Since many small businesses (especially in today’s economy) don’t want to spend a fortune on testing and research, I was pleased to see Marketing Sherpa‚Äôs brilliant new article called “Case Study: Increase Conversions with Simple Site Redesign: 7 Steps‚” (you can read this article and see creative examples for free until April 15th). The article provides some great advice to companies looking to test redesigns on the cheap.

The key to testing on the cheap is knowing what the problems with the current page are — usually identified through your web analytics — then incrementally redesigning the page and asking for input.

By pulling together a “best customer” list (I define ‚”best customers” as repeat customers or long-time customers) and asking them to provide input on your web page designs, you‚’re not only getting free advice directly from real customers — you’re engaging them and telling them that you value them as customers.

We did this in late 2008 during the Virginia Favorites web site redesign. Virginia Favorites has a best customer list they regularly promote exclusive offers to, and we sent them a link to a hidden web address for the new web site and asked them for feedback.

The e-mail we sent offered customers an exclusive sneak peak at the redesign that addressed features they had been asking for. If they completed a survey, they’d immediately receive a 10% off coupon. The SurveyMonkey survey the customers were asked to complete included specific questions about the design and an open-ended question for general comments.

We received many comments from this “focus group” and we made some tweaks to the new site based on the feedback.

The cost of the testing was minimal, and the conversion rate of the new site is over double the conversion rate of the old site (and higher than the industry average conversion rate).

Inexpensive testing works, and is a great solution for companies that don’t want to dedicate thousands of dollars to formal lab testing or focus groups.

I’m digesting this blog post today from Bazaarblog about how Office Depot increased clickthrough, conversion and sales from their Google ads simply by putting information based on customer reviews in their ads. What a great idea! Office Depot recently started a creative test to see how searchers would respond to messaging from product reviews on their site. The result was a 78% increase in clickthrough rate, 23% increase in conversion and almost 200% increase in revenue from their Google ads.

Here’s a sample of one of their ads (from the Bazaarvoice case study):

Office Depot Google ad

This would be an interesting test for online retailers that test copy in Google ads. You can bet we’ll be testing it!

I’m loving this blog post at the Get Elastic blog that comments on a You Tube case study where the guru in the video suggests that one buy button design always works the best. Folks, please don’t be tricked into thinking that there is one button style that works on all web sites. It simply isn’t true.

Read the commentary in the Get Elastic blog post and I think you’ll agree. My personal experience from testing hundreds of sites proves that there’s not one “magic” buy button, page layout, or product display. All businesses and sites are different (thus keeping me employed and working on new projects).

The video, though, does bring one point to light, and the point is that you can’t improve your results if you don’t test. Spilt testing can reveal better design that helps you sell your products more effectively.

Thanks to the Marketing Experiments blog for posting some recent research on optimizing client testimonials. We all know that client testimonials (or customer testimonials, customer ratings) are relevant and have credibility with web site visitors, but is your site using customer testimonials effectively?

You can read their findings here or if you didn’t see their webinar on July 9, you can watch it here.

I’ve had quite a few clients and prospective clients call and ask, “What is a good conversion rate?”¬ù and “What is a good shopping cart abandonment rate?”¬ù

While the Fireclick Index can give you the average conversion rate and shopping cart abandonment rate for your general industry, many web sites have intricacies that make them different from the “average”¬ù site. Additionally, many smaller web sites process e-commerce transactions through “canned”¬ù e-commerce systems (like Miva Merchant, Yahoo Merchant Services, osCommerce and others) and either can’t or don’t customize the checkout process.

My answer to the question of a “good”¬ù cart abandonment rate or conversion rate is to re-frame the question. Rather than asking what a conversion rate or cart abandonment rate should be, the question you should ask is “What can I do to my web site to improve the conversion rate and cart abandonment rate?”

I tell clients to use the Fireclick Index to get a general rule of what their e-commerce conversion rate should be, then compare it to their actual conversion rate. Is it close to “average,”¬ù or is it not in line with the average for your industry?

Once you answer that question, the real question is how you improve your conversion rate. We answer the question of how a site can improve by performing a web site assessment, which is an exhaustive analysis using qualitative and quantitative data, including testing a site with real customers. This helps uncover issues with web sites that make them easier to use, improving conversion rates.

