What is Checkout Conversion Management?

Your website is converting fewer customers than you were expecting. In fact, you’re starting to wonder whether you’ve done something wrong, and are looking for solutions. This is where checkout conversion management comes in, a dedicated process that reviews the checkout process in order to identify problems and bottlenecks and fix them. Every time a change is made to the checkout process, the checkout conversion management cycle begins anew.

The importance of measuring checkout conversion

If you do not measure your conversion rate on the checkout page, you will never be able to implement changes that will improve your bottom line. There are two main metrics here: checkout page abandonment and payment conversion rates.

Checkout page abandonment can be measured with tools like Google Analytics, but there’s more to it than that. The better you know your customer base and the better you understand your own business, the more effective you will be in lowering this metric. As the checkout conversion management process goes on, you might discover that clients from different regions have different cultural expectations. For example, perhaps your shoppers in Spain expect to be able to use a coupon, or maybe your shoppers in Germany abandon a shopping cart if there are not enough payment options.

The second metric, the payment conversion rate, allows you to understand the success rate of payment attempts. This is a critical baseline that can be target by various initiatives. It is also a fairly complex metric, since it can be affected by elements such as shopper location, average ticket size, purchase currency and subscription frequency.

With these two metrics in mind, you are able to implement changes to your checkout process much more effectively. Some of these changes may include things like the addition of new payment methods, currencies and languages, changes to your fraud rules and subscription model, and the addition of particular special offers and coupons.

The multi-disciplinary nature of data analysis

With the checkout conversion data in hand, you can draw from your team’s pool of experience, and find solutions that target all aspects of the checkout process. For example, a web designer might see the problem from a UX perspective and recommend changes on that level, a CFO might understand the issue from the financial perspective, and subsequently he recommends the addition of local currencies to prevent customers from abandoning the cart due to cross-border confusion, and a marketer might see the way forward in the form of coupons and special offers.

With checkout conversion management, not only can these suggestions be implemented, they can be tested once they are in place. Due to its cyclical nature, checkout conversion management is able to draw data from implemented changes, and continuously improve on the most effective conversion methods.

For more information on checkout conversion management and eCommerce data analysis, or to sign up for a merchant account, please call (888) 924-2743 or go to Charge.com.