The State Of E-Commerce Checkout Design 2012

I found an article on Smashing magazine the other day about the state of e-commerce checkout design in 2012.

Here’s a just a handful of the interesting stats they found when benchmarking the top 100 grossing e-commerce websites’ checkout processes:

The average checkout process consist of 5.08 steps
The shortest checkout process is one step (including cart) and the longest being a massive nine steps. They discovered that there was no noticeable relation between the number of checkout steps and the quality of the user’s checkout experience. The checkout processes of Apple, Walmart and Gap are all seven-step checkouts and perform approximately 50% higher than the average top 100 grossing checkouts. The taking from this is don’t focus too much on the number of steps in your checkout — instead spend your resources on what the customers have to do at each step, as that is what matters the most for the checkout experience.

Only 24% require account registration.
To put it differently: 24% don’t offer the customer a “guest checkout” option when placing an order, but force them to create accounts on their websites. One reason why customer hate being required to create an account to complete a purchase is because they have a mental model of account = newsletter. The mentality is when creating an account, customers are more likely to feel that you’re storing their information indefinitely. There is a notable trend towards guest checkouts with the option to create an account if the user feels they would be a repeat customer.

81% think their newsletter is a must have (opt-out or worse).
81% of the 100 largest e-commerce websites “assume” that their customers want their promotional emails by having a pre-checked newsletter checkbox (or worse) at some point during checkout. As a designer, it feels standard practise to mindlessly include this in as part of the process (at client request)… when you know, that when this happens to you, you hate it! When they asked the test subjects why, 40% told them that they “didn’t want any newsletters”. A massive 32% automatically sign up their new customers for their newsletters with no way of opting out during the checkout process, and often burying this fact deep down in their privacy policy. If this is to be included as part of the process, have the box unchecked. Value your customers enough to give them an option.

41% use address validators.
Everyone makes mistakes. An address validator can be a smart way to avoid common customer typos that might cause shipping problems, ones that otherwise would have resulted in undelivered or delayed orders. The advisable approach — implemented by the vast majority of the 41% of those websites utilizing address validators — informs the customer that the typed address doesn’t match, yet still allows them to force proceed if they are sure that the address is right.

50% asks for the same information twice.
Prepopulated fields are welcomed. Only 10% of websites did this properly. Simple planning and consideration will identify that when the user inputs their postcode, state and potentially country can be prepopulated. It was found that smaller websites did this better than the larger websites, pushing the user through the process swiftly.

The average top 100 checkouts violate 33% of the checkout usability guidelines.
If we have an overall look at the top 100 grossing e-commerce checkout processes, the average checkout violates 21 checkout usability guidelines explained in this document
This overall lacking of checkout experience — even among the highest grossing e-commerce stores — is hardly rooted in an unwillingness to improve checkout experience, but is most likely due to a combination of factors, such as:

· Flows are much more difficult to improve than single pages.

· Checkouts often need deep, back-end integration, and thus require more IT capabilities to modify/test upon.

· Checkouts haven’t been on the agenda for top management (although, I believe this has changed a lot in recent years).

· Checkouts are for most designers much more dull to work on than product pages, home pages or new ad-campaigns.

· In a few cases, a poor user experience can still be good for business, at least in the short run (e.g. sneaking people into your newsletter).

· No Web convention for a checkout process exists.

· “Best practice” for checkout designs are scattered and scarce (only two to three research-based resources exist).

· Feedback from those who use the checkout process are only several degrees of separation from those who design and develop it.

· Improving most somewhat-optimized/decent checkouts aren’t 1 to 3 “big fixes”, but are most likely to be 10 to 30 smaller checkout changes.