”  Aha!  Now I’m excited!

So, let’s use my embarrassing episode and see what we can learn about how to optimize a marketing outreach from the “driving point” to the landing page, and on through to conversion.

Step 1

The place where I started was a 3″ x 5″ printed card (see Step 1).  Remember that a driving point for online marketing often starts offline, and there’s no reason offline collateral can’t be optimized.  This touch-point does a decent job establishing the theme “Team Edward” that will be continued online.  A custom URL helps as well; easy to remember even if you lose the card.

Let’s take a look at www.TeamEdwardBottle.com (see Step 2).  The landing page is decent, and reflects the

Step 2

look and feel of the movie, as well as the “Team Edward vs. Team Jacob” theme that is essential to a much larger marketing campaign.  Apparently, young women across the country are pummeling each other with water bottles and other merchandise over this divisive issue   There are a few product features repeated from the offline card, the product photos are high quality, and the calls to action are relatively clear.  Also, there is a product upsell that would come in handy for a gift-buyer shopping for two daughters on opposite sides of the battle.  My only critique on this page is that I could use some reassurance about the security of the checkout.  I get the feeling that I’m not buying from Burger King, nor Twilight, but some 3rd party, and hence I’d like to feel a bit more comfortable about the credibility of that 3rd party.

Step 3

I clicked the Team Edward call to action to initiate the transaction.  On the next page (see Step 3), I’m presented with a standard shopping cart product/pricing table, although I’m a bit surprised to see “Team Jacob” in my cart!  They added the other product into my cart with a quantity of “zero,” which was a bit off-putting.  I don’t think I’d have risked annoying my customer.  Especially with the giant upsell banner already in place.  The good news is that now I do get a 3rd party Point of Action Assurance about security which makes me feel more confident to move forward.  Also, the wording of the call to action is strong.

Moving forward, I’m expecting to head into the standard “shipping and billing” page to do the real transaction.  Unfortunately, my expectations are not met, and I’m a bit shaken.  The seller has thrown up an overlay popup (see Step 4) trying for a third or fourth time

Step 4

to upsell me into buying another bottle.  But, the whole point of the campaign is to choose sides!  Enough is enough!  This hardcore interruption in the purchase flow is very risky.

After dismissing the overlay popup, I’m on to the real checkout process (see Step 5).  The true checkout page doesn’t have anything terribly wrong with it, but it just doesn’t feel credible.  I’ve never even seen a 3-column layout in a checkout!  And something as subtle as the serif font adds to the feel that this was thrown-together in about 10 minutes.  Again, just because nothing is broken doesn’t mean that people will convert.  Every pixel, every visual cue you present, will either add to, or subtract from, the persuasive momentum the prospect has heading into checkout.

Step 5

Once I made it through the checkout page, I was on to confirm my order.  At this point, everything should be done, and all I have to do is review my entries, and click “Buy,” right?  Well, take a look at Step 6’s screenshot.  You’ll notice that something MAJOR is missing.  I don’t see a call to action, do you?  Ouch, that is a persuasive scenario about to break down, and money about to be left on the table.  A simple check should always be run on critical pages like this one:  Is the primary call to action above the fold, high-contrast, and clearly labeled? If no, fix it.  If yes, consider testing it.  The call to action was hidden below the fold, see Step 6a.

Also, since this was a gift I was buying for someone, and part of a self-proclaimed “Holiday” promotion, where was I supposed to input a greeting/gift message for the recipient?  That is a pretty basic feature these days, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t have included it.

Step 6

Step 6a

After I finally found the call to action, and transacted, the “thank you” page had no major defects or noteworthy items.  Remember that thank you pages are still a chance to interact with your customers, so don’t waste the opportunity to test different offers, messages, upsells, or ways to collect useful data.

Similarly, the email confirmation I received had no serious challenges, but also could be considered a lost opportunity because it didn’t invite me to take further action.  Considering I just bought a movie-themed water bottle, there are dozens of different messages they could test presenting to me to see which ones resonated.  Think about fan clubs, movie sites, a Facebook fan page, a Twitter stream, a blog, etc.  The customer’s inbox is hallowed ground, so don’t be dismissive of the opportunity to reengage the purchaser and ask them to continue to interact with your site and your marketing efforts.

