16 ms·

Which has more sales: a single long checkout form or a multi-step one?

336 points by jkuria 7y ago

paulcole 7y ago
If there’s no statistical difference between them, then the multi-step is the better choice. Capture their email early and follow up about cart abandonment.
- moksly 7y ago
  Wouldn’t this be a GDPR violation, unless you harvested consent first?
  - fyfy18 7y ago
    You don't need consent if the data is being collected for a specific purpose. It's not clear cut, but IMHO cart abandonment would be acceptable. The user has entered their email on your cart, signifying their intention to make a purchase, and cart abandonment email is just following up from that. Say you phoned a company to enquire about some new windows and receive an estimate, if they call you back a few days later you wouldn't be that surprised. However you wouldn't want them to phone you every month until you buy from them, or to give/sell your phone number to another company without consent (maybe you need roofing too?).
    - iovrthoughtthis 7y ago
      I don’t think this would be the case here. You would need to show that a person entering their email into an input expected that email to be stored by the other party without submitting the form.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      > You don't need consent if the data is being collected for a specific purpose. It's not clear cut, but IMHO cart abandonment would be acceptable. The user has entered their email on your cart, signifying their intention to make a purchase, and cart abandonment email is just following up from that. This is based of an assumption that cart abandonment is some sort of mistake. What I would guess usually happens (based on my experience with shopping online) is that stopping just one step shy of actual payment is the only way for the customer to get the total cost of orders, that includes discounts and shipping costs. When I close the page at this point, it doesn't mean I got distracted - it means that once I finally got to see the actual costs, I decided not to proceed. > Say you phoned a company to enquire about some new windows and receive an estimate, if they call you back a few days later you wouldn't be that surprised. I wouldn't be surprised, but I wouldn't be happy about it either. If I asked for an estimate, I asked because you didn't publish the costs up-front, and I need them to make my decision (whether by comparing with my budget, or the price offered by competition). If I wanted to buy from you, I'd call again.
    - dkersten 7y ago
      It was my understanding that the “specific purpose” had to be “the technical functioning of the site or service” (and also any transactional mail, like sending order receipts), not literally any specific purpose. Selling your details to the highest bidder is a specific purpose after all. If the company calling you back isn’t unsolicited (ie I asked them to or they told me they would and I said OK), then its an expected part of the interaction. Cart abandonment emails are not expected or even necessary (from the customers point of view). If I called a company and they called me back days later, without telling me they would or asking if I mind, I would absolutely report them for that too. (At least in my country, data protection says they can’t do this) Cart abandonment is just like any other marketing and honestly, I report any cart abandonment emails I receive as GDPR violations to my local data protection commission.
      - GordonS 7y ago
        You are correct, the consent exceptions are only for functionality vital to the operation of the site, such as a cookie to store your shopping cart - not for marketing in any form.
    - zaarn 7y ago
      In Germany that callback would likely fall under unsolicited phone calls (around 2k€ or more if it's B2B). Unless you have a commercial relationship with a customer, don't assume you can email them anything or phone them up.
  - qznc 7y ago
    Personally, I believe sending the form is enough of consent. However, currently there is probably no lawyer who dares to say that officially. Everybody is still too afraid.
    - TuringTest 7y ago
      Sure, as long as you've shown the mandatory "request presented in clear and plain language to provide consent by an affirmative act (such as checking a box online or signing a form)"[1], make it clear that sending the form is considered consent, and describe explicitly the process by which such consent can be revoked. [1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers/data-protection/data-protection-gdpr/index_en.htm#shortcut-7-agreeing-to-data-processing-consent https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...
- gruez 7y ago
  If you really wanted, you could do the same with one step checkout by silently submitting the email using an onblur on the email field.
- anonytrary 7y ago
  Or just track their every input and send their email to your servers when they move to the next field... /s...?
  - ehnto 7y ago
    Worked at a company that did actually do this. It was because they were building the profile up as a lead to sell to service providers. They got the legal compliance as a checkbox during the process. The whole process had 15+ steps and it was when I learned that we were all wrong about how many clicks and actions a user is willing to go through to get a result.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      Does it count as consent given when the user checks the checkbox but doesn't actively submit the form, so doesn't expect that it was noticed? I'm not so sure about this, did your legal team see it that way? Feels like filling out a paper order form to buy something but not mailing it.
      - ehnto 7y ago
        It was pretty clear which was important to them. The whole form was a paragraph about the implications of the agreement and then you accept it with a button. No button confirmation, no agreement and without that they wouldn't sell or keep the lead. They were trying to be as possible given the industry. Still lead gen, but they did their best to be clear and ethical.
      - anonytrary 7y ago
        This does sound like a dilemma. I think the rules should be different for the web since the web is arguably more powerful than paper mail. As soon as you tell an internet form something, just assume you've mailed your response for that particular thing, even if the whole form isn't done yet. I think the whole "if something can happen, it will happen" rule works nicely here. You can write on paper all you want, but the recipient will never be able to know what you wrote unless you explicitly mail them or send them a copy of the paper. On the other hand, for the web, it is very possible for the client to send the server information at any time.
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
  Do something creepy like that to someone in the EU and you could well get a big fine! EDIT: this is a clear GDPR violation - you can't store and use user data without a lawful basis. Marketing requires consent. Consent has to be given freely. EDIT: even if you worm out of the fine people hate getting unsolicited email like this so some non zero percentage of potential customers will avoid your business in the future.
  - 2T1Qka0rEiPr 7y ago
    I'm not sure I completely buy the "creepy" nature of this, or that everyone hates getting unsolicited emails - AFAIK this is a clear GDPR violation. In my previous company we rewrote our checkout flow for this reason. Capturing emails and offering certain consumers discounts via emails after a few hours etc. was a successful move (given that a certain % of people will drop due to price sensitivity) - but GDPR removing that choice is a clearly a good thing for the majority who drop for other reasons.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      I can't remember which one, but a large shopping cart as a service provider does this (minus the discounts, or at least I didn't get them) for abandoned shopping carts where you've entered your email but didn't proceed to buy. Happened to me quite a few times because they only show shipping cost later on and they'd often be prohibitively expensive to ship to my country. As for creepy: I wouldn't consider these creepy (i.e. where I've entered my email), but maybe annoying. I had the creepy experience with Pavlok when I first looked into getting one. Browsed around on their site but didn't put one into the cart. Hours later I get an email from them. Turns out they were using some service that loads a beacon and tries to connect the browser via various third party services to an email address. That was creepy. I still ended up buying a Pavlok though, but at a later time.
