It's the Little Things

We were recently engaged by a new client to help them understand where their current website was leaking visitors and revenue opportunities. Out of the many recommendation that were made and implemented I want to focus on one very small change that had a measurable effect on conversion and demonstrates how the little things can add up to big results.

We often focus on the checkout process to find unnecessary abandonment, or what we call conversion leak. If you graph the checkout process a measure of abandonment happens at each step, revealing the "conversion funnel."

On this client's site, the visitor was asked to insert their credit card information first and then their billing address next during the first step of the checkout process. This has been identfied as a problem area during previous usability studies.

Our recommendation to the client was that these items be inverted, billing address first, then credit card information. This seemingly small insignification change resulted in a 22.5% increase in conversion during this step of the process.

With conversion rates on most ecommerce sites being measured in the single digit percentages every customer you can keep in the funnel, the better. We find day after day that the devil is in the details, and it is the little things that make the difference.