#40 – Unveiling the Secrets to Reducing eCommerce Abandonment Rates

So let's talk about the different abandonment rates for E Commerce. Every time you mention abandonment rates for E Commerce, people think about two rates. Cart abandonment rate and checkout abandonment rate. I think there are few other ones that we want to pay close attention to. One that really matters a lot to me is what I call the pre product page, Abandonment rates. My name is Kalis Slade, and I love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

I'm Simba, and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live hour, a show all about a B testing, experimentation and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode, Khaled amazes me, answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like, it's no big deal.

Well, pretty much every episode will take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we'll talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh, man. I bring tough questions like, do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high? Testing velocity? How do you measure the success of a conversion funnel? And how do you align your CRO program with a growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough questions.

Yes, they are, but we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does, subscribe to the CRO Live hour podcast today, wherever you listen to your podcasts. Another week, another CRO Live. Our Simba, how's your week?

I had a good week. Okay, before we jump right into talking about marketing, let's just talk about sport for a minute. I know that the Premier League is now off season, but I do watch a lot of cricket. I enjoy cricket. I think that's my second favorite spot, really, after soccer. So I've been watching, like, some. Yeah, I watch a lot of cricket.

I would not have guessed that.

And I've been watching a lot of World cup qualifiers.

If you had asked me to list the top 15 sports that you could watch, cricket would not be on that list. Learn something new every day.

Crickle is my second.

It's not popular in Africa, is it?

It's popular in Africa. We have, like, some of the best games. It's one of the most popular spots. It's actually popular than basketball. It's actually popular than volleyball. So, yeah, cricket is very popular.

Okay, interesting. I would not have guessed that. Okay, so you're watching crickets world. What do they call it? World cup qualifiers. Is it World cup as well?

Yes, World cup qualifiers. There's been an interesting games. I'VE been watching like Nepal, Pakistan, West Indies, Indiana. Yeah, those countries. So it's been interesting. I. I know a lot of cricket players, then I know a lot of basketball players. That's how much I love cricket. Wow.

Okay. Okay. Well, at least you found a sport. I have been just flipping through the channels. I mean, I try to watch a few things here and there. Nothing intrigues me. I mean, I'll watch American football, but tour off season as well, and it's not as fun as soccer.

Do you watch basketball?

Doesn't intrigue me. I mean, I used to be a lot more into basketball when I lived in. Yeah, I only watch basketball maybe when.

It'S LeBron against Steve Carey. That's one game that I watch. I don't watch like any other games. I don't think that I know about six basketball players. I just know the most famous one. Maybe top four than the rest. I don't.

Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I mean, I might be able to name a few, but I don't want anybody to put me on the spot. In the US what's really big is college football. That's always big. So you're going to college and I went to Texas, so it used to have a really good team. We haven't done anything decent in the last, I don't know, 15 years or so. Yeah, since 2006, I think. Last time we won. No sports for now. It's sad. All I do is I go on Twitter. I just go on Twitter and I follow the transfer news and there is nothing. And I'm like, duh, There is nothing going on there. August 11th is coming up soon. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We just like a couple of weeks away. So at least you now have missing the MLS late. So let's see how it is.

You want to hear something funny? So MLS tickets are cheap. I mean, $20, $30, maybe. Good seats, 40, 50 bucks. But because he joined Miami, I'm like, oh, they're coming to play in Chicago. So I'm like, let me just see the tickets. Because the kids want to watch Messi play. I go into the cheapest because it's 400 bucks. And I'm like, no way, guys. I'm sorry. $400 for like a bad seat? No, it's not happening. And of course it's not one kid. They all want to go. And I'm like, no, no, no, this is too much. I'm sorry.

Semi plays like, I think two weeks ago when the Champions League was here in Istanbul, I was also planning to go and watch, but I made like a terrible mistake. I was supposed to get the ticket maybe a few months before, but I was just telling myself, oh, a few weeks before then the ticket, the last time that I checked it was over 1,000 backs. You know, just for nature meanings. I would just want to get home.

