Insights on E-Commerce Checkout Design

The State Of E-Commerce Checkout Design 2012 study has some interesting findings drawn from benchmarking the top 100 grossing e-commerce websites’ checkout processes:

• The average checkout process consists of 5.08 steps - Advice: don’t focus too much on the number of steps in your checkout — instead spend your resources on what the customers have to do at each step, as that is what matters the most for the checkout experience.
• 24% require account registration - Of the 23 websites that had more than $1 billion in online sales, 65% of them did not ask for account registration.
• 81% think their newsletter is a must have (opt-out or worse) -  ..of those 81% of the websites that think their newsletter is a “must have”, 32 of them proceed to do something even worse than pre-checking a checkbox: Amazon is just one of the 32% of the top 100 grossing e-commerce websites that automatically signs customers up for their newsletters, without clearly informing the customer (only via the privacy link), and without giving an opting-out option during checkout. 
• 41% use address validators.
• 50% asks for the same information twice.
• The average top 100 checkouts violate 33% of the checkout usability guidelines.

Also see:

• E-Commerce in India
• Indian comparison shopping sites