So rather than asking “What should my conversion rate be?”¬ù or “What should my shopping cart abandonment rate be?”¬ù ask instead what you can do to improve it.

Normally, abandoned shopping carts make e-commerce retailers frown. Not in this case, however. Check out this video on You Tube and you’ll have a whole new view of the abandoned shopping cart (and a good laugh).

Whether you buy into it or not, there’s a lot of recession talk in the news today. Marketers and business owners consider curbing spending during a recession, which means that there’s often less to spend on online marketing.

There’s an easy way to improve your online sales to compensate for the lack of marketing spending. Recession proof your online marketing by focusing on your web site’s conversion rate. Whether your web site generates leads or sells goods/services, every web site could benefit from improving conversion rates.

It could be your web site’s usability or just your e-commerce checkout flow, but I’d be hard-pressed to name a site that can’t squeeze an additional 10% of revenue from the site by optimizing it.

Also, search engine optimization is a good way to improve your web site’s long term position in search engines, giving you free traffic over time.

There’s been a lot of convincing research released in the past few months around customer ratings and reviews. Clearly, web site customers find ratings and reviews useful and not only rely on them to make purchase decisions — they also participate and share their own experiences. Here are a number number of recent articles and blog posts that discuss customer ratings and reviews:

Forester: User Ratings Top Consumers’ Online Wish Lists

User reviews and ratings were the most-asked-for web site content and functionality, beating even coupons/special offers and price comparison tools.

Deloitte: Companies Must Learn to Compete in a More Transparent Age

User ratings and reviews are having a “considerable impact on purchase decisions.” Sixty-two percent of shoppers read customer-generated product reviews when shopping, and nearly 80% say the reviews have a direct impact on their purchases.

MarketingCharts.com: User Reviews a Must for Retail Websites

98% of surveyed shoppers read the reviews on e-commerce websites prior to purchasing. Many shoppers spend over 10 minutes reading reviews before making a purchase decision.

PowerReviews: New Study Analyzes the Positive Effect of Online Reviews on E-Commerce

Internet merchants say that customer ratings and reviews:

• enhance the customer experience
• ease the burden on customer service by answering many basic product questions
• improve trust and loyalty because of their unbiased nature
• are mostly positive
• are best utilized on the product page

eMarketer: Customer Reviews Increase Web Sales

Customer ratings and reviews increase site traffic, conversion rate and average order size. They also improve customer loyalty/retention and improve search engine optimization.

As you can see, adding customer reviews and ratings to your e-commerce site is not just a helpful tool for customers to interact with your site — they lead to purchase decisions.

You probably read this headline and scratched your head. No, the flu bug that I’m still getting over isn’t speaking to me — your customers really can help design your site. But don’t send them an email asking them to buy Photoshop just yet… Even though your customers know nothing about effective web design, there are two ways they can help you design your site.

The first is covered in GrokDotCom’s recent blog post about A/B testing. The premise is that your designer can post two versions of a page or page template, measure results and keep the page that works the best. This way, you enable your customers to indirectly tell you what they like best. Continually testing new designs doesn’t have to be time consuming or costly — it can be as easy as changing the placement, size or color of a button, or just pulling important copy out of a paragraph and making it a headline.

Second, you can conduct a usability test of your site with customers. This can be done in a lab (which can be a very expensive option), or you can test your site with remote users. There are some new options in the remote testing arena that are promising, especially for sites that have never been tested before (and nearly 77% of online retailers don’t test their sites). Remote testing, while less costly, will identify “low-hanging fruit” that you can easily fix.

No matter which you choose, you can let your customers design your site through their feedback and through the use of both quantitative and qualitative data.

Many retail ecommerce web sites ended 2007 with a bang according to Nielsen Online and MegaView Retail. Of sites that had a minimum of 500K unique visitors during the month of December, here are the top 10 sites with the best conversion rates:

The Popcorn Factory: 29.5%
L.L. Bean: 23.6%
Abebooks: 20.6%
Hollister: 17.6%
Amazon: 17.6%
Lands End: 17.2%
Coldwater Creek: 17.1%
QVC: 17.1%
Cabela’s: 16.8%
Gymboree: 16%

See the chart for yourself at MarketingCharts.com.

