
Which has more sales: a single long checkout form or a multi-step one? - jkuria
https://capitalandgrowth.org/questions/2055/which-has-a-higher-conversion-rate-a-single-long-e.html
======
benmorris
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.

~~~
petercooper
_People see the coupon code box and immediately head to Google to search for
codes._

If your system would still benefit from a discount code and you're not selling
low margin products, it's a good idea to "seed" those discount sites with
permanent codes for very minor discounts (even just 4%, say). People feel like
they've had a win even when the discount is minor.

~~~
benmorris
I've experimented with this. It is difficult to measure if I'm giving away
money unnecessarily or completing a sale I'd otherwise miss. Good point
though.

~~~
jstarfish
It depends on your industry and customer base.

When I was working with one that was primarily female and cost-conscious, that
trick worked great. The fact that a code existed helped drive organic
referrals (the code alone was enough to route traffic to me instead of a
competitor).

Don't make it permanent or you definitely are giving money away to Googling
cheapskates. Change it often-- people are excited by novelty anyway.

------
mikekchar
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
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
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.

~~~
_jal
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.

~~~
RexM
I have a catch-all inbox on my domain so there's no setup. I can just enter
<whatever_i_want>@example.com and I'll get the email in the catch-all inbox.

~~~
_jal
I did that for a while, but stopped probably a decade ago. A spam robot
educated me about my mistake when it sent me many, many gigs of crap, using a
dictionary of some sort to guess usernames. Surprise! they all "worked".

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
No need for the dictionary: I regularly get spam to addresses that are just
random sequences of letters.

------
nikanj
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.

~~~
pletnes
I always figured, why not leave that crap for an after-checkout form? Z%
discount if you sign up, or whatever. It’s worth something, after all.

~~~
tatami
On the after-checkout form I am already confronted with choosing which 3 of
the discount vouchers of "partner" shops I want to pick up. But HURRY only 10
minutes remaining to claim.

------
734129837261
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
>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.

~~~
jerf
"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.

~~~
nickjj
Yes, this boils down to just writing good copy or creating a sales page /
environment that's honest.

Everything you do from start to finish in the sales process needs to be
believable. Like in a sales page, if you admit that you screwed up and ordered
100,000 sunglasses instead of 10,000 and now you want to get rid of them at
whole sale prices, suddenly if you sell $39 glasses for $14.99 it's believable
that this really happened and it's a good deal, so the discount makes sense.

Now of course that could all be a lie and they cost $5 and they really wanted
to sell them for $15 so they cooked up a total bullshit story but something
like that is a lot more believable than trying to throw up a bunch of high
pressure sales tactics based on scarcity. Picking out those lies really comes
down to your reputation too, which is why sites that offer 24/7 discounts have
no credibility.

Basically, just be honest and it's hard to go wrong.

~~~
bluGill
Stores have gotten into trouble for not selling items at their list price.
Kohls always has half their items on sale and half regular price - they know
you won't buy the regular price item when the sale item is nearly identical.
They rotate items in and out of sale every week just so they can prove in
court there actually is a half off sales.

Depends on your country, but in the US you can't claim something has a regular
price if the regular price is never charged for it.

------
sesteel
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
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
> 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
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.

------
gesman
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

~~~
mobjack
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.

------
kerkeslager
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.

------
throwawaylolx
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.

------
jchw
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
> 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
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.

------
sklivvz1971
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
> 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.

~~~
sklivvz1971
Sure, but "forgetting" that the significance level is a 30% effect is at the
least misleading. A real 25% increase or decrease would not have been
statistically significant.

~~~
danaris
I'm sorry; I don't follow. Could you clarify?

~~~
sklivvz1971
If the author's setup can only statistically determine effects of 30% or
higher, saying "there's no significant change" means "there's no significant
change of 30% or more".

Nothing can be said of changes of less than 30%, and that's a hell of a lot of
uncertainty. One of the variants could give you 25% more results and yet,
those experiments would not see such a result.

As such, it is clear that the experiment is simply not thorough enough to
imply the two alternatives are equivalent. Not in the least.

~~~
danaris
Where do you get that the setup can only determine effects of 30% or higher? I
didn't see anything about that in the article, though I admit I only skimmed
it.

Simply saying that the statistically significant effect they found was 30% has
absolutely no bearing on how large an effect they can detect...

~~~
sklivvz1971
I can't know what is the resolution but neither does anyone else, which is
part of the problem. They only show 2 results at 30% (p 0.01) and 25% (p 0.05)
which makes me suspect they have a very low resolution. I can't prove it, but
I don't need to. They claim results without providing convincing evidence, not
me.

~~~
danaris
Those numbers, by themselves, tell you nothing whatsoever about the resolution
of the measures they're using. They tell you solely that for group A, they got
a result of 30% with 99% confidence and for group B, they got a result of 25%
with 95% confidence. That doesn't mean that they're approaching the limits of
their measurable resolution—it most likely means that group B is smaller, or
has more variability in it.

If group B had a result of 10% with the same confidence, that would also not
indicate that their measures have a resolution of 10%—those things literally
have nothing to do with each other. You are reading far too much into the very
limited data presented—not merely more than you can prove, more than there can
be any possible logical support for.

------
nickjj
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?

------
dotdi
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://capitalan...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190621031723/https://capitalandgrowth.org/questions/2055/which-
has-a-higher-conversion-rate-a-single-long-e.html)

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

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

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

~~~
murph37
Yes, let's build something useful and not worry about how they are going to
give us money for it.

~~~
nottorp
All these online store studies sound like they honestly believe that design
will improve sales more than the appeaal of the merchandise ;)

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
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.

------
paulcole
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.

~~~
hdfbdtbcdg
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.

~~~
luckylion
> Marketing requires consent. Consent has to be given freely.

That would exclude Remarketing services from GDPR-compliance, wouldn't it?

> 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.

I'm not so sure about this. It may well be true for you and me and our peers,
but I don't believe that companies send out annoying "newsletters" and
marketing emails just to drive away business, annoy consumers and wake up
regulators. They do work for a certain audience.

~~~
RaceWon
> They do work for a certain audience.

As an old school mail order pro once said "there is no such thing as junk
mail, just a poorly targeted list". If McLaren (to name one of my favorite
companies and website) started spamming me with the latest low-down on their
hypercars I'd be in heaven... Paul Graham Essays, Jay Abraham ebooks; same
deal--pure bliss.