Yeah, yeah. And especially that it's a team. Also that you're not like, you know, supporting person, you know, like, I'm not that interested. Sorry.

Okay, cool. So today we'll be talking about E commerce. A lot of E commerce abandonment rates. I think, like it's one of the topics that you know the most because you have like one of our best performing articles on investors. There's the article that you wrote. I'm not sure when. I think maybe it's five years ago, six years ago, about E commerce abandonment. So I guess that's one of your favorite topics.

It's funny because, I mean, you'll laugh at this. We published that article five years ago and it took me five years to write. It's funny because I literally had started audit, I was like, I go back through the version history and I'm like, oh my God. I started writing this article back in 2010, 2011. And every time I go back and I review and I add more things and I change examples and like every time I look at it, I'm like, oh, it's perfect. And I'm like, there's something still missing. So I enjoy Abandonment Trace because I think they give you a lot of insights about how your site is performing and everybody always is talking. Even when I Posted today on LinkedIn, I'm like, oh, we'll talk cart and checkout. But really there's so much more to abandonment than cart and checkouts.

Yeah, yeah, that's good. But before we get that, you've been in the, in the industry since you've been doing a B testing since 2006. So that's about how many years now?

16, 17 years. I feel whole.

Yeah, 17 years. So I want you to let us know maybe the five a B testing tips that you wish you knew when you were starting ab testing in 2006.