      - oarsinsync 7y ago
        I think this is something that has become normalised and is no longer creepy, simply by virtue of how many stores do it. If I abandon a basket in a retail store, I don't expect a phone call about it hours later after I've left the store and gone home. The first time an online-store followed up with an email about my abandoned basket, I stopped using that store. Not naive enough to think other stores aren't tracking these metrics, but it's still creepy unless you've been subjected the obviousness of it a lot.
- ddebernardy 7y ago
  Actually, it's better to capture the email last, once they've committed every other piece of information as a sunk cost, and ideally make entering an email optional to boot in order to reduce friction. The need to create an account is one of the main reason that shopping carts - and for that matter, SaaS signup forms - get abandoned.
  - saurik 7y ago
    ...doesn't that analysis violate the premise of "if there's no statistical difference between them"?
  - ehnto 7y ago
    How could you run a paid SaaS without an email address? Phone number as a contact? I wouldn't give a phone number to a company I didn't trust with an email address either. I could invisage a SaaS without ANY personal information, but if that even legal to do if you're taking credit card payments?
    - ddebernardy 7y ago
      Oh, sorry for the misunderstand. I mostly meant this for e-commerce and for a SaaS' informal trial part only, not the part where you actually need to create an account. In e-commerce cases, you're usually just fine with an address (since you need to ship), an email or phone or some kind of order tracking ID. In most SaaS cases you can ask for nothing - literally - as visitors try out your product. Allow them right in, and sprinkle a few "sign up" links or forms where appropriate. Build trust, basically. More often than not, you can delay creating an account proper until you're beginning the formal trial period or processing the credit card.
      - ehnto 7y ago
        I totally agree in regards to starting a SaaS onboarding process and ask for nothing. In fact I did that with a page builder I once built. Basically it dropped you right into the page building tool itself, so you could play and build a page. Then to save the page you just entered an email and password. It was excellent at converting into trial accounts. The platform had other problems and wasn't successful, but I was really proud of the painless onboarding process.
gesman 7y ago
I coming from school where single long checkout form suppose to be the best idea. Back quite a few years ago I sold onepagecheckout.com domain for a chunk of cash. Just 2 days ago I purchased very expensive laptop via multi page checkout process which I really appreciated. The key was to remind customer what he is buying, all options, warranty, shipping etc - make sure the complicated configuration is delivered in clear way. Gigantic one page thing would be less welcome
- davedx 7y ago
  Yep. I work in e-commerce selling cars (entire process is digital). We try to break down and explain each step because they're quite high impact decisions for the final amount and product.
- mobjack 7y ago
  I find from my AB testing is that mobile users are much sensitive to changes to checkout. A big one page checkout could work on desktop machines since they have the real estate to work with. This can be a poor experience on mobile as you need lots of scrolling to access all the fields and options.
- magduf 7y ago
  I think this is a case where one size doesn't fit all. For a laptop, or a car as the other poster mentioned, it's high cost, and there's many options. Whereas if you're just buying some simple items that have no options at all, you don't need a complicated checkout, just a list of the items and the taxes and shipping cost.
sesteel 7y ago
This is exactly the kind of post I come to HN to read. Thank you for posting this as it attempts to answer an interesting question I didn't even think to ask.
- jkuria 7y ago
  Glad to hear this. Apparently, unfortunately, for many HN'ers, this is exactly the kind of post they don't want to see! There has been a movement clamoring for a pure tech HN without any marketing business-y type of stuff. Only articles about the finer points of segment tuning and tweaking x86 assembly registers! Or all the reasons why classes can never really approach the elegance and terseness of classic K&R C structs. Or how Common Lisp and Scheme have this and that and the other but only that and no more :) The former are really life skills that make even the most hardcore techies more effective human beings!
  - amelius 7y ago
    > Glad to hear this. Apparently, unfortunately, for many HN'ers, this is exactly the kind of post they don't want to see! There has been a movement clamoring for a pure tech HN without any marketing business-y type of stuff. Or ... perhaps many HN folks just hate the concept of hacking the human brain to generate more sales.
    - sesteel 7y ago
      True, but it seems knowing how I'm being hacked helps me avoid it. There are several comments in this thread that share devious methods for increasing conversion. Now I know some new things to look out for.
- darkwizard42 7y ago
  I'm seconding this. I'm also really enjoying the discussion thats coming from people who have run online stores/checkouts. Its an entire world that I don't really spend time in, but lots of the techniques feel really relevant as I do plenty of checking out online.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jchw 7y ago
I like this. I wonder how the 'create an account' problem is best solved. Some sites (like Bandcamp) explicitly don't require accounts, and just associate purchases with e-mail addresses until you create an account. Other sites sometimes will give you an account with just an e-mail address, then allow either resetting password or 'magic links' (a la Slack) that log you in from an e-mail. I think for simplicity, it's probably best to abstract e-mails from accounts, so from a data model PoV, which thing do you ideally associate a purchase with, a phantom account or email addresses directly? Side note: I worry that skipping the cart review mostly loses customers because they begin having second thoughts. While adding this step may reduce conversion, it may be more ethical to include it as it may improve user's decision making.
- dkersten 7y ago
  > Side note: I worry that skipping the cart review mostly loses customers because they begin having second thoughts. While adding this step may reduce conversion, it may be more ethical to include it as it may improve user's decision making. I’ve personally abandoned plans to purchase because it wasn’t clear if I would get a chance to review at the end. Its especially important if its unclear what the final price will be, after applying shipping and such, since I live outside the US. Anecdotally, I’m much more likely to buy if its very clearly stated that there is a review step. I know that more impatient people might be the opposite way around, though.
  - meowface 7y ago
    I don't personally care about an intermediate cart page. Just as long as there's at least a cart page or purchase page which shows the item name/title, item photo, and item price for each item, and the grand total (including taxes and shipping). Most checkout pages I've seen have that information, so even if the confirm and pay steps are on the same page, I don't mind since it's still the same information anyway.
