A well-designed checkout process moves visitors in a single direction: toward a conversion. Take a close look at your checkout funnel and examine how visitors move through it. Are a percentage of your visitors going back and forth between different steps of the checkout process? We refer to this phenomenon as the checkout bounce-around effect. If your site suffers from this, you should tweak the design of some of the checkout pages. The following is a list of items you should test on your cart page.
If you charge customers for shipping and allow customers to choose different delivery speeds (regular, two-day delivery, next-day delivery), make sure these options are displayed on the cart page prior to visitors starting the checkout process. Doing so will ensure that visitors will not start the checkout process when they really are merely trying to find how much it will cost to ship their order.
What FUDs do your visitors have? What would stop them from buying from your site? An assurance center is a great way to combat these fears and concerns. Here are the steps for creating an assurance center for your site:
Start by listing the FUDs your visitors might have. This usually happens during the persona creation process of any conversion optimization project.
Prioritize these fears in terms of importance to your visitors.
Create the different elements of the assurance center to deal with each FUD.
Remember that not every website needs an assurance center. Test the following on your assurance center:
The goal of the cart page is to provide visitors with a simple and quick way to review the items they have selected. Test your current cart page with a design that shows product thumbnails as well as a clear product description for the items in the cart.
Some visitors will want to remove items from their cart, update quantities and options, and so forth. Many designers do not pay attention to the delete and update buttons. Figure 9-14 shows the different buttons for each item BestBuy.com has on its cart page. Test having a single update or delete button on the cart page versus having these buttons for each item.