All in all, I give the persuasion funnel a “B-” grade.  The usability of the checkout was OK, but that is expected.  A few tests could confirm how risky those aggressive upsell interruptions were, and the one major flaw on the purchase page could be fixed in 30 minutes or less, but how much money has it lost already?

I think the temptation with marketing campaigns that end in transactions is to not take them seriously enough because they are viewed as “short-term” projects. But, a very inexpensive usability test or audit by a pro could have found that one major “below the fold” issue and prevented lost sales.  Optimization doesn’t have to be a major project conducted on a major redesign of a major site.  It can and should be done on marketing outreach programs no matter how short-lived they’ll be.  If you’re investing marketing dollars on it, you owe it to yourself to optimize for better marketing ROI.

1. It’s often where “low-hanging fruit” grows. Conversion obstacles can often be removed quickly, leading to large gains in a short period of time.
2. It’s an area where you’ve already succeeded in persuading the prospect. They are in the Late Stage of their buying process, so a relatively low investment can give you a relatively high return.  In other words, you don’t have to produce pages and pages of persuasive content to move the visitor forward in her buying process.
3. Customer expectations regarding their online shopping experiences are rising every day. If your competitor has a more optimized checkout, they may be taking market share from you.

There’s a very wide spectrum of online selling solutions, from a PayPal button on a single sales page to a highly-customized checkout with a floating/sliding/shining interface and behaviorally-targeted cross-selling.  Still, FutureNow’s clients tend to fall into 1 of 2 camps:  those with a 3rd-party cart and those with a custom-built cart.

There are pros and cons to each, which I’ll touch on briefly, but please don’t consider this brief post the authoritative work on the subject–there’s lots of research and reviews out there on the various shopping cart investment options.

3rd Party Shopping Carts, also known as “canned”: Some of the pros are lower cost, quicker time to market, and the efficiencies/convenience gained when you buy a package that handles payment gateway, fraud protection, SSL encryption, etc.  Some of the cons are lack of control over look and feel, lack of control over the user experience, and more difficulties encountered with testing and optimization.  The tradeoffs seem pretty straightforward, but a lot depends on the IT resources you have at your disposal.

Custom Shopping Carts: Some of the pros are a user experience that’s more tightly integrated with the rest of your site, better tracking for better analytics, easier to make changes and add features, and easier integration with testing tools like Google Website Optimizer.  The obvious cons are higher cost, more operational overhead, and slower time to market.  Again, the tradeoffs are the same, and a lot depends on your company’s resources, budget, and business goals.

Those prospects we speak with who are interested in optimizing for a higher return on their eCommerce investments often ask questions like: Can I optimize my 3rd party shopping cart? The answer is a definitive “Yes!” even on the most restrictive 3rd party carts. One of our clients enjoyed a 38% increase month-over-month in their “funnel conversion rate” just by adding some reassuring copy and links only in the areas of their cart they had access to: the header and the footer!

That’s an extreme example, but with our guidance, clients can make the best of their current platform, whatever it happens to be.  And many clients, after getting a few “wins,” decide they want to upgrade from a 3rd party cart to a partially or fully custom cart.  In that situation, we often work to optimize their checkout before it goes live, saving them time and money, and then continue to refine the customer experience and persuasiveness of the live cart through more formal testing. We also work with several implementation partners who grok Persuasion Architecture and can build custom carts based on OnTarget recommendations.

The point of all of this is that you shouldn’t defer or avoid Optimization based on what type of checkout platform you have.  Persuasion Architecture is “platform-agnostic,” and the best time for Optimization is always “Now.”

The ones who make it through will be those who are passionate about the customer experience, AND who are able to prioritize their work between now and the “Holiday Crunch” so that the hours expended actually impact the number of sales they make.

Where do you start if you want your site to be a stellar performer this Holiday Season?  A great place for most to start is on Shopping Cart Abandonment.  That’s low in your sales funnel, where you’re losing customers who were already acquired via marketing and persuaded to buy from you!

