Part of the E-Commerce User Experience Series

When your customer can’t or won’t complete an online order even though they found a product they want, it is a disaster for your site. You lose that sale, and you often lose the customer as well. This report includes design guidelines for instilling trust in your customers and making their purchase process as easy as possible.

This 310-page report contains 114 design recommendations based on our usability research. Discussions and 322 screenshot illustrations supplement the findings.

Benefits

• Checklist of 114 guidelines for creating shopping carts and checkout processes
• Techniques for designing forms and registration screens that streamline the checkout process
• Common usability mistakes to avoid when closing a sale

Topics

• Checkout process steps and procedures
• Requesting personal information
• What to include in the shopping cart
• Editing and saving the shopping cart
• Gift options
• Optional or required registration
• Shipping and billing address forms
• Multiple recipients
• Payment information
• Completing the order: Summary and confirmation
• In-store pickup

Download report excerpt (2MB PDF)

Research Method

The information in this report is based on two separate rounds of e-commerce studies, including:

• One-on-one usability testing
• Diary-based longitudinal study
• Eyetracking

In total, 108 people tested 206 e-commerce websites. The studies took place in the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and China (Hong Kong).