Have you ever wondered about the Shopping Cart page. It captures a lot of details. The details are meticulously supposed to be filled by buyers and then complete the purchase. Now what is most interesting about this page is that this is the only page where the shopper actually needs to enter information and before this page, the interaction has been pretty much a passive interaction. One of the things about a passive interaction is that we typically shut off our minds and enjoy / trust whatever is coming our way. For example we are passive when we watch movies. We are passive when we listen to music. We are passive when we are browsing on a site (apart from some clicks here and there)
Active engagement typically starts when we start to enter details about us and this is the time when we start thinking. “Do we really need to buy this product?”, “Can I find it cheaper on some other site?”, “Why are there extra payments for shipping?” etc
This is the reason why the maximum drop out (on a page) happens at the shopping cart page and in many large e-commerce companies, this rate is as high as 80% also.
Now that stat is alarming for companies as they are losing 4 out of 5 potential customers at this page. Lots of experimentation and lots of testing showed a simple trick that made more and more people buy and not drop off at the Shopping Cart.
The trick?
Get user to fill the simplest of details first. Name and Personal details. Then slightly more complicated things like Address – Billing / Shipping, Contact details etc. and then finally go for the payment information.
Why does this work? Because 1) We don’t want to leave after putting in all the effort of filling the form 2) We are purposely not reminded of anything that has to do with money (which is the biggest reason to drop off)