- johannes1234321 7y ago
  In GDPR-land the customer has to confirm, that the shop may store the e-mail (or other data) for more than full filling the single order. So there is need for at least a checkbox. And yeah, using a mail address for login is certainly better than coming up with a user name, which is free and which you remember in a year's time.
nikanj 7y ago
They don’t mention the winning one: A single short checkout. Purchase funnels are filled with account creations, newsletter sign-ups and other crap. I don’t want an account, I want to give you money.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  I love using Apple Pay on websites, so fast that I avoid shopping around.
  - lathiat 7y ago
    Yes; sites with Apple Pay get purchases from me almost instantly. It's a good way to battle people otherwise preferring to use a platform they already have an account on (e.g. eBay; Amazon) where you lose more on commission.
    - jaimex2 7y ago
      Not really what being compared here though. eBay, Amazon run the whole site.
      - thaumasiotes 7y ago
        Amazon operates a payment service, and eBay used to. Using Amazon to pay doesn't mean you're buying something on amazon.com, just as using PayPal to pay doesn't mean you're buying something on ebay.com .
    - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
      Etsy has done extremely well with this! If my SO or I are talking about something there, it’s an almost certainty that one of us will press thumb to purchase. It’s too easy.
- mkohlmyr 7y ago
  As someone who previously worked in ecommerce marketing, many of these practices certainly would cause more drop-off in the funnel. I would suggest that the idea is that losing X% of first-time customers isn't such a big deal if you can increase LTV by Y% through marketing efforts otherwise not available to you. That being said I don't really think the average marketing team has thought it through to this point (or measures the outcomes). But nevertheless it's perhaps why they see positive results.
mikekchar 7y ago
Interesting for me is the amount of abandonment on for the "unexpected shipping costs" issue. I actually have this issue right now. I'm trying to buy cheesemaking cultures and because I'm half way around the world form most of the places that sell this stuff shipping can be more expensive than the thing I'm buying. It really bugs me that shipping calculation is usually last in the multi-page cart layouts. I definitely abandon because I'm not willing to enter all of that detail before I know how much I'm going to be spending.
- JeanMarcS 7y ago
  That’s one of the first thing I look for on an website: the shipping policy and amount. If it’s not present (or too well hidden) I usually try another website. I too hate the unpleasant surprise of high shipping costs
  - Cerium 7y ago
    My number one complaint of shopify is that they require email first to see shipping, which means I'll get a "what's wrong? Forgot your cart?" Email later that day.
    - pwodhouse 7y ago
      Take the opportunity to tell them what's wrong: that you want shipping costs up front. Then create a spam filter for the site and be happy to stuck a blow for justice that may help customers in future.
    - _jal 7y ago
      You want your own domain. I don't know how I'd cope with the mess the internet is without an infinite supply of disposable email addresses. The next question I always get is about how annoying it is to go make an email address in the middle of checking out is. I personally always have a shell open - I'm a command line person. So I just run a script, `nem spammystore-com190621`, done. (And then `dem spammystorewhatever` when they start annoying me.) I've fantasized about writing a browser plugin that scans the page for entered email addresses and shells out to create them on submit, but (a) I'm not even sure that's entirely possible anymore, and (b) wiring my browser up to something that runs sudo on remote machines seems like maybe not the best idea I've ever had.
throwawaylolx 7y ago
Hardly any details about the experiment design or why we should believe the results should generalise outside of whatever they're doing on that website. I don't see the point of reading results if there is no reason to believe the experiment and methodology were sound.
sklivvz1971 7y ago
Warning: bad statistics abound in the article. If you can't spot them, let me explain a bit why statistics do not work that way. A _lot_ of data is necessary to call a result if the effect is relatively small. If not enough samples are taken, there will still be a "formal" result, but the level of certainty of it will be low. Of course, depending on how accessible that page is, it might take a very long time to achieve significance. How much certainty do we need in the result? P-values are generally considered not a great measure, but they are standard, and they are what they are using (if I understand correctly). This can give you an idea of the numbers we'd like to see for that value: https://xkcd.com/1478/ https://xkcd.com/1478/ In other words, only the first A/B test has conclusive results: accordion is worse than wizard by 30% with 0.01 p-value. Of course, you can see that there's a significant result _because the effect is large_. Note that this gives us an idea of the _resolution_ of their test system (i.e., how many As and Bs they have and how much effect they can see with their test). So we know they see an effect of about 30% change. Now: all the other results are wrongly reported. The next four are mistakenly reported as "no statistically significant difference in performance." This is a false statement. Having high p-values means that any effect is below the resolution achievable with those numbers. In other words, the correct statement would be either "the experiment was inconclusive" or "the effect, if any, is less than 30% change". This is quite different from claiming "no change." The last result has 28%, and it has a p-value of 0.05. I would _not_ accept it at face value. Such a p-value means the result has 1-in-20 chances of being due to a random fluctuation of data. There are six such experiments just in the post, so it's not unthinkable that the effect could be a fluke. More info on this here: https://www.xkcd.com/882/ https://www.xkcd.com/882/ All in all, the only result found is that _in their case_ the wizard was much more effective than the accordion. The rest is not supported by the facts presented and furthermore any generalization of the result outside their particular case is unwarranted.
- danaris 7y ago
  > The next four are mistakenly reported as "no statistically significant difference in performance." This is a false statement. Having high p-values means that any effect is below the resolution achievable with those numbers. No...that's what "no statistically significant difference" means. In these kinds of statistical tests, literally all you can look for is a statistically significant difference. Either you find one, or you don't. Once you know that you've found one, you can say what size it is—a difference of 0.1% is still plenty statistically significant if your p-value is <0.001. It's just not very practically significant. There are a lot of different reasons you might not find a statistically significant difference, and simply knowing the p-values cannot tell you which ones are true here. That's why a lot of journals (at least in Psychology, the field I have some knowledge about) have been pushing for reporting additional tests and measures.
nottorp 7y ago
How about selling something useful and worrying less about the cart design?
- murph37 7y ago
  Yes, let's build something useful and not worry about how they are going to give us money for it.
  - nottorp 7y ago
    All these online store studies sound like they honestly believe that design will improve sales more than the appeaal of the merchandise ;)
    - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
