2 Testing Ideas for Reducing Checkout Abandonment

As a blogger, I love receiving emails from readers sharing the results they've received from testing out ideas shared on Get Elastic on their own shops. The following is a message I received from Robert Hodgson from Bandanashop.com:

Bandanashop.com is a family owned business operating in a niche, selling bandanas and headwear worldwide. We try and compete by offering responsive customer service, rapid shipping and technology, and have used several design elements featured in Get Elastic articles. After reading Linda's blog on persistent cookies we realised that although we store basket details (as cookies) for 30+ days we weren't actually telling our customers that.

Using Google Website Optimiser to run an A/B test, this one small change resulted in a 16.5% increase in sales from the MyBasket page. We used the text "Your Basket contents are stored here for 30+ days so you can return anytime." It seems that telling some customers is enough for
them to come back rather than abandon, confident that they can pick up where they left off.

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As an aside, on the same page we had a 'Jared Spool' moment changing the checkout button from "Checkout" to "Start Checkout." This call-to-action gave us a 43% conversion improvement (confidence interval of 97.5%). This was also inspired by the 'brain-food' from Get Elastic!

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To sum up, Robert saw significant improvements by testing 2 simple things in the checkout:

1. Telling customers how long their cart contents will be held on the shopping cart summary page
2. Labeling the "Checkout" button "Start Checkout"

These 2 changes would be easy for any online store to try (they're not industry or market specific) - I challenge you to consider these tactics in your next checkout test!

Thanks to Robert for sharing his test results. If you would like to have your A/B or multivariate test results featured on Get Elastic, ping me at linda.bustos @ elasticpath.com.