Let’s examine a prioritized list of reasons shoppers listed that caused them to abandon shopping carts.  Then, we’ll offer actionable suggestions corresponding to each concern.  The data comes from the 8th Annual Merchant Survey, conducted by PayPal and comScore in April of this year.

#1 High shipping charges

We’re all aware of this challenge, and it’s somewhat out of your hands, but there are things you can do.  One is to thing is to test different shipping offers in the cart.  Another, if you have a certain order value that qualifies for free shipping, is to display how much more the customer needs to qualify.  For example, “You are $xx.xx away from free shipping!  Continue shopping »”

#2 Wanted to comparison shop

Make sure you’re saving customer carts for at least 30 days, maybe more for the Holidays.  A recent study sponsored by McAfee showed that the average time span between visiting a site and checking out was 34 hours! Acknowledge that this behavior is occurring and plan for it.  If you’re sending “cart recovery” emails inside of 24 hours, you may be really annoying your prospective customers!

#3 Leaving to Google a coupon code

If you have a coupon code capture field on your “View Shopping Cart” page, you may consider moving that capture later in the checkout process, when prospects are more ‘invested’ in the process and less likely to bail and go “coupon Googling.”  Some of our clients offer coupons right on their site as a way to combat this behavior, and it works.

#4 Couldn’t find preferred payment option

Most eStore owners offer a proper assortment of payment options, BUT are your customers seeing them at the point of concern?  We call these Point of Action Assurances.  When the prospect is in your cart, and wondering about their payment options, are you reassuring them at the point of action that you offer BillMeLater, PayPal, etc.?  Test different placements of those assurances.

#5 Item unavailable at checkout

Yikes!  This issue simply needs to be dealt with on your product pages, before the cart.  If an item is out of stock, why not capture an email so you can notify when the item is back in stock?  Zappos.com does a good job of this when a certain size of shoe is out of stock.

#6 Couldn’t find customer support

Similar to #4, most online stores do offer good customer service options, but sometimes your prospects aren’t seeing them at the appropriate point in the cart.  Test those placements.  Also, if you use live chat support, and the chat service is “offline,” what is the customer experience like?

#7 Security concerns

Similar to #1, this is somewhat out of your hands…the Web isn’t 100% safe for shoppers, and they know it.  But, Point of Action Assurances, 3rd party security seals, and credibility of design are key.  Another great opportunity for testing different placements and different seals in the checkout.

Blogger’s Note: Apologies for excluding other winter holidays in the title of this post; I was just going for alliteration

As I relate the following three eCommerce mishaps, be thinking about whether you can eradicate all of them from your business by the time the “Holiday Rush” hits. ALL are preventable, if you start today and take one item at a time.

Let’s start at the “precipitating event;” the spark that lit my desire to shop online…

1. An email with a promo code arrived.  w00t!  They paid attention to past purchases, and sent me a great promotion: 10% off a brand I’ve purchased before, and free shipping if the order exceeds a certain amount.

How They’re Losing Sales: Despite not mentioning an expiration date for the promo code, it was expired by the time I reached checkout.  I’m notoriously slow for opening emails from online retailers, but I bet I’m not alone.  Creating a sense of urgency with an expiration date is fine, but remember that shoppers sometimes go weeks without going through their personal email accounts to read your promo codes.

And now it’s Customer Service’s turn…

2. When the promo code came up as expired, I was understandably disappointed.  I’d just spent a fair amount of my weekend building up enough value in my shopping cart to qualify for the free shipping (Yes, I’m cheap.)  My credit card was out of my wallet.  So, I clicked the live chat in the cart to see if they’d extend the promo code, or give me an equivalent one.

How They’re Losing Sales: The live chat agent, while polite and earnest, was not able to do anything to help me (be a cheapskate).  They weren’t empowered by their employer to get creative and save me from abandoning my cart.  They suggested I call the “real” Customer Service during regular M-F business hours.  So my guess is that the live chat is being outsourced, which is fine, but if they aren’t empowered to save sales, they’re probably not giving good ROI.