That's a really good question. Let me think. I'm just kind of like seeing how I just trying to come up with five things. But over the years, we've done almost 32,000 AB experiments. We have not even counted the experiments that we've launched in 2023. And when I reflect back at some of those experiments and some of the mistakes I've made. I'm like, oh my God, I wish somebody had sat me down and told me, really be careful and aware of those things. Eventually if you do enough AB testing, you will fall into one of those mistakes or you discover that you shouldn't have done certain things a certain way. So here are my five things that I wish somebody had told me when I first started doing AB testing. And some of those are a bit advanced, but let's go through them. Number one, if you are running an AB experiment with multiple variations in it and you decide to remove one of those variations, so let's say you have an experiment with four variations challenging the control, you look at your data and based on some analysis, you say, you know what? This variation has no chance of beating. We've already collected enough conversions, we've already collected enough visitors and it's actually causing maybe a 20% drop in conversion rates and has no chance of beating the original. Maybe I should remove it and reallocate the traffic to the other variations. Now in the past when we've done that is we simply went in, disabled one of the variations and continued the experiments. Lo and behold, we discovered the hard way that you just simply cannot do that. Every time you remove a variation from an A B experiment, you should relaunch the experiment as a new one. So you're starting with a clean slate. There is some statistical reason for that, so I'm not going to go through that. But if you just merely disable one of the variation and you don't flush the data or you don't create a new test with zero visitors, zero conversions, your actual results will be impacted and they're not clean and your statistical analysis will be incorrect. So make sure that you are aware of this mistake and not fall into it. Number two, if you are running an AB experiment on a high value page. So let's say you're on an e commerce website and you're running an experiment on the cart page or your product pages or maybe in the checkout. If you are running an experiment, if you're a SaaS website and you're running an experiment on the registration funnel and you worry that some of your variations are going to cause a major drop in conversions, that major drop in conversions might mean major money out of the bank. Correct. Instead of making the money because one of the variations is performing poorly, you are seeing less sales, less subscriptions, less leads, less. If that is the case, then make sure that you start doing your AB experiments in a stacked and rolled up fashion. What does that mean? You don't show 100% of the visitors. The experiment. You start by showing the experiment to 10% of the visitors and you let the experiment run for a few days, collect enough visitors and enough conversions, and then you can evaluate the performance of the different variations. If there's no impact the variations, some of them are, some of them are down, but you're not seeing something horrendous, then you go ahead and increase the flow to that experiment. So now instead of 10% of the visitors seeing it, we go to 25% again. We check, make sure that there are no issues. Then we go to 50% and then we either go to 75% or 100%. Now we do that kind of rollout specifically with larger e commerce companies. Imagine you are running an a B test for ebay and you're running it on their checkout process. Well, guess what? If one of my variations is getting a couple million visitors a day and that variation causes a 10% or 15% drop in conversions, that is a lot of money being lost. So that's the reason we do that type of rollout experimentation, to control and to make sure that we don't lose money as a result of running the AB Experiment number three. I cannot emphasize the importance of quality control, quality assurance before you launch an experiment. Now, in the good old days when we were very small, we expected our conversion rate optimization specialist. We expected any digital marketing specialist who is about to launch an experiment to go in and do the quality control. What does that mean? You load the different variations and you make sure that there are no bugs, that the variation is performing correctly. There are no bugs as a result of running the experiments. Eventually, as you expand and as you do more testing, you discover that, yeah, the CRO is doing some testing, the project manager is doing some testing, but we actually have additional dedicated quality control team just to make sure that there are no bugs in any a B experiment that we are launching. We've learned this the hard way. Remember, the goal from a B test is to increase conversions. But if one of your variations or a couple of your variations have bugs in them, you've sort of defeated the whole purpose of doing experimentation. So pay close attention to quality control and quality assurance. Now, here is another tip for quality control. After you launch your experiment, let the data come in, let it run for about a day, especially if you have enough time conversions and look at the results. Are you seeing a variation that is causing a 40 or a 50% drop in conversions? If you Are that might be an indicator that there is a bug in that particular variation. I remember learning about this from one of the companies that we worked with where he came in and he said, khaled, I mean, yeah, we made a few changes, but those changes, I didn't expect them to improve conversions by more than 10% or cause a drop in conversions by more than 10%. When we saw a drop in conversions by about 40 or 45%, that means that there's a problem in that variation. And I agreed with him. So now we pay very close attention to data and that data will tell us if there is a problem in one of our variation. Number four, monitor the results. Monitor your results to see where things are going. Now, before you start any A B experiment, what you need to do is you need to calculate the sample size based on the original page or what we call the control conversion rates. How many visitors are coming to the page, what kind of lift I expect, what kind of improvement I expect from running the A B experiment. You calculate the sample size. This experiment needs to run for 14 days, collect about 50,000 visitors. Great. We're monitoring the results regularly for two reasons. One, I mentioned in case there is a bug. Number two, I might decide to do an early stop. So I would say after 10% of the visitors are collected, if I see one of the variations perform really poorly with low chance to beat the original, I might stop the experiment to remove that variation. So I have what we call early stop at 10%, at 25%, at 50%. The goal from this is to eliminate the negative impacts the experiment has on our overall conversion rate. Number five, sounds simple, but we don't break this rule. Do not launch your experiments on Fridays. For some reason, experiments that are launched on Fridays tend to break over the weekend where everybody is not working and you have a bug and you have an issue and causes too much headaches. So I don't like to launch experiments on Fridays. We are very religious about that. We usually like to launch our experiments very early in the morning, Monday or Tuesday. What's early in the morning? It could be around 3am or 4am and then we're monitoring the results just to see how the data is performing, how our different variations are performing. By the fact that we're only launching on a work day and not the weekend. When we start, we eliminate any need to call anybody to work. By launching experiments very early in the morning, we're able to monitor the results and find any issues in the experiment before we actually before people citing our Websites. So those are five things I wish somebody had told me when I started a B testing.

Yeah, those are very, very good points. And I'm sure like some of the people might be making the same mistakes. One of the things that I want to highlight is your second point. Like about high value pages. Like when you said you have to roll out your experiments. I'm sure many people would make the mistake of just allocating 5050 chocolate without even thinking about music. Just rolling out slowly as you say. But that was a really good point.

