Shopping card abandonment frustrates online marketers to madness: The prospect has been reeled in, the desire for an offering is clearly there, and the selection has been made. Yet customers still walk away at the last possible second.
Addressing the question of how to retain people at this point was the last—but perhaps most important—step in a page-by-page redesign undertaken during the last two years by online body products marketer Fragrance Direct. The company knew its two-column checkout page was flawed: The trick was determining which elements to tweak in order to boost desired results.
Were there only one or two, the test would be a matter of simple A/B splits: Serve up the different versions of the checkout page to customers, and after a trial period evaluate which generated the best outcomes. But Fragrance Direct wanted to test several elements, and used MaxTest, a multivariate system from Maxymiser, to guide the page’s redesign.
“Within all of our tests, we’ve gone in with between four and six variants,” says Julian Thompson, ecommerce manager at Fragrance Direct.
The checkout page had a similar number of variations. Tests included evaluating the impact of flipping a billing details column and a delivery column, repositioning items in a shopping cart from the middle of the page to the top of the page, measuring how including or removing gift card options affected revenue and moving the call to action button.
Switching around six elements and determining their effectiveness might seem daunting, but for most pages evaluated Maxymiser and Fragrance Direct were able to eliminate one or two variables within the tests’ early weeks. “During the last half of the test process we got down to half the number of templates, in order to get more volume going through those better variances,” Thompson says.
The modifications suggested by the data for the checkout page were fairly straightforward. But this wasn’t always the case. For instance, site visitors were given the option of making a purchase without registering their details, a variant that generated more sales.
“Unfortunately, that was the weaker option because we captured a lot less data and couldn’t e-mail them with newsletters,” Thompson says. “We couldn’t use those customers for down-the-stream marketing activity.”
The differences in sales rates weren’t huge, Thompson adds, but they were significant enough that Fragrance Direct and Maxymiser huddled together before agreeing that the option yielding the second-best results was the best for the company.
Ultimately, Fragrance Direct substantially overhauled its checkout page. It moved the products ordered and the price and postage costs to the top of the screen and increased the width of the payment column. An “Additional Options” box, which prominently offered customers the ability to request gift wrapping, enter a promotion code or redeem a gift certificate, was removed (gift cards hadn’t been a significant part of the company’s revenue stream). And it flipped the billing details and payment details columns.
Changing the position of the billing and payment columns resulted in the customer’s payment details being on the right-hand side of the page, just above the button that completed the process. Thompson feels the eye naturally flows from the payment details to the complete the order button, and results bear him out: The site has generated a 23% increase in order placement since the new checkout page was finalized.
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