How a re-design helped babystyle.com boost its completed checkout rate

The Babystyle.com site of Estyle Inc. increased sales by 25% when a re-design of the checkout process prompted a higher rate of successful checkouts, eStyle reports.

Using new click-stream technology from Coremetrics Inc., the company analyzed customer behavior during checkout. Among the changes that Babystyle.com adopted were to identify which stage of checkout the customer is at every step of the way, clearly display the Continue Checkout button on every page so customers always know what to do next, repeat shipping information to minimize the number of times the customer uses the Back button, present shipping charges early in the process so customers don’t experience sticker shock as they are at the final steps, integrate the gift-giving function into checkout so customers don’t have to follow a divergent path to give a gift and keep all information on one screen so customers don’t have to scroll down.

As a result, the number of customers who complete the checkout process rose by a third from 47% to 62%.

Coremetrics today unveiled its new Coremetrics Marketforce, a marketing analytics platform that captures and stores all customer and visitor click-stream activity to build what it calls LIVE--lifetime individual visitor experience-- profiles of online customers and visitors to serve as the foundation for all marketing initiatives. The program captures information about the marketing vehicle that a visitor responded to, what the visitor did at the site before becoming a customer and how customers navigate and use a web site. It combines that information so a retailer can craft marketing promotions to particular sets of customers based on their experiences at the site and to analyze the effectiveness of a web site’s design.

"Our clients know that all successful marketing efforts are based on rich profiles of visitor and customer behavior, and Marketforce is the only solution that natively captures every single click a customer or visitor makes on a web site and stores that data in unique profiles,” said Scott Kauffman, president and CEO of Coremetrics. “Our clients have moved well beyond basic metrics and site hits, and are working with us to build a data asset of behavioral information that is giving them a pronounced competitive advantage in the market."