      You're being downvoted but you do raise a valid point. I've been willing to fight with some pretty awful checkouts in the past to buy something I really want, or to buy from someone I really want to do business with.
- magduf 7y ago
  If you're just a reseller of mass-produced goods available at many other resellers, then having a crappy cart design means customers go to your competitors instead.
734129837261 7y ago
I remember doing A/B testing on this for a multinational multi-billion dollar company's website. The learning was to never surprise the customer. Show the sum total before they even get to the checkout process. And stay true to it. What proved conclusively positive was adding a discount to the checkout process (a time-limited one did not prove successful). Just to make the customer feel that they're getting a good deal. Once the customer was on the checkout form we'd display: "This product is almost out of stock," and when they for some reason come back to the product page or listing, we'd show: "43 people are looking at this product." Which created a sense of urgency. This strategy wasn't legal in all countries, because it was 100% fake, but it worked wonders where it could be displayed. Customer satisfaction skyrocketed, so... evil as it might be, it only created happy people.
- wil421 7y ago
  >43 people are looking at this product. Hotels.com and a couple other websites were doing that to me the other day. I had a feeling it was bogus. You did have me at discount. I shop the same brands that I like and know. If I’m offered a discount I’ll buy 90% of the time. If it’s a brand I haven’t heard of or bought previously it’s much lower.
  - CamelCaseName 7y ago
    >I shop the same brands that I like and know. If I’m offered a discount I’ll buy 90% of the time. But if you get a discount a non-negligible amount of the time, you may stop buying unless you're getting the discount. The discounted price will become the 'true' price.
  - jerf 7y ago
    "I had a feeling it was bogus." I've always ignored those sorts of things entirely, on the theory that I don't believe the entities in question are capable or willing to put the engineering effort to provide a number accurate to two significant digits at scale. Also the numbers are often implausibly large. If there's "one" of an item left and "43 people" are "currently looking" at it, then the problem isn't that I need to hurry up and buy it, the problem is that you've utterly failed at one of your basic tasks, stocking correctly for demand. In general, businesses are actually really good at that; it's literally life and death for them, so the idea that every single thing on their site is just on the verge of selling out unless you get it now is just absurd. I've been trying to train myself to ignore "discounts" too, unless I can prove to myself that there really is a difference between the "real" price and the "discounted" price and there is some specific reason that I'm getting the latter. Or to put it another way, "customers in general" don't get discounts. You can get a discount if you are "a price discriminating customer willing to hunt for coupon codes", or "a friend of the proprietor", or something specific, but you are never just handed a discount. Those discounts are discounts... they're just the price.
underdown 7y ago
Split tests are not generalizable. This "research" means almost nothing for your checkout process.
benmorris 7y ago
I removed all registration and login components during checkout. Most people have an auto complete setup on their browser now and most of my sales are first time customers. Granted I have a small subset of return customers that ask for it, but I know from years past introducing registration opens up a whole set of barriers to the checkout process. Order confirmation pages are essentially a page they can return to at any point in the future without logging in. I also removed the coupon code box completely from checkout. I used to get bombarded with requests for discount codes and people not getting their codes to work. In reality the way I used codes were in email promotions. I switched to instant redeeming clickable codes in emails and removed it all the boxes on the site. I also know it was a significant factor in checkout flow because I could google "mybrand.com " into google and google instantly starting adding in "mybrand.com coupon codes" "mybrand.com promo codes". People see the coupon code box and immediately head to Google to search for codes. PayPal Express checkout is still a huge choice for customers. They can choose express checkout or standard checkout flow. Many people use it (30-40%). It removes the need to enter their address as well.
- deelly 7y ago
  Love to see some A/B testing of you approach.
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  > Order confirmation pages are essentially a page they can return to at any point in the future without logging in. Do they need to have the URL to do so? Hmm, I suppose one could have a feature, without accounts, where you enter your email address and get emailed to you (at that address), your order history with links to individual orders. I think you are right that at most ecommerce sites, registration does not provide too much value for the user (and is a barrier to sales). I know I am always annoyed when an ecommerce site asks me to or makes me register, and if given the option almost always choose not to register. (Exceptions for sites I use very regularly; maybe everyone is hoping their site will be one of these. :) )
  - benmorris 7y ago
    I encourage people to save their order confirmation email which contains a secure URL back to the website which has their original order and links to reorder the same items. Simple and effective. I've used this method for about 8 years.
imafish 7y ago
The site seems dead. Cached version here: https://web.archive.org/web/20190621120031/https://capitalandgrowth.org/questions/2055/which-has-a-higher-conversion-rate-a-single-long-e.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190621120031/https://capitalan...
dotdi 7y ago
It seems the site died due to HN's hug of death. You can still read the text here[0] but images are not loading. --- [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190621031723/https://capitalandgrowth.org/questions/2055/which-has-a-higher-conversion-rate-a-single-long-e.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190621031723/https://capitalan...
nickjj 7y ago
I find that most digital products that you buy require creating an account because typically the account you create is how you gain access to what you're buying. I'm designing a checkout page right now where I planned to do a small 1 pager with an email address + minimal billing info required to make a transaction while minimizing CC fraud. Knowing the email (aka. account) before the checkout actually happens is essential because it would allow you to prevent someone from buying the same item twice. If you don't collect an email address pre-transaction, how would you do that for a digital item?
kerkeslager 7y ago
I would love to hear someone justify how multi-stage forms are ever good for the user. It seems to me like an honest site tells you all the information you're going to need to enter up-front, in one form so you can decide whether or not to fill out the form with complete knowledge of what you're going to be filling out, that is, informed consent. Multistep forms trick the user whether it's intended or not: you're either collecting a little bit of information knowing the user might not complete the process, or you're pressuring the user into completing a process they wouldn't otherwise complete because they've already sunk so much time into it, when they wouldn't have ever embarked if they had known from the beginning all you were going to ask for. There's a segment of HN that argues that market incentives will always lead to good results for consumers, but here's a clear example where people clearly only care about maximizing conversion and collecting the most data, with no concern for the consumer.

