Is Your Checkout Afraid of Hitting Its Head
My son did swimming sports yesterday.
He was doing well until, whilst doing back stroke, he cruised at the end because he was afraid of hitting his head on the wall.
He only races once a year and he really isn’t bothered about where he places.
But, it made me think about how we had no idea if he was a fast swimmer or not.
He swims a lot and seems fast, but it is only when he swims next to others do we find out if he is fast.
Also, it clearly identifies an issue with his technique.
Swimming at the end with one arm above your head for a quarter length of the pool, just in case you hit your head is going to slow you down a bit.
Now we know what’s wrong we can fix it.
This is like your checkout page.
It looks fine.
Chugging all day and sending you order confirmation emails.
But how fast is it?
Let’s have a look at five retailers and compare the results.
Some of our clients use the ‘one step checkout’ which is all the checkout on one page and thus makes it easy to find the ‘time on page’ for each one. Here’s how they look last month in Feb 2018
1. B2B Site A selling spare parts
Average time on checkout page – 3 minutes 7 seconds
2. B2B Site B selling lab equipment
Average time on checkout page – 3 minutes 40 seconds
3. B2C Site C selling clothing
Average time on checkout page – 2 minutes 50 seconds
4. B2B Site D selling protective equipment
Average time on checkout page – 2 minutes 33 seconds
5. B2C Site E selling food
Average time on checkout page – 2 minutes 32 seconds
6. B2C Site F selling Flowers
Average time on checkout page – 3 minutes 59 seconds
So how does the checkout race look?
Well, we might argue that Business 2 Business (B2B) sites checkouts are a little slower than Business to Consumer (B2C) sites. This would make sense as people might have to look up addresses etc when buying for work.
But site F selling flower does look slow, doesn’t it? Almost 4 minutes against an average time on B2B sites of 2 – 3 minutes.
Next step would be to record some browser sessions of site E and then some browser sessions of site F.
We could then compare the behaviour and find out what people are struggling with.
Where there is struggle, there is always checkout abandonment, so this could be very lucrative work indeed.
How Fast Is Your Checkout Page? See how diving into numbers like these allowed our clients to scale their Google Shopping revenue by watching our case study video here http://go.markhammersley.co/get-started/#go-go
Thanks
Mark (Competitive Dad) Hammersley
