I am looking into my first ecommerce venture and cart abandonment was something I hadn’t even considered, but your article raises some really good points for consideration – and mitigation. So thanks!

Chris

Step 1: Payment
Step 2: Review
Step 3: Submit Order

I remembers seeing on some site something to this effect:

Main progress bar = step 1, step 2, step 3, purchase
Purchase progress bar = payment, review ,checkout

I think their purpose was to reduce possible exits out of the purchase phase by doing this (the progress bar doubled as navigation).

Figured there are arguments for showing all steps in one progress bar or splitting it into 2 separate ones.

With our previous checkout we’d seen people abandoning and then doing things like downloading free trials of products they already had in their cart.

With the new checkout we’ve seen a 42% increase in our cart completion rate, but because there were a number of changes it’s hard to directly attribute any of that increase to being enclosed.

What kind of nightmares are you having with your online store? Are the developers locally based or overseas?

Cheers,
Nigel