High abandonment rates on your checkout page can be devastating to your site’s profits. You’ve attracted visitors to your site and they’ve found something they wanted. Then they go to purchase and they end up leaving your site, with no conversions made, and no profits to show. While a high abandonment rate for your checkout pages is a recipe for conversion disaster, fortunately, it’s a problem that can be corrected. And the first step to correcting the problem is correctly selecting which style of checkout is best suited for your site: single page or multipage checkouts.
Single-page checkouts
Let’s start with a single-page checkout. A big advantage of most single page checkouts is that they offer customers a quicker-to-fill-out, less-questions-to-answer form that requires minimal time. I say “most” single page checkouts and not all because some single-page checkouts can be incredibly extensive and time-consuming forms that have been crammed onto a single page. Avoid making that mistake! Another advantage of single page checkouts is that customers don’t have to deal with loading times for other form pages.
Furthermore, many researchers suggest that single-page checkouts are more likely to lead to lower abandonment rates because the customer has less work to do and can see all of the information they will need to provide all on one page.
Single-page checkouts have their disadvantages as well. For one, the customer has to provide less information, so you aren’t collecting as much customer-specific information as you potentially could be with a multipage checkout. Furthermore, one-page checkouts are more difficult to track because traditional analytics solutions perform funnels at a page level, not a form field level. Knowing exactly what step of the form your customer is exiting your site from is something traditional analytics solutions cannot do for you. However, with an event-based solution like FoxMetrics, you will have more flexibility to track one-page checkouts in a similar manner as a multi-page checkout.
Multipage checkouts
While single page checkouts might sound like the best idea, multipage checkouts aren’t always the wrong option. If your orders require more customer input, such as shipping info, you will need customers to provide the necessary information. Traditionally, multipage checkouts have the funnel: basic information, shipping information, billing information, review, confirmation. As mentioned previously, you certainly do not want to cram a multipage checkout onto one page and overwhelm the customer. As for multipage checkouts reporting, it can be accomplished using traditional analytics solutions, as everything can be tracked on each individual page of the checkout funnel. However, you are putting your customer through a long checkout process and could be risking high abandonment rates.
So in deciding what type of checkout works best for your site, consider the purpose of your business, what type of orders your customers will be placing, and what checkout information you truly need from them. Do you have any experiences with single page checkouts or multipage checkouts? Share them with us! Leave a comment or tweet us @FoxMetrics!
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