Overstock`s checkout conversion soars with analytics-driven improvements

Overstock.com reduced shopper bail out rates and saw its checkout conversion rate rise to as high as 70% on some days after implementing checkout process improvements suggested by its use of Omniture Inc.’s SiteCatalyst service, the company reports. The checkout conversion rate was defined as the percentage of shoppers who completed a purchase after they had initiated checkout on the site.

Revisiting its checkout process in August, Overstock found through the SiteCatalyst funnel reports that a significant number of customers were leaving the site after having reached checkout. Overstock’s first attempt at improvement was to trim its then seven-page checkout to four pages by consolidating key pages and eliminating those it determined to be non-critical or redundant.

While this produced an improvement, analytics showed a fair number of customers still left at the order review page. The page had been designed to function as an “are you sure” mechanism that appeared after shoppers already had supplied all information needed to complete the transaction, including credit card and shipping information. Puzzled about why shoppers would leave at this point in the process, Overstock made the decision to remove the page, which shrank checkout to three pages.

Within two days of rolling out the new, three-page process last September, Overstock started seeing days with checkout conversion rates exceeding 70%, according to Kamille Twomey, Overstock’s director of internal marketing. “We have heard from our customers that it is a much less painful process and our customer service calls regarding online checkout have significantly decreased,” she adds. “Now, we don’t make a change without testing it, no matter how small it is.”