Abandonment issues? Time to review your online checkout process.

This video does an excellent job illustrating what an online checkout process would look like in real life, and it isn’t pretty:

Shopping online is easy and convenient. In fact, more people still cite “convenience” as the primary reason for shopping online more than any other reason including price or selection. So the checkout process shouldn’t gum up the flow, yet, as you see in the video, it does more often than not.

Yes, consumers want security, but not at the expense of frustration. (As an aside, there’s nothing I hate more than those text recognition widgets. I especially love it when it gives me words in Greek letters. How am I supposed to type Greek characters on my American keyboard?)

Now you know why the Shopatron team spends so much time testing and monitoring the performance of our stores and online checkout processes. We’re not just bored. We have usability scientists testing small changes to page elements to determine their effect on conversions and overall sales. Finding out if the buy button performs better in blue or red, at the top or bottom of the page, or next to the 30-day return guarantee.

Sometimes these test have no measurable effect or only bring conversions up a meager 1-2%, but sometimes the effect is dramatic.

Take our active testing of “guest checkout” as an example. Initial results showed a 25% reduction in shopping cart abandonment on the first step of checkout, with over 40% of shoppers electing to checkout as “guests.” That’s a pretty substantial jump. However, when the study was completed, we found that the overall conversion rate was not measurably increased—most shoppers just abandoned later in the process. And that returning guest users converted to sales at a lower rate than existing accounts. With those findings, we decided guest checkout does not yet make sense to launch for Shopatron clients.

Yes, every “expert” and their brother will tell you how guest checkout is key to increasing conversions, but maybe that is not the case for our clients. Or maybe we just have not found the right recipe for success. In any case, we’ll continue to test guest checkout until we can prove it makes our clients more money. And when we do launch it, we will be statistically certain of the increase.

I guess that’s the point of the video. We can know instinctively that a business process is wrong. (Do any of you think the checkout process in the video seems reasonable?) But only through precise and thorough testing methodologies can we clearly improve it. And if we don’t test, we may just make it worse.

True, we don’t want your customers (or your bottom line) to have the experience the guy in this video is having. But the ultimate goal is more sales. And shoppers will tell us what is better by voting with their hard-earned money…