Until now, the de rigueur of ecommerce web design says that add-to-cart buttons belong on the right column of the screen. Crutchfield.com is breaking that convention, though, by placing the add-to-cart button on the left column. Rather than showing a screen here, you can see one on Grokdotcom’s blog post or at Crutchfield.com.

Having worked at Crutchfield for a short time a few years ago, I know that there are some brilliant minds there, and that they used to test a lot of different screen designs. I wonder if this is a test or if they have seen some data that indicates that a left-side add-to-cart button works.

In any case, I can’t believe that an add to cart button on the right side is actually more effective.

It’s interesting to me that even sites that should be effective at e-commerce instead succeed at frustrating customers.

Case in point: I clicked over to the eTail 2008 web site last week to look at the agenda to see if I might want to attend. After browsing the site, I saw an advertisement selling the eTail 2007 conference audio presentations.

Interesting, I thought. I can listen to this past year’s conference in the comfort of my home or office. The advertisement led me to this page.

The page asked for my credit card information but made absolutely no mention of a) how much it costs, or b) what I get for my money. Also, the page said to “Complete this form to register for the webcast.” My expectation was that I would receive audio, which usually comes in the form of downloadable MP3s, not a webcast. There was also no mention of if my purchase would allow me to download the presentations to my iPod or if the presentations can only be accessed once online (a “webcast” is typically a streaming file viewed or heard online).

Due to the poorly conceived page, I immediately bailed to try to find that information elsewhere (unsuccessfully).

There’s a lesson in this experience. When selling something, clearly let customers know how much something costs before asking for their payment information. Additionally, you should briefly let them know what they are getting for their money. In the example above, the eTail conference folks might want to set my expectations of the price and product before asking for payment information.

Setting customers expectations before asking for their payment information is not only a best practice, but a way to reduce customer complaints when they don’t get what they expected.

If your company uses its web site as a marketing tool or sales tool, you can’t afford not to test new things. One powerful technique to help your company make huge site improvements with a relatively small effort is the incremental redesign.

Incremental redesign doesn’t involve a total overhaul of your web site — rather, just a single page or page template. It can involve your homepage, a landing page for a paid search campaign, your e-commerce product page or even your e-mail marketing campaign.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say your company runs an e-commerce web site, and you think you could improve your conversion rate. Use Excel to create a simple spreadsheet and log some “control” information — the date range and conversion rate. Pick one page — in this case, a product page. The objective for this page is to convince the customer to add the product to their shopping cart, so you hypothesize that the add to cart button isn’t large and colorful enough. Make a simple change to your product page template by making the add to cart button larger and more colorful. Next, log the test date range in your spreadsheet, what change you made to the template, and the conversion rate for the date range. Having this spreadsheet allows you to compare the before and after, and make a decision as to whether you’ll keep the new add to cart button. Keep this spreadsheet up-to-date over time and it will also serve as a log of what you’ve done in the past and what results you measured from those changes.

Of course, it may take many tests before you find the right page design, but this low-cost technique can be used on almost any page of your web site or even on a landing page.

It works. Last year, an online retailer hired me to improve their conversion rate. After looking at their site, I deduced that the single biggest barrier to conversion was their product page template. A large product image took up the entire width of the page, the pricing/value proposition wasn’t clear and users had to scroll before seeing any product information. With the old page template in place, the site conversion rate was 0.91%. After the product page was redesigned, site conversion increased to 2.76%, all because we changed a single page on their site!

Often, significant improvements can be made without redesigning your entire web site. I encourage small businesses to try the cost-effective technique of incremental redesigns to improve the effectiveness of their web sites.

It’s a fact that even the “big boys” of internet retail leave money on the table, and GrokDotCom does a good job pointing out real examples of how large retailers could improve their conversion rate. My favorite is their latest screencast that shows how one of Petco’s Google Adwords ads clicks to a page that shows no products.

No matter the size of your ecommerce site, you should check out GrokDotCom’s conversion rate screencasts and see examples of how ecommerce sites fail at converting visitors to paying customers. By viewing these, you may get ideas for improving your own site.