Now this, by the way, just to also be very clear, it depends on how much traffic and how many conversions and what's the value for you. And I know it varies from one business to the next, but with a company and I go back to ebay and I go back to Target. So with larger enterprise companies where they are getting a ton of of traffic and a ton of conversions for them, a variation that causes a 10% drop, it's even for a day or two, it's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. So in those cases that's when we pay close attention to this stacked rollout of the experiment and the traffic. If you know if your site is not generating a lot of money, you might be losing $200 here, $300 there. Other variations will make up for that. It's probably not worth doing the stacked rollout of an experiment.

Hi Tutankwe. So I'll just move on to the topic of the day which is about abandonment rates in E commerce. So the first question that I have for you is what are the key factors that contribute to high abandonment rates in E commerce and how can businesses effectively address these issues?

So let's talk about the different abandonment rates for E commerce. Every time you mention abandonment rates for E commerce, people think about two rates. Cart abandonment rate and checkout abandonment rate. I think there are a few other ones that we want to pay close attention to. One that really matters a lot to me is what I call the pre product page abandonment traits. Most people don't measure it. I like to measure it. I think it's a very important metric. What is that trait? It's the percentage of visitors who come to your website, different pages of the website, but never make it all the way to the product pages. Remember our goal as an e commerce website, we have several battles that we have to go through. First we need to convince people that we are legitimate, we are trustworthy. Then we need to convince them that we have the right product and then we need to navigate them to that product. Convince them to click on the add to cart and then go to the cart. Start the checkout, place an order. Pre product page abandonment is an important metric because it tells you the percentage of visitors who are landing on the website but never making it all the way to the product pages. Pre product page abandonment should be less than 40%. You should be able to get about 60% of your visitors to your product pages. I have seen websites that are able to do even better than that. But let's say 60% of the visitors is reasonable. If you have a high pre product page abandonment, what you need to do is you need to segment that rate based on the traffic source. Are we struggling with people coming organically? Are we struggling with people coming from paid social? For paid traffic, you want to break it down by device type and you want to break it down by source and medium. That's the very first step. Second step, then you want to think, so these people are coming to the website and leaving. Are they leaving because of trust issues? Correct. This does not look very trustworthy because of messaging that we have on those different pages. How further down are they going? Are they starting from a landing page, going to the category pages, collection pages and then leaving, or are they just landing on a page and leaving right away? Correct. There are different indicators that we want to think through. If we have pages with very high bounce rate, naturally our pre product page abandonment is going to be high. If we, you know, our bounce rate is reasonable, maybe it's like, you know, around between 30 to 50. The 40% were like, okay, the problem is not in trust. The problem is not necessarily in messaging. The problem might be in navigation. The problem might be in the way we laid out our collection pages. The problem might be in the way we've designed the filters. All of these factors contribute to our pre product page abandonment rates. So that's number one. Number two for those visitors who make it all the way to the product pages, whether or not you know they've landed somewhere on the site, went through the collections, got to the product pages, or people who navigated and came all the way to or people who came from an external source got to our product pages. On Google, I have an ad, I click on it at your product page. Another metric, and it's not an abandonment rate metric, but you can always flip it. It's what I call the product page effectiveness rate. What is the percentage of people that got to the product page and clicked on that add to cart button? I don't want them to Convert yet. I just want the click on the add to cart button. Now the percentage of people that click on the add to cart are impacted by many factors. Some of them you have control over the product page layout, the product page design, the copy that you are using on the product pages. Some of them have to do with the average order value. I was looking at a study that we did with one of the companies I work with and about 45% of the visitors said your prices are too high, you are too expensive. Well, guess what? There is a lot that could be done and should be done on product pages to justify prices. The easy way out is to say, oh well, let's offer some coupons. Let's, you know, let's lower our prices. No, that's not a strategy. What we need to do is we need to bunker down and justify our prices to our consumers. So let's say my product page effectiveness rate is 5%. That means the product page abandonment. So we talked about pre product page abandonment. Now I'm talking about the product page abandonment people who got to the product page and abandoned and in this case the abandonment, in this case not leaving the website per se. Correct. But it's not clicking on that add to cart. It's 1 minus the product page effectiveness rate. So 95% of the visitors are actually not clicking on the add to cart button. And that's a very important metric because that metric controls the rest of the site. Now we get to the cart page, somebody adds an item to the cart and instead of starting the checkout, they're like, you know what? Thank you. You know, it's almost like you're walking to a store, to a Walmart. Add items to the cart and instead of going to the checkout line you say, you know what? Yeah, got a call. Goodbye and good luck. I'm just going to leave my cart in the middle of the store. That's another metric that is very important. People who add items to the cart have showed genuine interest in your product. They're not necessarily ready to buy, but they've shown that I am interested, somewhat interested. Why are we losing those now? For most e commerce websites, cart abandonment rates are anywhere between 55 to 65%. The highest abandonment rate, cart abandonment rate I've seen was 98%.

