Changing a button in checkout increases HPshoppping.com’s order rate by 3+%
HPshopping.com, the e-commerce site of manufacturer Hewlett Packard, increased its conversion rate by 3.42% with minor site design changes driven by analytic software from WebCriteria, the company reports. The Site Analyst change management tool isolated how individual design elements on the site inhibited visitors’ ability to complete intended activity such as purchasing-–information HPshopping.com wasn’t getting from traffic statistics, purchase activity and regular mining of its own log files, it says.
HPshopping.com conversion programs manager Eileen Wong wanted to break conversion rates down to the level of individual processes. When the tool looked at shopper behavior during the checkout process, it found that many shoppers who increased the quantity of an item they’d placed in their cart simply changed the number and didn’t notice the second step required to complete the change, an “update cart” button located on the left side of the page. This created confusion when attempting to pay, because the additional items shoppers believed they’d ordered didn’t register.
Relocating the bottom to appear on the right hand side next to the quantity of items ordered in the cart made it almost impossible to go to the next step without noticing the bottom, and that reduced exits in attempts to update the cart by 26%. The tool also identified confusion over shipping charges, which used to be delivered at the end of the checkout process, allowing HPshopping.com to validate its hunch that communicating shipping information earlier on would improve conversions.
“Traffic analysis will tell you the most popular paths on the site, but you can’t make any conclusions from that,” Wong says. “Web Criteria allows us to break down visitor activities beyond just the conversion rate and track visitor progress through to checkout.”
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