Copyblogger has a post today on 5 Tips for Knockout Testimonials. Whether you’re business specializes in professional services or in ecommerce — or any other business in fact — you can benefit from testimonials on your web site.

Web sites are, by nature, impersonal. There’s no one to greet your web site visitor when they arrive at your web site, and your site visitors also come with concerns about whether they’ll be getting what you claim on your site. Testimonials ally those concerns since testimonials tend to be specific, objective and relevant.

In addition to Copyblogger’s 5 tips, here are a few more tips to get effective testimonials from your clients/customers.

• Don’t be afraid to ask for a testimonial. Many business owners aren’t completely comfortable asking for testimonials. Perhaps it’s because they don’t think they need testimonials or they are afraid that the customer will say “no.” In my experience, most clients/customers will gladly share a testimonial.
• Know how to ask for a testimonial. Asking a customer face-to-face is best, but over the phone is good as well. If you ask by e-mail, you’ll want to include some guidelines (see the next bullet point) so the customer knows how to structure the testimonial.
• Know what information to ask for. Be sure to ask the customer to specifically describe what work you performed for them. If relevant to your business, ask them to comment on your adherence to schedule and budget. Ask them to comment on the intangibles of how you did the job and finally, ask them to share results. Some customers/clients might be reluctant to share specific results, but ask them to be as specific as possible.

When people buy something or acquire a service, they are seeking a solution to a problem. If your testimonials can describe the problems your customers had and solutions your company provided, you’re well on the way to convincing prospective customers to work with you.

Amber writes in with the following question:

“I was just wondering whether you could provide me with just some brief stats on expected response rates/conversions from a campaign directing them to a specific landing page as opposed to a homepage/product page on a website?”

My answer follows:

It would be tough to generalize that landing pages would improve your conversion rate because landing page design, which is a discipline all it’s own, affects conversion rate immensely.

One factor to consider is where the landing page receives traffic from. You’d have different content for Google Adwords landing pages than you might for other ads you might run (say for instance, landing pages for e-mail marketing campaigns). I would also recommend having different landing pages for each of your Google Adwords campaigns.

The key to improving your conversion rate is to give the person browsing your website information that is extremely relevant to the information they were seeking before visiting your site. Combine that with sound graphic design principles and your landing pages will certainly convert customers better than a homepage would.

One last note — sending search engine traffic to a product page can be an excellent tactic when their search specifically describes the product that you’re selling. In this case, the product page should act as a landing page.

Thanks for the question, Amber.

Whether you’re talking about a landing page or a website, the first consideration when optimizing a website is to take it one page at a time.

When you examine a single page of your website, you can carefully evaluate search engine optimization factors like titles, content and meta tags. You can scrutinize your content to ensure that it addresses all of your customers’ questions. You can inspect the design and evaluate whether the page has the optimal eye path.

Most importantly, a critical factor in optimizing your website is to have a single goal for each individual web page or landing page. Just one — no more. Many marketers and designers make the mistake of trying to do too much on a page. A page, however, should do one thing well rather than distract users with multiple themes.

One example of maintaining a singular focus on a page is removing the site navigation in checkout. You’ll notice that on MaroonHelmet.com and 3FellersBakery.com, two clients of ours, there is no site navigation on any checkout screen. We deliberately did this to keep visitors focused on the task at hand, which in this case was buying products.

Focusing on one goal per page is an idea that has been reinforce time and time again through research. The latest research (May 2007) from Marketing Experiments found that “Focusing the landing page on the primary objective increased conversion by more than 19%.” The same study found that “by clarifying the offer and providing only one call-to-action option (button), conversion increased by 65%.”

Optimizing your website should be a page-by-page process, and all content, illustrations, photos, etc. should directly support the one goal for that page. It’s this continual analysis and improvement that will keep your website running at peak effectiveness.

There’s a good article over at the Ecommerce Times called “Minding the Gap Between Click and Conversion” discusses the concept of “post-click marketing” and offers up some ways to solve the mystery of what happens between click and conversion.

Read the article, then consider the simple recommendations below. In my experience, these recommendations, while somewhat general, will address many drop-off problems.