Very, very high.

Now it's for a company that's actually unfortunately went bankrupt a year ago. They sold diamond jewelry. Average order value was about $7,000. So maybe that was a reason. Correct. High average order value. People are worried about buying jewelry Online worried about the quality of the items that they're going to receive. There are many factors played into a 98% cart abandonment rate. And the final metric is the checkout abandonment rate. Checkout abandonments. I started the checkouts, but instead of finishing, I'm going to say, you know what? Yeah, yeah, I'm actually standing in the line at the checkout in the store. You know, I have two, three people ahead of me. I have two people behind me and I'm like, no, I don't want to place the order. And that's a killer metric. That's a metric you want to pay very close attention to. All of these metrics that we talked about are important, but checkout abandonments is even more important because that's a person that is almost ready to pull out their wallets and give you the credit card, but then something happens and they say goodbye and good luck. Now this is something that could happen, could be for many reasons. And we'll talk about some of the reasons. But you want to pay close attention to all of those. If you're able to fix your checkout abandonment rate, your cart abandonment rate. And we'll go back in kind of the opposite order of how we mentioned this stuff. Correct. So check out abandonment rate, card abandonment rates, product abandonment rate, pre product abandonment rate. You're increasing the flow from one area to next to the next in the sites and your site conversion rate is just going to shoot up.

I like how you had to break down like all the leads that you're buying E Commerce, especially like the pre product page abandonment rate. I'm sure like some of the people, they don't really measure that. I just want us to talk about the product page effectiveness. Right. Suppose that you see like that your product page effectiveness rate is kind of like this. Very, very low. What are the three things like on a product page that you usually focus on?