336 points by jkuria 7y ago

If there’s no statistical difference between them, then the multi-step is the better choice. Capture their email early and follow up about cart abandonment.

moksly 7y ago
Wouldn’t this be a GDPR violation, unless you harvested consent first?
- fyfy18 7y ago
  You don't need consent if the data is being collected for a specific purpose. It's not clear cut, but IMHO cart abandonment would be acceptable. The user has entered their email on your cart, signifying their intention to make a purchase, and cart abandonment email is just following up from that. Say you phoned a company to enquire about some new windows and receive an estimate, if they call you back a few days later you wouldn't be that surprised. However you wouldn't want them to phone you every month until you buy from them, or to give/sell your phone number to another company without consent (maybe you need roofing too?).
  - iovrthoughtthis 7y ago
    I don’t think this would be the case here. You would need to show that a person entering their email into an input expected that email to be stored by the other party without submitting the form.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > You don't need consent if the data is being collected for a specific purpose. It's not clear cut, but IMHO cart abandonment would be acceptable. The user has entered their email on your cart, signifying their intention to make a purchase, and cart abandonment email is just following up from that. This is based of an assumption that cart abandonment is some sort of mistake. What I would guess usually happens (based on my experience with shopping online) is that stopping just one step shy of actual payment is the only way for the customer to get the total cost of orders, that includes discounts and shipping costs. When I close the page at this point, it doesn't mean I got distracted - it means that once I finally got to see the actual costs, I decided not to proceed. > Say you phoned a company to enquire about some new windows and receive an estimate, if they call you back a few days later you wouldn't be that surprised. I wouldn't be surprised, but I wouldn't be happy about it either. If I asked for an estimate, I asked because you didn't publish the costs up-front, and I need them to make my decision (whether by comparing with my budget, or the price offered by competition). If I wanted to buy from you, I'd call again.
  - dkersten 7y ago
    It was my understanding that the “specific purpose” had to be “the technical functioning of the site or service” (and also any transactional mail, like sending order receipts), not literally any specific purpose. Selling your details to the highest bidder is a specific purpose after all. If the company calling you back isn’t unsolicited (ie I asked them to or they told me they would and I said OK), then its an expected part of the interaction. Cart abandonment emails are not expected or even necessary (from the customers point of view). If I called a company and they called me back days later, without telling me they would or asking if I mind, I would absolutely report them for that too. (At least in my country, data protection says they can’t do this) Cart abandonment is just like any other marketing and honestly, I report any cart abandonment emails I receive as GDPR violations to my local data protection commission.
    - GordonS 7y ago
      You are correct, the consent exceptions are only for functionality vital to the operation of the site, such as a cookie to store your shopping cart - not for marketing in any form.
  - zaarn 7y ago
    In Germany that callback would likely fall under unsolicited phone calls (around 2k€ or more if it's B2B). Unless you have a commercial relationship with a customer, don't assume you can email them anything or phone them up.
- qznc 7y ago
  Personally, I believe sending the form is enough of consent. However, currently there is probably no lawyer who dares to say that officially. Everybody is still too afraid.
  - TuringTest 7y ago
    Sure, as long as you've shown the mandatory "request presented in clear and plain language to provide consent by an affirmative act (such as checking a box online or signing a form)"[1], make it clear that sending the form is considered consent, and describe explicitly the process by which such consent can be revoked. [1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers/data-protection/data-protection-gdpr/index_en.htm#shortcut-7-agreeing-to-data-processing-consent https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...
gruez 7y ago
If you really wanted, you could do the same with one step checkout by silently submitting the email using an onblur on the email field.
anonytrary 7y ago
Or just track their every input and send their email to your servers when they move to the next field... /s...?
- ehnto 7y ago
  Worked at a company that did actually do this. It was because they were building the profile up as a lead to sell to service providers. They got the legal compliance as a checkbox during the process. The whole process had 15+ steps and it was when I learned that we were all wrong about how many clicks and actions a user is willing to go through to get a result.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    Does it count as consent given when the user checks the checkbox but doesn't actively submit the form, so doesn't expect that it was noticed? I'm not so sure about this, did your legal team see it that way? Feels like filling out a paper order form to buy something but not mailing it.
    - ehnto 7y ago
      It was pretty clear which was important to them. The whole form was a paragraph about the implications of the agreement and then you accept it with a button. No button confirmation, no agreement and without that they wouldn't sell or keep the lead. They were trying to be as possible given the industry. Still lead gen, but they did their best to be clear and ethical.
    - anonytrary 7y ago
      This does sound like a dilemma. I think the rules should be different for the web since the web is arguably more powerful than paper mail. As soon as you tell an internet form something, just assume you've mailed your response for that particular thing, even if the whole form isn't done yet. I think the whole "if something can happen, it will happen" rule works nicely here. You can write on paper all you want, but the recipient will never be able to know what you wrote unless you explicitly mail them or send them a copy of the paper. On the other hand, for the web, it is very possible for the client to send the server information at any time.
hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
Do something creepy like that to someone in the EU and you could well get a big fine! EDIT: this is a clear GDPR violation - you can't store and use user data without a lawful basis. Marketing requires consent. Consent has to be given freely. EDIT: even if you worm out of the fine people hate getting unsolicited email like this so some non zero percentage of potential customers will avoid your business in the future.
- 2T1Qka0rEiPr 7y ago
  I'm not sure I completely buy the "creepy" nature of this, or that everyone hates getting unsolicited emails - AFAIK this is a clear GDPR violation. In my previous company we rewrote our checkout flow for this reason. Capturing emails and offering certain consumers discounts via emails after a few hours etc. was a successful move (given that a certain % of people will drop due to price sensitivity) - but GDPR removing that choice is a clearly a good thing for the majority who drop for other reasons.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    I can't remember which one, but a large shopping cart as a service provider does this (minus the discounts, or at least I didn't get them) for abandoned shopping carts where you've entered your email but didn't proceed to buy. Happened to me quite a few times because they only show shipping cost later on and they'd often be prohibitively expensive to ship to my country. As for creepy: I wouldn't consider these creepy (i.e. where I've entered my email), but maybe annoying. I had the creepy experience with Pavlok when I first looked into getting one. Browsed around on their site but didn't put one into the cart. Hours later I get an email from them. Turns out they were using some service that loads a beacon and tries to connect the browser via various third party services to an email address. That was creepy. I still ended up buying a Pavlok though, but at a later time.
    - oarsinsync 7y ago
      I think this is something that has become normalised and is no longer creepy, simply by virtue of how many stores do it. If I abandon a basket in a retail store, I don't expect a phone call about it hours later after I've left the store and gone home. The first time an online-store followed up with an email about my abandoned basket, I stopped using that store. Not naive enough to think other stores aren't tracking these metrics, but it's still creepy unless you've been subjected the obviousness of it a lot.
ddebernardy 7y ago
Actually, it's better to capture the email last, once they've committed every other piece of information as a sunk cost, and ideally make entering an email optional to boot in order to reduce friction. The need to create an account is one of the main reason that shopping carts - and for that matter, SaaS signup forms - get abandoned.
- saurik 7y ago
  ...doesn't that analysis violate the premise of "if there's no statistical difference between them"?
- ehnto 7y ago
  How could you run a paid SaaS without an email address? Phone number as a contact? I wouldn't give a phone number to a company I didn't trust with an email address either. I could invisage a SaaS without ANY personal information, but if that even legal to do if you're taking credit card payments?
  - ddebernardy 7y ago
    Oh, sorry for the misunderstand. I mostly meant this for e-commerce and for a SaaS' informal trial part only, not the part where you actually need to create an account. In e-commerce cases, you're usually just fine with an address (since you need to ship), an email or phone or some kind of order tracking ID. In most SaaS cases you can ask for nothing - literally - as visitors try out your product. Allow them right in, and sprinkle a few "sign up" links or forms where appropriate. Build trust, basically. More often than not, you can delay creating an account proper until you're beginning the formal trial period or processing the credit card.
    - ehnto 7y ago
      I totally agree in regards to starting a SaaS onboarding process and ask for nothing. In fact I did that with a page builder I once built. Basically it dropped you right into the page building tool itself, so you could play and build a page. Then to save the page you just entered an email and password. It was excellent at converting into trial accounts. The platform had other problems and wasn't successful, but I was really proud of the painless onboarding process.