Now stepping up to the plate, Technology…

3. I came back the next day with the intention of calling the retailer and trying to get them to extend the promo code or give me the equivalent deal.  So, I returned to the site and clicked “My Cart” to review what I’d put in there, and have it on-screen when I called.

How They’re Losing Sales: They didn’t save my cart! So many sites are saving cart items via cookie that I assumed my items would be there the following day or week.  So now I’m definitely not going to re-build my cart AND call them to try and negotiate the promo code.  I’m going to just repress the whole memory…maybe I’ll even forget the retailer’s brand in the process!

These 3 blunders may seem unconnected from a business perspective, but from a buyer perspective, they were all part of a persuasion scenario that broke down and turned a VERY motivated shopper into a lost sale.

I do like the site, and hope they can address these issues and stay in business.  But they and others will have a very painful holiday sales season if they don’t treat the disparate parts as a unified buying experience that must be nearly flawless to be profitable.

Why were shoppers abandoning their carts?

46% of online shoppers said high shipping charges were a “very important reason” for emptying carts. Is free shipping a must in this economy? Have you tested personalized shipping offers based on location?

Other reasons for abandonment included:

• Wanted to comparison shop: 37% – Are you saving their cart for at least 30 days, so they can return to it?
• Lack of money: 36% - Can you make them an offer they can’t refuse?
• Wanted to look for a coupon: 27% – Are you prompting them to look for coupons? It could be costing you a huge percentage of sales.
• Wanted to shop offline: 26% - Are you offering them options to pick up items in store?
• Couldn’t find preferred pay option: 24% - Find a way to GTC. Get The Cash!!!
• Item unavailable at checkout: 23% – Ooooops! This has to be dealt with on the product page or it will erode your brand trust.
• Couldn’t find customer support: 22% – This could be dealt with by using POA – point of action assurances (see the video below).
• Security concerns: 21% – This is also handled with point of action assurances and establishing more trust in your website.

Do you think you may need a cart whisperer? How many of these have you tried to deal with recently? Are you testing and optimizing you shopping cart? If not, why?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are 5 key, unanswered questions (beyond shipping costs) of the shopping cart:

1. Do you offer alternate forms of payment (aside from credit card)?
2. Are you safe and secure?
3. Why are you asking for this information?
4. Do I have to set up an account to buy?
5. Do I get to review my order before we transact?

I recently bought a Father’s Day present online from a gift retailer, and their overall shopping cart process was “OK.”  I would give it a “B-” grade; it was good enough to get me through the purchase without bailing, but not nearly good enough to earn brand loyalty.  But, they did a good job of clearly answering the 5 Questions, and it was enough to help them “Get The Cash.”

I captured some elements of their billing page so you could see how their design answers the 5 unanswered customer questions.  When you click on the screenshots, can you pick which design element answers which question?

Are you adequately answering the 5 unanswered questions? Whether your confidence level is low, high, or somewhere in between, we know you could run some interesting tests to validate your assumptions about how well you’re doing, and you might increase your funnel conversion rate in the process!  Want help?  Let us know.

One suggestion is to make sure your toll-free or 800 number is clearly visible at the top of all pages and even more visible during the checkout process. However, many businesses balk at this because they are concerned with the increased cost associated with taking full orders over the phone. By the time, customers tell you what they want, ask their questions, your representatives take all of their shipping and billing information you have eaten away at several minutes worth of your call-center resources.

However, PetFoodDirect makes it a bit easier. It let’s customers fill out their order online without giving the website credit card information and then offers the option to have their customer service reps call the customer to finalize the order and collect just the credit card information. That is efficient and only takes a couple of minutes of call time!

What else have you tried in order to get more customers to complete their purchases?

This feature has become ubiquitous, probably due in part to the “Let’s Copy Amazon.com Syndrome.” I encounter it on nearly every “first date” I go on with a website.

I agree with the concept of saving items pre-purchase.  It’s a great micro-conversion to start measuring and optimizing.  It’s a natural step for Early Stage or Middle Stage buyers.  And for more complex or high-dollar purchases, it’s a way to store an item until consensus can be built.

