Does your funnel have holes?

Merchants that have been around a while may be familiar with the metaphor, but if you are new merchant, you should consider your checkout pages as a funnel—wide at the top representing all of the visitors that see a shopping cart page, and thinner at the bottom representing visitors that have completed an order. Potential buyers leave at each step in checkout either because they don’t have the information needed to proceed to the next step, or the process to complete a purchase is too long, too complex, or asks for information they are not willing to provide. (It’s true that some buyers may never intend to check out and are only comparison shopping, but you can’t do much about them besides cutting prices or offering discount or free shipping.)

With this in mind, each change you make to your checkout pages should be aimed at plugging holes in the funnel (providing information where necessary and providing reassurances of privacy) and greasing the funnel (reducing the number of steps and fields to a minimum) to make it quick.

I’ve been meaning to post a link to an interview that James Maguire did with usability guru Jakob Nielsen about design guidelines for checkout usability. With Checkout Manager out of beta, you can put these tips into practice in your checkout pages. While I recommend reading the full interview to get tips that are normally reserved for enterprise-level ecommerce sites, I’ll provide a brief list of some of the areas covered:

• How much information to ask buyers in checkout?
• Adding shipping calculators and coupon fields to the shopping cart to let buyers know final costs as early as possible.
• The importance of a prominent “return to shopping” link.
• Validating input and providing error messages.
• How many steps should your checkout process have?

With Checkout Manager, you can easily customize or add fields, control the number of pages in your checkout flow, customize the look of any button, and add a shipping calculator and coupon field to your shopping cart.

The tips discussed in the interview will help you identify any “holes” you may have in your checkout pages and also how to provide the shortest path between your shopping cart and a completed order.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business