gesman 7y ago

I coming from school where single long checkout form suppose to be the best idea. Back quite a few years ago I sold onepagecheckout.com domain for a chunk of cash. Just 2 days ago I purchased very expensive laptop via multi page checkout process which I really appreciated. The key was to remind customer what he is buying, all options, warranty, shipping etc - make sure the complicated configuration is delivered in clear way. Gigantic one page thing would be less welcome

davedx 7y ago
Yep. I work in e-commerce selling cars (entire process is digital). We try to break down and explain each step because they're quite high impact decisions for the final amount and product.
mobjack 7y ago
I find from my AB testing is that mobile users are much sensitive to changes to checkout. A big one page checkout could work on desktop machines since they have the real estate to work with. This can be a poor experience on mobile as you need lots of scrolling to access all the fields and options.
magduf 7y ago
I think this is a case where one size doesn't fit all. For a laptop, or a car as the other poster mentioned, it's high cost, and there's many options. Whereas if you're just buying some simple items that have no options at all, you don't need a complicated checkout, just a list of the items and the taxes and shipping cost.

sesteel 7y ago

This is exactly the kind of post I come to HN to read. Thank you for posting this as it attempts to answer an interesting question I didn't even think to ask.

jkuria 7y ago
Glad to hear this. Apparently, unfortunately, for many HN'ers, this is exactly the kind of post they don't want to see! There has been a movement clamoring for a pure tech HN without any marketing business-y type of stuff. Only articles about the finer points of segment tuning and tweaking x86 assembly registers! Or all the reasons why classes can never really approach the elegance and terseness of classic K&R C structs. Or how Common Lisp and Scheme have this and that and the other but only that and no more :) The former are really life skills that make even the most hardcore techies more effective human beings!
- amelius 7y ago
  > Glad to hear this. Apparently, unfortunately, for many HN'ers, this is exactly the kind of post they don't want to see! There has been a movement clamoring for a pure tech HN without any marketing business-y type of stuff. Or ... perhaps many HN folks just hate the concept of hacking the human brain to generate more sales.
  - sesteel 7y ago
    True, but it seems knowing how I'm being hacked helps me avoid it. There are several comments in this thread that share devious methods for increasing conversion. Now I know some new things to look out for.
darkwizard42 7y ago
I'm seconding this. I'm also really enjoying the discussion thats coming from people who have run online stores/checkouts. Its an entire world that I don't really spend time in, but lots of the techniques feel really relevant as I do plenty of checking out online.

deleted 7y ago

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jchw 7y ago

I like this. I wonder how the 'create an account' problem is best solved. Some sites (like Bandcamp) explicitly don't require accounts, and just associate purchases with e-mail addresses until you create an account. Other sites sometimes will give you an account with just an e-mail address, then allow either resetting password or 'magic links' (a la Slack) that log you in from an e-mail. I think for simplicity, it's probably best to abstract e-mails from accounts, so from a data model PoV, which thing do you ideally associate a purchase with, a phantom account or email addresses directly? Side note: I worry that skipping the cart review mostly loses customers because they begin having second thoughts. While adding this step may reduce conversion, it may be more ethical to include it as it may improve user's decision making.

dkersten 7y ago
> Side note: I worry that skipping the cart review mostly loses customers because they begin having second thoughts. While adding this step may reduce conversion, it may be more ethical to include it as it may improve user's decision making. I’ve personally abandoned plans to purchase because it wasn’t clear if I would get a chance to review at the end. Its especially important if its unclear what the final price will be, after applying shipping and such, since I live outside the US. Anecdotally, I’m much more likely to buy if its very clearly stated that there is a review step. I know that more impatient people might be the opposite way around, though.
- meowface 7y ago
  I don't personally care about an intermediate cart page. Just as long as there's at least a cart page or purchase page which shows the item name/title, item photo, and item price for each item, and the grand total (including taxes and shipping). Most checkout pages I've seen have that information, so even if the confirm and pay steps are on the same page, I don't mind since it's still the same information anyway.
johannes1234321 7y ago
In GDPR-land the customer has to confirm, that the shop may store the e-mail (or other data) for more than full filling the single order. So there is need for at least a checkbox. And yeah, using a mail address for login is certainly better than coming up with a user name, which is free and which you remember in a year's time.

