Comments on: A/B Test Case Study: Single Page vs. Multi-Step Checkout

By: Amy R.

Amy R. — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:04:16 +0000

I would like to hear more information about this study. I am quite shocked to see these results. They are very uncommon.

Did more users sign up when using the multi-page checkout? I am a usability specialist working at a few different companies currently, and all of my tests (and industry standards) report that requiring users to register will dramatically decrease conversions. The multi-page design appears, to me, to require a sign up (the optional guest checkout is not very noticable). So, I guess my question is…where did you drop your customers on the multi-page shopping cart?

By: Janis

Janis — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 22:31:35 +0000

Verolina, it greatly depends on your ecommerce platform, but few points to consider:
1) we “linked” GWO and Ecommerce data in GA using Advanced Segments (with Regular Expression a.k.a regex)
2) regex looked at our URLs and filtered something like “audience=A”, “audience=B”, which was appended to our URL.
3) In order for our URL to show “audience=A”, our developers needed to look at GWO cookie, extract assigned audience, and show this in URL.

I do realize this is not an obvious clarification, but I hope this sets you on the right track.

By: Verolina

Verolina — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 23:02:39 +0000

Hi Janis,

Thanks for sharing this case!

Can you tell something more about the “few little hacks” that enable linking GWO / ecommerce data in GA?

Thanks!

By: Linda Bustos

Linda Bustos — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:04:30 +0000

Hi Paul,
While that may be true, you need to know that the Olympic Store will only accept Visa as it was an official sponsor of the Olympics.

By: Paul Weingarth

Paul Weingarth — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:34:19 +0000

They should have incorporated PayPal Express checkout. This would enable all credit card transactions for non PayPal users. Also even better, the PayPal account holders shipping address would be pre-populated so one less step for them before they confirm -> decrease the dropout rate.. ohh and it is safer for consumers as they do not provide any credit card details to the merchant. Its a win / win / win

By: A/B Test Case Study: Location of Size and Color Options Mattered « Get Elastic

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:26:22 +0000

[...] our case study in conversion optimization for the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store (see last week’s post if you missed it), today we’ll share the results of our product detail page [...]

By: A/B Test Case Study: Homepage « Get Elastic

A/B Test Case Study: Homepage « Get Elastic — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 04:41:19 +0000

[...] posts related to conversion optimization for the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store. Following checkout process and product details page optimization, in collaboration with Wider Funnel, we looked at the [...]

By: Gareth Brown

Gareth Brown — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 22:42:57 +0000

Great post and I think the whole process from the cart to success page is nicely designed. One thing that I couldn’t see was any mention of security. Do you think including a ssl security logo or including a link to it in the ‘shop with confidence’ section would have increased conversions?

By: Janis Lanka

Janis Lanka — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:54:24 +0000

@eMerchandising – in multi-step checkout, user registration is only offered at the very beginning.

@David – good question about tracking order issue. Regards creating creation: it could be a new blog post , but our aim was to remove any potential distractions. We would prefer them to checkout and not create account, rather than opposite.

By: David Minor

David Minor — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:06:28 +0000

@Jestep – Great observation! We are in a niche market and found that most of the “improve conversions 200% by doing x” have very little effect.

Moving to a single page checkout yielded about a 5% improvement for us. We’ll take it, obviously, but we’ve learned to temper our expectations.