Whenever I look at a product page, I like to do a few things. First, you want to evaluate is there simple UX issues that we see on the page by UX? Sometimes you know, there's the 10 NNg principles that we evaluate on a product page. So that's very simple. Then we look at heroistics version heuristics that we're evaluating on the product page page. We look at the visitor view and how they view, how they interact with the page. All of these can tell you about simple things that you can fix on the page. Now you can use tools such as heat maps, you can use tools like session recording and Watch visitors who got to the product pages and see how they're clicking around. Are they clicking in dead areas where we don't expect them to click? Are they not scrolling down enough to where we have our information available? Most product pages nowadays have the right information, especially for people who have spent time looking at their product pages. They have all the right information, but that information is just thrown on the page without thinking about the visitor and the questions that visitors have. Give you an example, we're working with a large retailer. They sell kitchen appliances. They get a couple million visitors to their site every month. Now every merchandising team, every marketing team is always focused on increasing average order value. So what do they do? As you list the product, you add a section you may also like. You know, you can bundle this product with these other products. So they're trying to upsell the customer. Well, guess what, Most of their customers have not made the decision to buy yet. I haven't even decided to click on the add to cart and you're trying to upsell me already. So sometimes by doing that, you're causing people to leave that product page and go to other pages, which is a huge problem. Even more important, that particular retailer had a Q and A section where people who have questions they've asked and they got answers from other people who have bought the product or from the people who work at the store. The problem is that Q and A section was hidden at the very bottom of the page and somebody had to really dig down to find it by just merely moving that Q and A section above the recommendations, above the bundling. By doing that, we increased conversion rates by 8 or 9%. Simple thing, correct? Just kind of thinking about the visitors, what do the visitors want and giving them that information that was already there on the page. That was an amazingly simple test to implement and it was an amazingly result driven test as well. Drove a lot of results for that company. So think about the UX of the page. Watch session recording, watch heat maps. Try and think about the visitors, how they interact with the page. Now let's say you've done all of that and you're still your product page effectiveness rate is really not high enough. That's when I would do some usability tests. So I try and recruit people from those who are coming to my website and have them actually walk me through in a moderated or unmoderated session. Walk me through and diminish. Maybe they can speak loudly as they're navigating through different products and what they are thinking Number three, that you can do, launch exit intent polls. As people are exiting from the product pages, ask them, hey, why aren't you moving forward with a purchase today and try and collect as much data? Maybe I will launch that poll initially just with simple text box and based on that I will analyze. I have collected 300, 500 inputs from people who are coming to my product pages say oh, people are complaining about prices, people are complaining maybe about the quality of the product, people are complaining that they don't find discount codes. Maybe that's categorize all these answers that you've collected. Launch a second poll to validate. But now it's not going to be a free form text. Now it's actually a poll with three or four different options based on our analysis. With a fifth option to say other and we give them more text if they select others. Like hey, why aren't you placing an order? What is it in our product pages that is stopping you from placing an order? Now the fourth thing that I would do is look at the messaging. Messaging is one of the hardest things that an e commerce website can do and has the most impact on the visitor's persuasion or your ability to persuade a visitor to convert. Now the problem is most e commerce websites have a lot of products. I have a thousand, maybe two thousand products. We work with some companies that have called million products and they're like messaging, yeah, how about it? If you have a limited set of products, your job is easier. But let's say you have a thousand products. Writing copy for a thousand products, it's just horrendous. Correct? No one is going to go through it. So what we need to do is we pull our top 10 best products and write the messaging and measure the impact of that better messaging. Do we justify to write copy and messaging for 10 more products or no, we say not, we didn't get it right. Or maybe our visitors don't really care about the copy. Number five, think about the questions that people have on your product pages and are you answering those questions? It's amazing to me how many times I go to an e commerce website and I think to myself, I have questions, I'm trying to select the right product and I don't find the answers on that particular product page. So what do I do? I go to YouTube, I'm a very visual learner. I go to YouTube and I Google the product and I see videos and I make the decision outside of that retailer's site, which is horrible by the way. Somebody else is influencing me and there's a very good chance if they recommend a particular product, I am going to buy that particular product. So understand the questions that people have. Understand the fears, uncertainties and doubts that people have around the product and answer them on your product pages. I think if you do all of these, it is difficult not to increase your product page effectiveness rates.

Yeah, that's a good point. Also in answering that. Answering that, my second question that I have for you, which is what role do website design and user experience play in reducing abandonment rates?

It's one of those topics that you answer my question, but they're so intertwined. Correct. You cannot talk about one without talking.

About the other one. So I'll move on to the last question that I have for you, which is what are some strategies for optimizing the checkout process to minimize abandonment rates and maximize conversion rates? Are there any common mistakes that businesses make in this area?

