[Sigia-l] Shopping Basket

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

On 18 January 2011 13:16, Louise Hewitt <louise.hewitt at gmail.com> wrote:

>  > 6. What about the upsells? (sorry, I work ecomm). Many sites will use
> the
> > shopping cart to sell that final upsell. Need a warranty to go with that
> > watch? Or the belt to go with those shoes? A lot of ecomm platforms offer
> > upsell products in the shopping cart for additional sales before starting
> > checkout.
> >
> RE Jonathon - this is the kind of messaging I worry will be lost
> (particularly the 'comfort' stuff like charges and policies) in a slimline
> overlay approach. In losing the dedicated space, those who would like to
> have that sort of stuff won't get to see it.
>

Changing the goalposts, eh? :-) If up/crossell is an issue, then we're on a
different playing field (although still not one where I'd rule out removing
the cart step to solve those issues).


>
>
> > I'd be curious to see/hear what your checkout flow is going to look like.
> > Multi-step? Single page? UI presentation? Etc. There's alllll sorts of
> > debates and  back and forth on "the best checkout" that continues to rage
> on
> > (in a good way, of course :) ) but I understand client confidentiality.
> >
>

I don't think I'd be revealing too much when I report that we have been
running a three-way test between very different checkout paths (a two-step,
a three-step and a single step) solidly for the best part of two YEARS
across about 10 points of sale, and in that time have run various tests
within those tests on each main variant. There has been no clear winner yet,
and most of the sub-tests barely move the needle. On the evidence I have
from that, it would seem you could make customers place their orders with
SQL queries and it would barely affect conversion. Could it be that once you
are that far down, design becomes irrelevant? It's certainly the case that
UI tests at the top of the funnel show variations in conversion and other
metrics that are usually an order of magnitude more violent than anything we
do down by the booking form. Mind you, we also invite people to place orders
with a toll-free call (which tend to convert extremely highly) so that's
worth considering :-)

Jonathan