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.
