Testing And Improving Your Order Page.
by Abe Cherian,

The order page is a crucial element of any web page. This is truly where the little things mean a lot. 

Hits are not enough, although driving traffic to your site is very important. Good web page design of an order page turns a browser into a customer, a business prospect into a client, and a proposal into a deal.

There's many things to consider when it's time to design an order page, but one of the first is to incorporate a theme - settle on a visual theme and stick to it. Graphics, fonts, content, colors, and borders should all be within a theme that provides an identifier for your business. If your company's logo incorporates a flag and the colors are red, white and blue, your web page should not have graphics that use orange, green or black.

The only reason to perfect an order page is to increase revenue generated from either functionality or experience while on any particular page to purchase products or services.

Functionality - better support, user friendly, proper layout, design and much more.

Experience - steps to complete an order, secure environment, and trusted resources. 

These are the most important to consider when improving your order form. This will help improve use and response rate.

Basically, you need an "on-line e-commerce solution" that has a merchant account, or the ability to process your customers' credit card transactions over the Internet. This includes needing a secure server. You'll probably need an on-line order form that customers can complete, in order to purchase your products. You may even want your the processing of customers' order to include processing the customers' credit card numbers right away while they're still on-line and connected to your Web site.

The biggest mistake we've seen e-commerce web sites offer is only one choice of purchasing. If your web page offers products or services, always offer secure credit card ordering using more than one method to purchase. If your visitor finds only one way to purchase, there's a 50% chance to leave without clicking further. Supplying this option makes your visitor feel comfortable and most importantly secure when performing money transactions.

But there are some features unique to e-commerce. Not all products are real compatible to be sold over the Internet. For example, they may require a lot of face-to-face selling. They may cost a lot to ship. A primary practice in e-commerce is that customers buy products, and you ship the products to them. You need to make sure that, because your product may be advertised to the world, that you remain in control of your ideas, or intellectual property.

How do I improve my shopping cart?

Shopping carts are no different than one single order form when it comes to being abandoned. It is very possible and you will never know why unless you consider what your visitors were looking for on the Internet and how they interacted with your e-Commerce website. 

There are numerous reasons for abandonment and it afflicts expensive as well as inexpensive web sites. In fact, many websites have invested heavily in the latest design effects, yet have poorly written content and little or no focused merchandising approach to the overall website and the e-commerce or shopping cart design. 

Of major importance in any website is integrating the facility to see who visits what pages, how they travel, and view your website. It is essential to understand what pages are working and which pages are being abandoned. It is even more important to understand why visitors are buying and not buying your products and services. 

There are many tools available for this purpose and the small monthly investment is well worth the cost. A number of market researchers say the rate at which Web consumers abandon their online shopping carts before making purchases online runs between 25 percent on the low end and 78 percent on the high end. 

Why do so many shoppers go through the time and trouble to load up their shopping carts, only to leave without the merchandise? And what, if anything, can e-commerce web site owners do about this problem is potentially costing them $30 billion per year in unrealized sales? In a recent major survey, online shoppers gave fifteen major reasons they abandoned shopping carts. 

These ranged from No gift certificates (11%) to Cost of Shipping too high and not shown until checkout (69%) as the top reason. As a e-commerce web site owner you are possibly losing customers due to issues that can be resolved by taking your understanding of retailing and merchandising principles and incorporating them within your website when working with your design team. 

When designing your pages, keep your potential visitors interests, needs, goals, and purpose for visiting uppermost in your mind. Statistics consistently show that when customers do not understand how to apply for things, make purchases online, and cannot find what they’re looking for. Where do they go? 

Back to what they know, and that may be one of your competitors. If the abandonment rate suddenly rises from 15 percent on one page to 25 percent on the next, it should be a red flag. Make changes to your existing web site. Keep your users oriented by providing navigation that tells them where they are, where they were and where they’re about to go. Find ways to let users get quickly back to where they were when they had to leave. This includes using cookies for intuitive applications. 

A word of caution; make sure there are NO advertisements or banners on your buying pages. Why invite someone to leave your site when they’re buying something from you? If you have completed the testing of your order pages correctly and visitors are streaming to your website and then abandoning you at a moments notice, you must study and correct the issues with your underlying web site functionality and merchandising structure or online success will continue to elude you.

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