• Even the best web sites are somewhat impersonal. Provide your phone number prominently at every step so customers can talk to a real person.
• For lead generation sites, keep it simple. Improve conversion rate by asking leads to fill out just the basics and then follow up either personally or virtually as soon as possible.
• For ecommerce sites, make sure landing pages are extremely relevant and focused. Give the customer information about the product in clear, concise language while reassuring them that your company (and web site) is reputable. Don’t make it cumbersome to order — collect only the information you need and keep screens neatly formatted.
• Don’t distract customers from their goals. Too many testimonials, crowded pages, a lack of a call to action and trying to cross-sell unrelated products distract customers.
• Make the process shorter. The quicker the customer can achieve their goal while satisfying their need for information, the more will act.

I received this from a reader a week or so ago:

I’ve read your post on cart abandonment rate with interest.The one thing that puzzles me is that a standard cart abandonment rate calculation is nowhere to be found. Some merchants calculate the filled carts against the placed orders, while others calculate the first step of checkout against the placed orders.

Those could be quite different numbers. I think that both instances are useful, but I can’t understand if, say, a 50% cart abandonment rate, is bad or good if I don’t know how it’s calculated.

After all, filled carts which never got to the checkout process could double or triple my statistic base, compared to those who started it.

Could you specify if your numbers are calculated against filled carts or against checkout processes?

Here’s my answer:

Ecommerce conversion rate can be broken up into 3 different calculations, which is probably why there’s not one single shopping cart abandonment calculation. These three calculations are:

1. Site conversion: The most popular of the conversion rate calculations, this is the ratio of the number of total site visitors to the number of completed orders over a given period of time.

What’s a good baseline number? According to data collected from the Fireclick index today, the average ecommerce conversion rate is 1.80%. Industry conversion rates vary, though:

See more granular data at the Fireclick Index.

2. Cart conversion: The ratio of the number of visits to the shopping cart to the number of completed orders.

There’s also a metric called cart abandonment rate that is related to this calculation.

3. Checkout conversion: The ratio of the number of people visiting the first checkout page to the number of completed orders.

You can get more granular data into why customers abandon checkout by setting up a checkout funnel.

Do you need help calculating your conversion rate, setting up a conversion funnel or interpreting your web site analytics? Check out our e-commerce analysis and conversion rate services and contact us — we’d be glad to help you today.

Almost every site that sells something online could use improvement in their conversion rates. Prospective ecommerce clients frequently ask what causes poor conversion rates, thinking that a broken checkout process is the answer. Often, it goes far beyond the checkout process. When I perform a site audit, I look at three factors (and yes, one of them is the checkout process).

Look upstream

Many online retailers don’t realize that factors influencing conversion rates occur before customers visit your site. Some shoppers are price shoppers, while others are goal-oriented. Regardless, visitors most frequently find web sites as a result of some marketing activity.

Whether it’s an organic SEO campaign, a paid search campaign, an online shopping guide, buzz, noticing your web address on marketing collateral or good ‘ol fashion word-of-mouth, it’s typically marketing that brings customers to a retailer’s web site. Retailers need to understand that the message customers get from the marketing campaign influence their attitudes when they visit the retailer’s site.

Understanding this is critical, because if retailers can maintain clear, consistent messages in all marketing vehicles, then it makes the web site’s job easier.

The web site

Of course, the web site is a factor in conversion. I’m not speaking of the checkout process here, but instead the user experience starting on the homepage or landing page, and radiating throughout the other pages customers look at on the web site.

It’s critical to reinforce the marketing message on the web site to bridge the gap between marketing and the web site experience. I wrote a while back about how Verizon Wireless likely lost customers when they advertised a service but the service was not explained on the homepage of their web site. Creating synergies between marketing and the web site help to orient the customer and make them comfortable and more informed about the product or service.

Navigation and labeling on a retail site is also important. One challenge retailers that sell many products face is categorizing the products in a manner that is intuitive to their customers. Site search becomes a factor also, and building a robust search engine for a web site can not only help customers find what they are looking for — it can also upsell and expose customers to similar items they might not have otherwise considered.