Most e commerce websites accept checkout abandonment rates and high checkout abandonment rates as a fact of life. I think they are leaving so much money on the table and there is a lot that could be done about those checkout abandonment rates. So the very first thing that you need to do is understand your checkout abandonment rate. Is it high? Is it low? And now we're talking specifically of people who started the checkout and then decided, I'm going to leave. Now here's the thing. Most e commerce websites see checkout abandonment rates around 35 to 40%, maybe 45%. If you have something much higher than that, then there's a chance that you have a problem. The best checkout that I have seen had an abandonment rate of about 15%. So that means there's lots of hope for many sites that still have 35% abandonment rate and they are happy with it. Now what you need to understand is somebody who started the checkout, they said, okay, I've accepted the store, I trust the store, I think the prices are okay, maybe, and now I'm going to start the checkout. But for some reason they decide to leave. Lots of times we focus on the checkout itself and we forget that checkout abandonment rates might be happening due to reasons outside of the checkout itself. It might have something to do with the messaging. So you need to understand what is the root cause of the problem. Why do we have high abandonment rates in our checkouts? Give you an example, we're working with an e commerce company and they were struggling with logistics. They're like, hey, you know, we're not able to ship the Items really fast. And there are delays in shipping. Should we show during the checkout process, should we show the shipping date of the item? Their first instinct was, no, we should not show it. Let's not add more fears and uncertainties to people and cause higher abandonment. We actually tested that. We said, you know what? I think people want clarity because if somebody is upset that you did not ship the item, guess what, they're canceling the order anyways. So you're not going to trick people into converting. You might trick few people for a little bit of time, but you're not going to trick everybody all the time. So we said, let's test that out. Now, here's the fascinating thing. We were testing the original checkout where we did not mention the checkout rate, the shipping dates. We tested the original where we did not show the shipping dates. We tested a version where the shipping date during the checkout was clear. And we tested a version where the shipping date was there, but it's not as prominent. Which version do you think won between those three?

I think these shipping dates?

Yeah. So it's not the clear one. So we had to mention the checkout, we had to mention the product shipping date, but it did not need to be very prominent. But it is there so visitors can see it. We're not hiding it, but at the same time, we're not making it as prominent as the rest of the page. And that gave almost 15% lift in conversions, reduced checkout abandonment rate. So we answered a question that people had. We answered it, and we answered it very clearly in the checkout process. Now, the other thing that you want to focus on is if there are any UX issues in the checkout. Lots of times people have checkout, they don't pay attention to it. They put it together. But checkout could be confusing. Sometimes there's silly things such as somebody inputting the wrong information. The system is throwing an error without telling people what the error is. Today in the morning, my daughter was trying to buy a day pass for the train. Very simple. It's $10. And she's like, I can't place an order. I'm clicking and she already added the item. She has to catch the train in half an hour. She's in a rush and she is highly motivated because she wants to buy the day pass before she goes to the train station. I look at it, I'm like, oh, there is a bug, probably in their software. I reload the page, I'm looking at it on a mobile device, and then it Hit me. It was not highlighted and she completely missed it. It she needed to select the payment method. Now, you would think, hey, lady, no one can actually place an order without actually putting a payment method. But it was not very clear to her. She thought that she was going to put the payment method on a second page. That is very silly UX issue. And that's if I have a high checkout abandonment rate. I would actually bunker down every week and I would pull my session recording software. I would watch people that started the checkout but never actually place an order. Watch those session recording, try and decipher what people are doing on the website. Are they struggling? What are they struggling with? This was something really simple, but I'm sure Metro here in Chicago is losing quite a bit of people who are just basically frustrated trying to figure out where to place an order and they can't. And they're like, you know what? Okay, I'll just go buy the ticket when I go to the staging number three. Don't surprise visitors during the checkout process. You'll be surprised how many e commerce websites surprise their visitors. They surprise them sometimes with shipping charges that they did not account for. They surprise them by showing shipping dates. We talked about shipping dates. It's like, oh, this item is going to ship in three weeks. It's like, hold up, you didn't mention this to me. So you want to mention shipping date before and you want to mention it again during checkout. So you're not surprising the visitors. Now, an exit intent poll as people are leaving the checkout without placing an order is excellent. Hey, why are you leaving without placing an order? Ask people and find out why they are leaving. A culprit for checkout abandonment rate. Horrendous culprit. Sometimes either on the cart or the checkout is discount codes. I fall for them all the time. I'm about to place an order. It's for an expensive item, but spend like a thousand dollars. And I see that there's discount code and I'm like, ooh, oh, this item could be $200 cheaper. I am gonna go and search and search and search. So it's funny, remember I got you a laptop three, four months ago. You're like, hey, it's just better to get from the US I was about to place an order and I'm leaving tomorrow and I see that like, and I was on one of the retailer's website and I'm like, oh, I wonder if I can get it cheaper. So I start searching and I couldn't find a coupon. I mean all these coupon sites that pretend to have coupons, but they don't have coupons, complete waste of time. Then I'm like, oh, maybe student discount. Maybe my daughter should buy the laptop for Simba. Then I'm like, I'm not going to go through that. All of these things sometimes you do not have control over as a retailer, but you need to be aware of them and you need to deal with them and address them. If you don't have any particular sales, why show that discount promo code if you don't have it? Why are we showing it to people where people like say, oh, maybe I could be saving on this, on this order. Before you introduce an element to the cart or the checkout, pay close attention to the impact it will have on the mind of visitors.

