1 Shopping Cart Abandonment

What many articles on the subject of shopping cart abandonment seem to ignore is that people may start the checkout process without any intention to complete it. Why? Because often it’s the easiest way of discovering information such as shipping rates, shipping destinations, payment methods etc. Of course that’s an indication of bad design too but I think it’s an important distinction to make.

posted at 12:41 am on March 07, 2006 by Tamlyn Rhodes

2 Untitled

How do you build up more energy? How do you reduce friction? This isn’t an article, this is an advertorial— one of the worst pieces on ALA ever.

posted at 01:20 am on March 07, 2006 by Martijn ten Napel

3 Erlend

Good article!

Martijn; It looks a bit abstract but when you think wisely the author explains it good and gives lots of tips.

posted at 01:40 am on March 07, 2006 by Erlend Debast

4 you forgot one important catagory Free info.

what if you made a web site (that was successful) for informational purposses only. no membership/login, no popups, no advertisments! a place where people could go to get information on. now I think maybe your point was focus on delerving that info smoothly and it will be succussful, ok but don’t forget the ‘free info’ sites. thanks ps this is not something along a blog either.

posted at 01:52 am on March 07, 2006 by a a

5 Untitled

An increase in conversion rates of over 500%. That is to say, of the people who arrived at the subscription offer page, we increased the number who actually signed up by over 500%.

And while we sold a little harder—and offered an incentive at the back end—the primary cause of the increase was almost certainly that we reduced the friction during the sign-up process.

So basically what you’re saying is “we changed half-a-dozen things and improved conversion, but for the sake of convenience we’re going to claim it’s all due to one thing”? You can’t draw conclusions like that without clear A-B comparison exercises; adding customer incentives is the quickest way to render your results worthless. How many of us have signed up for Microsoft’s free USB key this past week with no intention of paying any attention to whatever else they might want to tell or sell us?

This article would have been better as an example of why giving away free stuff increases conversion rates by 500%...

posted at 04:00 am on March 07, 2006 by Matthew Pennell

6 Energy

“How do you build up more energy?”

Energy = appeal of your offer. Offer me free bottle of StormHoek, and I might be willing to answer a lengthy survey. Offer me a white paper, and I’m outa here after couple of questions.

I agree that the article is a tad abstract, but Nick stresses an important point nonetheless. If I had a dime for every site that overestimates my interest & patience…

For whatever it’s worth, a couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation (partly) about appeal vs friction of products. I posted the slides here

posted at 04:43 am on March 07, 2006 by Amit Bendov

7 Thanks for the intro

I have to agree with Martijn – this is a great, if somewhat overlong – introduction, but Nick seems to have got so carried away explaining his somewhat random analogies that he has forgotten to write the article itself.

Other ALA articles – good ones – tell us how to achieve our aims. All this one does is tell us what we already knew, but mashed through with a load of new buzzwords.

posted at 07:26 am on March 07, 2006 by Stephen Down

8 Discovering Shipping Costs

@Tamlyn Rhodes : I agree completely. As a Canadian-dweller, I actually have a greasemonkey script that adds every item in my Amazon.com cart to my Amazon.ca cart. With the dollar the way it is right now, it’s almost certainly cheaper to buy from the U.S. store, but it used to be a much closer competition.

posted at 08:15 am on March 07, 2006 by Mike Purvis

9 It's a little bit more complicated than that

I agree with Nick’s statement that building up kinetic energy and decreasing friction is a good thing. But I expect more analysis and more serious work from the author than just statement of obvious. Very good article for general public and people interested in this field but a little bit weak for professionals. By now I think people already realize that there are bad things to do and good things on websites. But it is not all that simple. It’s not just “make sites easy to navigate” it’s “how?” that’s what we discuss here. Let’s look at the process of conversion described by Nick. A visitor gets excited about an offer and discovers more and more information that makes the offer more appealing. At some point he makes his mind and converts in his head. Customer converts not when he clicks “place an order” or submit button. He converts before that, and after he made his mind he would stick to it, unless he meets significant amount of friction to formally finish conversion. And when he converts in his mind he knows that he will be required to go through several steps of “work” to get the offer. So when he makes decision either to take or pass, he in his mind weights advantages of the offer against the expected by him labor to get it. And ones he made the decision he will go through even more labor than he expected since people are not easy to give up on what they set their minds on. And how far he or she can go beyond expected friction depends on each visitor’s psychological profile. So if we look at the process closer we don’t’ have to make process just easy. We should make it not harder than expected by visitors to get conversions. In real life things are more complicated than just easy and hard. How easy is the real question because there are also other goals and limitations that retailers and businesses need to meet. I know that it’s hard to evaluate the expected friction but it is usually expected on experience basis. If it was easier last time the visitor got similar offer he would be somewhat disappointed. So here is the name of the game – stay ahead of not behind the competition. But there are cases when from business perspective it is not necessary to spend huge budgets to simplify process to save 1/60th of a second.

posted at 09:51 am on March 07, 2006 by Andrey Smagin

10 The article could be a two sentences paragrph, however

It is a good opportunity do some thinking about the real points which a good website must take into the design consideration.

Mine are:

1) Play the customer and see if you are satisified 2) Never stop improving 3) Balance depth (clicks) vs information density 4) Focus on your best products, help the user find them 5) See what your competitors are doing and improve it 6) Experiment 7) Show a single short message that summarizes the main action you want the customer to do and why.

After designing with the considerations above I would do an improvement phase using the paradigms from the article and see if the site is focusing the customer efforts and creating enough energy to complete the action. If not, items 3,4 and 7 should be repeated.

posted at 10:35 am on March 07, 2006 by CoMagz founder