High consideration products need a sufficient level of detail to make the customer comfortable with purchasing the item. Product information could include large or multiple views of products, what’s in the box, requirements to use the product and items that accessorize or make the product more enjoyable. Great sites always find a way to engage customers. In addition to describing the product, it also helps to show customers how the products are used in everyday life. Crutchfield’s “digital drive-thru” is a great example of a site feature that provides product detail on iPods but also helps the customer choose the right iPod and gear to hook it up properly. Integration with Crutchfield Advisor throughout the site gives great information on how to install and enjoy products and even shows examples of how other customers have installed and use their electronics.

Color and positioning of page elements also play a factor in conversion. After all, if a customer can’t find an add to cart button, you won’t get the sale.

Finally, messaging is important. Ally any customer apprehension by clearly showing pricing, offering a privacy and security policy, shipping rates and information, and other industry-specific considerations. Don’t forget to ask for the sale, and use strong call-to-actions.

Downstream — your checkout process

Whether retail sites have a one-step checkout process or a multi-step process is largely irrelevant. What’s critical in checkout is to keep the customer focused on making the purchase and removing distractions. Removing site navigation can aid in improving conversion rates in some instances. Clearly showing all prices and shipping costs early in the process will help customers decide if price is a major consideration. There’s an opportunity for multi-channel retailers to send customers to a store nearest them if shipping costs are perceived to be too high.

Design-wise, highlighting required fields and keeping the page design clean is important to encourage users to check out. Upselling and cross-selling in checkout is a risky proposition, so retailers should test it carefully before deciding to sell anything in checkout. Making action buttons primary and any “back” or “cancel” links recessive will provide adequate navigation while urging customers forward. Never label the button that completes an order “Continue.” Retailers should instead be more descriptive by labeling the button “complete order” or “send order.”

Retailers should also remind customers about privacy and security during checkout, and it should be more visible during the payment step.

Hopefully, reading about these factors have given you a to-do list that will help your conversion rate soar. My take is that it’s never okay to be normal when it comes to conversion rates, so periodic assessment and testing of your site will help your conversion rates improve over time.

I thought I’d share a real story about how important your web site design (specifically, your landing pages) is to your search engine marketing program’s success. Here’s the story.

A company recently approached me about a running a Google Adwords campaign for them with the goal of getting more people to their web site. After some initial keyword research, I confirmed my hunches that their target keywords bring a hefty price tag.

I told myself that I could still make it work, but after looking at their web site, I’m squarely sitting on the fence. The web site isn’t structured well at all — in fact, there are no good destination pages with relevant content on the site, and the homepage is one image (no text at all). Surely the quality score that Google will assign to the client’s destination pages will be very low. Unless we build some custom landing pages, we’ll have to live with the higher price-per-click and a low conversion rate.

When companies hire consultants to revamp their search engine marketing campaigns, they should understand that an effective search engine marketing campaign often requires more than just the campaign setup and monitoring. We consultants want to make our clients’ campaigns as effective as they possibly can be, so allowing a consultant the budget to create some targeted landing pages to place on the client’s web site is something that should be included in every campaign.

Here’s why — Persuasion/the selling process doesn’t end with the ad.

Selling and generating leads online requires that you capture the user’s attention in the ad, get them to click, and then push them to your web site where you can convince them to do business with your company. After they are sold, they will call or buy online.

If your landing page simply provides a phone number or contact form, you’ve missed the opportunity to convince that visitor to do business with your company. Worse, you’ve wasted your money on the click.

A quality landing page on your web site is critical to the success of the search engine marketing campaign. Your web site is where most of the selling should happen, and your web site should engage your potential customer with relevance and credibility. It should also make the process of becoming a customer intuitive.

Understanding this concept will make your company’s search engine marketing campaign much more effective.

This morning, Internet Retailer came out with a release that said that web site performance is more important to web shoppers than brand loyalty. Read the release here.

90% of web site shoppers will give up after three or fewer unsuccessful attempts to complete a purchase. Survey respondents went as far as to say that 75% of sites load too slowly, and half of those would consider shopping on a competitor’s site to make the purchase.

If you run a small internet retail operation, this underscores the importance of keeping your web site running as quickly as possible. Additionally, just as many customers abandon web sites because they can’t find what they are looking for and order totals are not shown early in the checkout process.