That's a good point. Also, when it comes to checkout, I think one of the main reasons that I see like people maybe kind of like complain about is the length of it. How long is it? Because some of the checkouts are very long and very complicated. So want to ask you, how long should it be?

Yeah, so less is better. When it comes to forms and the length of the checkout and the forms. Lots of times people ask for fields and I'm like, why are you even asking for this? What are you doing with this data? Well, you know, marketing wants it great, but they have not done anything with it in the last five years and they're not going to do anything with it in the next five years. So unless you really, really want it and you can justify why you're adding it there, then don't have it on your checkout. Every field that you add will cause a drop in conversion rates. Now would that drop? I don't know. It might cause a 2% drop, it might cause a 1% drop. There's different studies. I think it's different from one website to the next. Make it simple, make it very clear. I mean, I go as far as when it comes to simplifying the orders, people love to have first name, last name. I'm like, you know what? I don't need first name, last name, fields. I can have one field name my developer can write. Simple. JavaScript can split the name for me. That's to the level that I want. I like to see address validation. You start typing the address, it validates automatically. I don't have to fill the city, the zip code, all that good stuff. Correct. I want to make life very easy for people to place an order with me. And if there is an error, I want to be very clear to highlight the error fields correct on the form. You made me fill 20 field form and then you're telling me that there's a problem, but you're not telling me where the problem is. And I'm like, okay, you know, I'm like, that is just lazy. Lazy marketing and lazy development. So test it out. Use software to monitor the performance of your forms during the checkouts. Go for shorter. It will perform better than longer.

Yeah, I think those are good points because like the idea of swing online, the process has to be fast and painless. I think those are the questions that I had for you today. Awesome.

I enjoyed it. Simba. And we shall come back next week.

So I'm listening to you and I share something?

No, no. I think next week the big thing is going to be GA4 and the migration to GA4. 30% of the companies that we're working with have not done serious migration. I mean, they've dropped the scripts on their side, but that's not the full implementation of GA4. So everybody is panicking at this point. Lil Ray, who's well known in the SEO community, she posted something and I think she's just jokingly, she still hopes that Google is going to say, oh, we're going to give you an extension From Universal to GA4. I don't think they'll do that. I think that sets a precedent that's really not acceptable for them. So they are forcing everybody to GA4. So watch what's going to happen in the industry in the next three to six months. It will be very interesting and fascinating. Anything to see how that goes?

Yes.

Awesome. Until next week. Thank you everyone, and happy testing.

Bye.