nikanj 7y ago

They don’t mention the winning one: A single short checkout. Purchase funnels are filled with account creations, newsletter sign-ups and other crap. I don’t want an account, I want to give you money.

lotsofpulp 7y ago
I love using Apple Pay on websites, so fast that I avoid shopping around.
- lathiat 7y ago
  Yes; sites with Apple Pay get purchases from me almost instantly. It's a good way to battle people otherwise preferring to use a platform they already have an account on (e.g. eBay; Amazon) where you lose more on commission.
  - jaimex2 7y ago
    Not really what being compared here though. eBay, Amazon run the whole site.
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      Amazon operates a payment service, and eBay used to. Using Amazon to pay doesn't mean you're buying something on amazon.com, just as using PayPal to pay doesn't mean you're buying something on ebay.com .
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    Etsy has done extremely well with this! If my SO or I are talking about something there, it’s an almost certainty that one of us will press thumb to purchase. It’s too easy.
mkohlmyr 7y ago
As someone who previously worked in ecommerce marketing, many of these practices certainly would cause more drop-off in the funnel. I would suggest that the idea is that losing X% of first-time customers isn't such a big deal if you can increase LTV by Y% through marketing efforts otherwise not available to you. That being said I don't really think the average marketing team has thought it through to this point (or measures the outcomes). But nevertheless it's perhaps why they see positive results.

mikekchar 7y ago

Interesting for me is the amount of abandonment on for the "unexpected shipping costs" issue. I actually have this issue right now. I'm trying to buy cheesemaking cultures and because I'm half way around the world form most of the places that sell this stuff shipping can be more expensive than the thing I'm buying. It really bugs me that shipping calculation is usually last in the multi-page cart layouts. I definitely abandon because I'm not willing to enter all of that detail before I know how much I'm going to be spending.

JeanMarcS 7y ago
That’s one of the first thing I look for on an website: the shipping policy and amount. If it’s not present (or too well hidden) I usually try another website. I too hate the unpleasant surprise of high shipping costs
- Cerium 7y ago
  My number one complaint of shopify is that they require email first to see shipping, which means I'll get a "what's wrong? Forgot your cart?" Email later that day.
  - pwodhouse 7y ago
    Take the opportunity to tell them what's wrong: that you want shipping costs up front. Then create a spam filter for the site and be happy to stuck a blow for justice that may help customers in future.
  - _jal 7y ago
    You want your own domain. I don't know how I'd cope with the mess the internet is without an infinite supply of disposable email addresses. The next question I always get is about how annoying it is to go make an email address in the middle of checking out is. I personally always have a shell open - I'm a command line person. So I just run a script, `nem spammystore-com190621`, done. (And then `dem spammystorewhatever` when they start annoying me.) I've fantasized about writing a browser plugin that scans the page for entered email addresses and shells out to create them on submit, but (a) I'm not even sure that's entirely possible anymore, and (b) wiring my browser up to something that runs sudo on remote machines seems like maybe not the best idea I've ever had.

throwawaylolx 7y ago

Hardly any details about the experiment design or why we should believe the results should generalise outside of whatever they're doing on that website. I don't see the point of reading results if there is no reason to believe the experiment and methodology were sound.

sklivvz1971 7y ago

Warning: bad statistics abound in the article. If you can't spot them, let me explain a bit why statistics do not work that way. A _lot_ of data is necessary to call a result if the effect is relatively small. If not enough samples are taken, there will still be a "formal" result, but the level of certainty of it will be low. Of course, depending on how accessible that page is, it might take a very long time to achieve significance. How much certainty do we need in the result? P-values are generally considered not a great measure, but they are standard, and they are what they are using (if I understand correctly). This can give you an idea of the numbers we'd like to see for that value: https://xkcd.com/1478/ https://xkcd.com/1478/ In other words, only the first A/B test has conclusive results: accordion is worse than wizard by 30% with 0.01 p-value. Of course, you can see that there's a significant result _because the effect is large_. Note that this gives us an idea of the _resolution_ of their test system (i.e., how many As and Bs they have and how much effect they can see with their test). So we know they see an effect of about 30% change. Now: all the other results are wrongly reported. The next four are mistakenly reported as "no statistically significant difference in performance." This is a false statement. Having high p-values means that any effect is below the resolution achievable with those numbers. In other words, the correct statement would be either "the experiment was inconclusive" or "the effect, if any, is less than 30% change". This is quite different from claiming "no change." The last result has 28%, and it has a p-value of 0.05. I would _not_ accept it at face value. Such a p-value means the result has 1-in-20 chances of being due to a random fluctuation of data. There are six such experiments just in the post, so it's not unthinkable that the effect could be a fluke. More info on this here: https://www.xkcd.com/882/ https://www.xkcd.com/882/ All in all, the only result found is that _in their case_ the wizard was much more effective than the accordion. The rest is not supported by the facts presented and furthermore any generalization of the result outside their particular case is unwarranted.

danaris 7y ago
> The next four are mistakenly reported as "no statistically significant difference in performance." This is a false statement. Having high p-values means that any effect is below the resolution achievable with those numbers. No...that's what "no statistically significant difference" means. In these kinds of statistical tests, literally all you can look for is a statistically significant difference. Either you find one, or you don't. Once you know that you've found one, you can say what size it is—a difference of 0.1% is still plenty statistically significant if your p-value is <0.001. It's just not very practically significant. There are a lot of different reasons you might not find a statistically significant difference, and simply knowing the p-values cannot tell you which ones are true here. That's why a lot of journals (at least in Psychology, the field I have some knowledge about) have been pushing for reporting additional tests and measures.

nottorp 7y ago

How about selling something useful and worrying less about the cart design?

murph37 7y ago
Yes, let's build something useful and not worry about how they are going to give us money for it.
- nottorp 7y ago
  All these online store studies sound like they honestly believe that design will improve sales more than the appeaal of the merchandise ;)
  - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
    You're being downvoted but you do raise a valid point. I've been willing to fight with some pretty awful checkouts in the past to buy something I really want, or to buy from someone I really want to do business with.
magduf 7y ago
If you're just a reseller of mass-produced goods available at many other resellers, then having a crappy cart design means customers go to your competitors instead.

