Imagine walking into a shopping mall and having the wrong currency, or an oddball credit card no merchant will accept. Many shoppers face that situation today; they have the wrong kind of money when they want to buy something online. It isn't because they frequent an overseas storefront that only takes Lira or Francs or something other than dollars. Online stores have bizarre checkout processes that do everything they can to discourage shoppers from completing a purchase. Customers want to buy from your store, but you won't let them pay. 

A report from Creative Good, Holiday 2002 eCommerce, describes these and other troubling results. They conducted experiments on six popular storefront sites, noting where 50 shoppers went and how they navigated each site during typical purchases. The stores -- the Gap, BestBuy, Amazon, and eToys among others -- were tested with experienced Internet users who had successfully made prior online purchases, had bought gifts online last season, or were considering doing so this fall. The golden target audience for eCommerce, right? Try as they might though, they weren't able to buy.

The most common cause for failure was checkout problems. Sure, there were other issues, such as customers failing to find their products, or pages loaded too slowly, but the difficulties in checking out and completing a purchase were huge. The study found customers failed to complete an order 40% of the time.

Many sites have two customer paths: one for returning shoppers and one for new shoppers to the storefront. Confusion over these two paths accounted for some of the checkout failures. Many new customers took the path for returning customers, only to find out their mistake too far into the process. Other sites required customers to create an account before making any purchase. (Got any Lira in your wallet?) And some of the sites' error messages were confusing enough that customers abandoned the checkout process entirely. Talk about your blue screen of death (the ultimate error message under Windows -- your machine just crashes)! There are more details in the report, which you can download for free provided you fill out the registration form on this page:

http://www.creativegood.com/holiday2000/

As an experiment, Creative Good decided to redesign one of the storefronts. They found that using the production version, 70% of customers failed to complete a purchase. On the redesign, 80% succeeded in buying a gift. That is an amazing conversion, and a sobering one if you add up all the lost sales implied by the experiment.

The point I am trying to make here is a simple one. Make your site plain and easy to use, and more people will buy stuff from your store. Make it complex, and your customers will go elsewhere. Sites willing to spend millions dressing it up with the latest Flash and Shockwave visual gee-gaws should divert a few dollars and watch how real people navigate their pages. You might find the money you have invested to pay big dividends.