I wanted to post a follow-up to yesterday’s post regarding shopping cart abandonment rate to provide a real-life example of why shopping cart abandonment matters.

I have a new client‚Äîwe’ll call them “Client A”‚Äîthat recently asked me to improve their conversion rate. There was one problem, though. Client A didn’t have a web analytics package in place to accurately measure their conversion rate. After installing Google Analytics on Client A’s site and configuring a checkout funnel, we found that their cart abandonment rate was a whopping 87% (industry average is about 60%). This is one case where higher-than-average isn’t better.

“Client B”, a long-time client, has a much better cart abandonment rate. We’ve worked for years to improve checkout and get it running as efficiently as possible. After all, Client B doesn’t get as much traffic as Client A, so stellar conversion is a must if they want to make money. Client B’s cart abandonment rate is currently 19%, so their site is getting 80% of their users that reach the shopping cart past the cart and into checkout.

Client A only sent 1 of 10 people through their shopping cart into checkout while Client B was sending 8 of 10 people through.

Knowing this, I can now turn my attention to solving Client A’s cart abandonment problem. We’ll try different page designs and process flows until we achieve Client A’s goal of getting 4 of 10 customers through to checkout, and this will have a huge impact on revenue.

This, in my opinion, is why monitoring cart abandonment is so valuable. Not only will your site generate more revenue per visitor as your shopping cart abandonment rate decreases, but your ad spend also becomes more effective.

An article from Kevin Hillstrom called “Shopping Cart Abandonment” recently asked the question, “Is there anything wrong with a sixty percent shopping cart abandonment rate?”

Hillstrom was reacting to a blog post from the Marketing Experiments Blog that concluded that simple page changes could increase conversion rate by decreasing cart abandonment rate.

In his blog post, Hillstrom concluded that “an abandoned shopping cart is a non-issue.”

I couldn’t disagree more.

There are definitely cases where having high shopping cart abandonment is inherent. Having worked in electronics and consulting for a golf retailer that frequently sells products governed by Minimum Advertised Price guidelines, I understand that a customer must place something in the shopping cart to see the actual price of the product.

In all cases, however, you want as many customers as possible to proceed through the shopping cart and into checkout. It’s a natural part of improving your checkout process. So isn’t it at least worth testing different designs and messages to see if you can improve your conversion rate rather than just dismissing abandonment as a non-issue?

Absolutely! It’s a no-brainer. Why? Let’s assume you have a site with 10,000 visitors per month. 25% of shoppers on average place something in their shopping cart, which means that 2,500 shopping carts are created per month. If the industry average‚Äî40%‚Äî proceed to checkout, then 1,000 people per month enter checkout. Increase the success rate to 45% and 1,125 people per month enter checkout. That’s 125 more chances per month to get a sale!

You can see that even a small decrease in cart abandonment will result in thousands of dollars per year (or more) in incremental revenue. The only cost of getting this incremental revenue is the time it takes for staff to run and analyze one-page shopping cart tests. We’re not talking rocket science here‚Äî simply changing the size, placement and color of a button could be a test.

All retailers should run tests to optimize their ecommerce checkout processes. If they don’t they’re leaving lots of money on the table.

If you think AJAX is a brand of abrasive household cleaner, you’re right. It’s also a powerful web development technology that can significantly improve user interfaces. With shopping cart abandonment rates near 50% on average, wouldn’t it be nice to have a simple, one-page checkout flow to give your web customers fewer opportunities to abandon the process?

I stumbled upon a company that has created a real live one-page checkout flow using AJAX. The company is Varien, and they have produced two videos to show you how the flow works [see the video: user with existing account] [see the video: user without an existing account]. Aside from being an insightful look into how an AJAX checkout process would work, this video details the user experience of the flow. While a one-page checkout flow has improved conversion rates by 50% for TJMaxx.com and HomeGoods.com, Varien doesn’t specify actual results of this AJAX checkout flow (which you can see live at BentGear.com).

At the very least, this is a look into what the checkout process of the future may look like. If you can afford to develop a process like this and run A/B tests against your current checkout flow, it could be worth the expense and learnings.