734129837261 7y ago

I remember doing A/B testing on this for a multinational multi-billion dollar company's website. The learning was to never surprise the customer. Show the sum total before they even get to the checkout process. And stay true to it. What proved conclusively positive was adding a discount to the checkout process (a time-limited one did not prove successful). Just to make the customer feel that they're getting a good deal. Once the customer was on the checkout form we'd display: "This product is almost out of stock," and when they for some reason come back to the product page or listing, we'd show: "43 people are looking at this product." Which created a sense of urgency. This strategy wasn't legal in all countries, because it was 100% fake, but it worked wonders where it could be displayed. Customer satisfaction skyrocketed, so... evil as it might be, it only created happy people.

wil421 7y ago
>43 people are looking at this product. Hotels.com and a couple other websites were doing that to me the other day. I had a feeling it was bogus. You did have me at discount. I shop the same brands that I like and know. If I’m offered a discount I’ll buy 90% of the time. If it’s a brand I haven’t heard of or bought previously it’s much lower.
- CamelCaseName 7y ago
  >I shop the same brands that I like and know. If I’m offered a discount I’ll buy 90% of the time. But if you get a discount a non-negligible amount of the time, you may stop buying unless you're getting the discount. The discounted price will become the 'true' price.
- jerf 7y ago
  "I had a feeling it was bogus." I've always ignored those sorts of things entirely, on the theory that I don't believe the entities in question are capable or willing to put the engineering effort to provide a number accurate to two significant digits at scale. Also the numbers are often implausibly large. If there's "one" of an item left and "43 people" are "currently looking" at it, then the problem isn't that I need to hurry up and buy it, the problem is that you've utterly failed at one of your basic tasks, stocking correctly for demand. In general, businesses are actually really good at that; it's literally life and death for them, so the idea that every single thing on their site is just on the verge of selling out unless you get it now is just absurd. I've been trying to train myself to ignore "discounts" too, unless I can prove to myself that there really is a difference between the "real" price and the "discounted" price and there is some specific reason that I'm getting the latter. Or to put it another way, "customers in general" don't get discounts. You can get a discount if you are "a price discriminating customer willing to hunt for coupon codes", or "a friend of the proprietor", or something specific, but you are never just handed a discount. Those discounts are discounts... they're just the price.

underdown 7y ago

Split tests are not generalizable. This "research" means almost nothing for your checkout process.

benmorris 7y ago

I removed all registration and login components during checkout. Most people have an auto complete setup on their browser now and most of my sales are first time customers. Granted I have a small subset of return customers that ask for it, but I know from years past introducing registration opens up a whole set of barriers to the checkout process. Order confirmation pages are essentially a page they can return to at any point in the future without logging in. I also removed the coupon code box completely from checkout. I used to get bombarded with requests for discount codes and people not getting their codes to work. In reality the way I used codes were in email promotions. I switched to instant redeeming clickable codes in emails and removed it all the boxes on the site. I also know it was a significant factor in checkout flow because I could google "mybrand.com " into google and google instantly starting adding in "mybrand.com coupon codes" "mybrand.com promo codes". People see the coupon code box and immediately head to Google to search for codes. PayPal Express checkout is still a huge choice for customers. They can choose express checkout or standard checkout flow. Many people use it (30-40%). It removes the need to enter their address as well.

deelly 7y ago
Love to see some A/B testing of you approach.
jrochkind1 7y ago
> Order confirmation pages are essentially a page they can return to at any point in the future without logging in. Do they need to have the URL to do so? Hmm, I suppose one could have a feature, without accounts, where you enter your email address and get emailed to you (at that address), your order history with links to individual orders. I think you are right that at most ecommerce sites, registration does not provide too much value for the user (and is a barrier to sales). I know I am always annoyed when an ecommerce site asks me to or makes me register, and if given the option almost always choose not to register. (Exceptions for sites I use very regularly; maybe everyone is hoping their site will be one of these. :) )
- benmorris 7y ago
  I encourage people to save their order confirmation email which contains a secure URL back to the website which has their original order and links to reorder the same items. Simple and effective. I've used this method for about 8 years.

imafish 7y ago

The site seems dead. Cached version here: https://web.archive.org/web/20190621120031/https://capitalandgrowth.org/questions/2055/which-has-a-higher-conversion-rate-a-single-long-e.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190621120031/https://capitalan...

dotdi 7y ago

It seems the site died due to HN's hug of death. You can still read the text here[0] but images are not loading. --- [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190621031723/https://capitalandgrowth.org/questions/2055/which-has-a-higher-conversion-rate-a-single-long-e.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190621031723/https://capitalan...

nickjj 7y ago

I find that most digital products that you buy require creating an account because typically the account you create is how you gain access to what you're buying. I'm designing a checkout page right now where I planned to do a small 1 pager with an email address + minimal billing info required to make a transaction while minimizing CC fraud. Knowing the email (aka. account) before the checkout actually happens is essential because it would allow you to prevent someone from buying the same item twice. If you don't collect an email address pre-transaction, how would you do that for a digital item?

kerkeslager 7y ago

I would love to hear someone justify how multi-stage forms are ever good for the user. It seems to me like an honest site tells you all the information you're going to need to enter up-front, in one form so you can decide whether or not to fill out the form with complete knowledge of what you're going to be filling out, that is, informed consent. Multistep forms trick the user whether it's intended or not: you're either collecting a little bit of information knowing the user might not complete the process, or you're pressuring the user into completing a process they wouldn't otherwise complete because they've already sunk so much time into it, when they wouldn't have ever embarked if they had known from the beginning all you were going to ask for. There's a segment of HN that argues that market incentives will always lead to good results for consumers, but here's a clear example where people clearly only care about maximizing conversion and collecting the most data, with no concern for the consumer.