The following is Part III of Ecommerce & Web Analytics:
Part I: Visitor Targeting & Acquisition
Part II: Landing Page Effectiveness

Optimizing Checkout & Cross Selling

Once the visitor has been acquired, and the landing page leads to the visitor placing an item in a cart, the next step of the conversion funnel is checkout and cross selling. In general, the one page most E-commerce sites have made an effort to study and optimize is the checkout phase. This series of forms that a visitor must fill out in order to have the product paid for and shipped correctly is the most common area of conversion loss.

Checkout processes range from modern and slick, to Byzantine and antiquated. What is of paramount importance is that this process be able to be completed without undue drudgery and with thoughtful and convenient customer service links. Granted, it would be hard to make an entertaining checkout process, but it is fairly simple to have shipping, return/exchange, and about us links readily available to the scores of visitors who just want a question answered before purchasing. These pacifying links can save many a sale and increase conversion rates by answering buyer objections at the most crucial time in the buying cycle.

The second area in this stage is cross selling. Any visitor who decides to buy one item, is receptive to buying multiple items. Once the initial questions are answered and trust established, the process of cross selling is many times simply the effort it takes to suggest it to the consumer. Educating the consumer that replacement discs are available for the new disk sander he/she bought, that a certain set of mugs would go great with the set of dishes just bought, or that a home theater sound system would enhance the pleasure gained from the new HDTV purchase is not only a great way to increase average sale, but often increase customer satisfaction with their purchase. No one likes to find out, or be told later, that when you bought that new widget you should have bought that other widget accessory to go with it and/or make it better. A better result would be to have a customer who tells friends that he/she got everything he/she needed at one time, and maybe even saved a bit by buying them together. Most importantly, a visitor who has decided to buy is the easiest person to cross sell. The trust, price, & selection hurdles have all been cleared, leaving a consumer who is ultra receptive to another call to action.

The analytics tool’s function in regards to optimizing the checkout process would be analyzing the drop out points during the checkout series of pages. By determining the stage or stages of the checkout process in which the majority of shopping carts are abandoned, changes can be made to streamline or modify the checkout process for higher cart retention.

The analytics tool can make a huge impact in the cross selling stage. Here is an example of cross selling as driven by analytics.

-For all the people who bought Item A, show the list of items also bought with Item A from most popular to least popular.

This report would be a self-generated cross selling list. It will show the most popular complementary items sold with any SKU. These cross selling lists can be posted on each product page and modified over time.