Across Blue Acorn’s clients, we’ve found that a good checkout success rate (meaning visitors who view the checkout process and then the success page) is 60% or above. A rate between 50-60% could use some improvements, but a rate under 50% is a signal that your process needs some immediate attention.

Calculating Your Checkout Success

Before you make improvements, you’ll have to know how much you need to improve first. Determining your checkout success rate in Analytics is a relatively easy process if you’re running Magento. First, go to All Pages under the Content section in Analytics on the left-hand menu.

In the filter box, type checkout and then click the magnifying glass.

If you’re running the stock Magento checkout, you’ll be looking for two things: /checkout/onepage/ and /checkout/onepage/success. The unique pageviews are what we’ll use to calculate checkout success.

You’ll want to divide the number of unique page views of the success page by the number of people who have viewed the checkout. In this example, it’s 5885/9900 for a checkout success of 59%. If you find your checkout process can use some work, there are generally a few things you can do to improve it.

Getting More Detailed Data

At Blue Acorn, we make intelligent decisions based on what data is telling us. Often times, this requires collecting more detailed data before making a decision. For example, in optimizing your checkout, advanced Analytics tagging will tell us exactly where in the checkout process visitors are leaving. This allows you to prioritize which part of the checkout needs attention first. The screenshot below shows a client that is using advance Analytics tagging to track steps in their checkout.

By just quickly looking at the data above, you can conclude that something in the billing section is preventing customers from reviewing their order.

Using Checkout Best Practices

Removing distractions

There are a few things you can do to help improve your checkout success by sticking to some best practices. One of the easiest approaches is removing elements that cause friction or distraction with users. This includes removing extra fields that are not needed (i.e. fax number) and completely removing website navigation. In regards to the last suggestion, one of our clients had 87,000 visitors leave the checkout process within the last year because of a particular element of the website navigation.

Building confidence

Adding confidence builders to your checkout can also increase conversion rates. This includes making any warranties and guarantees easily visible. Site security badges and your acceptance of varying payment options increases confidence as well. The main point of confidence builders is to take away the feeling of risk that a visitor may have from purchasing from your website.

Knowing your audience

For example, an eCommerce manager working for a store that sells mobile phone accessories should be aware that a significant amount of visitors will be visiting from a mobile device. Having a mobile-optimized checkout will likely increase the checkout success. If you’re not sure if your site is optimized for mobile, you can find out how to access that information here.

Testing Your Changes

Not every change you make to your checkout is guaranteed to increase the checkout success. Sometimes, you may find your changes have a negative effect. It’s important to use a testing tool that will allow you to test your changes (hypothesis) before you commit to expensive development time. By taking it step by step and ensuring that you are moving in the right direction after each change, you can achieve a 60% checkout success rate in no time.