But every time I try to use one, I disagree with the execution of it, the positioning of it, and the requirements put in front of it as a barrier.  It all adds up to a lousy customer experience and lack of adoption for a feature you’re paying for.  I think our poor implementations of Wish Lists Internet-wide are actually training shoppers to mis-use the Shopping Cart feature!

A scenario:

1. An Early Stage buyer comes to a website to do some researching and maybe a bit of comparison shopping.
2. On a favorite product detail page, she has several options (usually bookmark the page, email to someone, add to cart, add to wish list, etc.)
3. She isn’t yet persuaded to make the purchase, but is well on the way.  She clicks “Add to Wish List,” which is highlighted as a secondary call to action.
4. She’s asked to register an account (we all know what a painful interrogation that can be) or leave the shopping process to at least enter a little personal information.
5. She balks at this request and backs out of the Wish List
6. She knows that the Shopping Cart will save the item just as well, and because you can remove items from the cart before you checkout, can also be used as a storage or comparison function.
7. She adds the item to the Shopping Cart.

Not the end of the world, right?

But here’s a few things to think about from an analytics standpoint:

• If you’re measuring “Add to Cart” as a micro-conversion, or as the success in a test scenario, you’ve increased your count by 1, but that increment is invalid traffic.
• If you’re measuring views to the Add to Cart page as some sort of KPI, you’re measuring someone who’s mis-using the feature.
• If you’re measuring “Cart to Conversion” as some sort of goal or funnel report, it’s skewing your conversion rate down because some people in that funnel weren’t persuaded in the first place.

Now, let’s go to the retail world to see how this should really work. A store visitor walks into a clothing store, browses around, checks some prices, maybe holds a few things up in front of a mirror.  We are nowhere near “conversion” at this point.  Eventually, the visitor picks out a few things and asks their significant other to “hold this.”  Or, seeing that the visitor is starting to amass some items of interest, a helpful store clerk volunteers to put the items in a dressing room or hold items at the register so the visitor doesn’t have to lug them around the store.

The store clerk doesn’t ask for email address (twice!), password (6 to 10 characters, at least one alpha and one numeric, and no special characters!), First Name, Last Name, Daytime Phone, etc.  NO!  They simply lighten the visitor’s load and hold the items.  No strings attached.

Back to your website.  A visitor clicks “Add to Wish List.”  She’s notified that the item has been saved, and how to access it.  She’s also told the item is saved during this visit only, and to save it for longer, she’ll need to register an account.  Done.  You’ve just “lightened her cognitive load” in a simple, helpful way.  And you’ve started to sell the value of registering with your site!

As they say on the TV show, We have the technology.

If you can leverage your technology to make a feature that’s easy to use, and that adds value to your visitor’s shopping experience, then by all means use a Wish List

If your Wish List isn’t attractive to an Early Stage or Middle Stage buyer, if it requires full registration, or if it doesn’t test out as a value-add to your bottom line, it’s clutter!  It’s distraction!  Remove it!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Get Elastic’s recent post on reducing friction kicks butt – providing incredibly clear explanations of too-common Website flaws along with great examples of how to do it right.  I wish I wrote it.  Not only did the article reduced me to green-faced envy, but many of the post’s links pointed to further “must reads.”

Do yourself a favor and go read it now.

While this type of increase is common with our clients, the interesting part of the story comes from a different metric.  During the duration of the test, the client’s Average Order Value dropped 28.05%.  A frightening metric, but no surprise given all the reports we’ve been seeing about lower budgets for online Holiday shopping.

The silver lining, directly attributed to the client’s optimization efforts, was that their increase in funnel conversion rate more than offset the drop in their Average Order Value.  So despite people spending less, the website is getting more people to successfully checkout and spend.  And this was just their first test!

The moral: Optimization is a highly effective way to make the best of the bad economic situation we’re in.  You can’t control how much less people are going to spend for the Holidays this year, but you can control improving your site to be more efficient–to squeeze more out of your opportunities.