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.