As E-commerce continues to expand worldwide the online merchant is confronted with many different variables to monitor, measure and consequently improve the online store.

One significant factor that can provide major benefits is  by analyzing and improving the checkout process. A lot of the older eCommerce platforms have multiple page checkout and a recent A/B Test case study provides some serious food for thought on the benefits of “Single Page” vs “Multi-Step Checkout

The test was setup by Get Elastic to provide A/B split testing where 50% of the traffic was sent to a single page and 50% of the traffic to the 2 page checkout of the  Official Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics e-Commerce Website

In the test the the new single-page checkout looked very much like the two-page checkout, with shipping information first, followed by billing and confirmation.

The report found after only 300 transactions, the winner was clear and they stopped the experiment after 606 transactions. Google Website Optimizer concluded that

• Single-page checkout outperformed the out-of-the-box checkout by a whopping 21.8%
• Successful completion rate for the entire checkout process increased by 257.26%.
• Overall site conversion rate increased by 0.54%.
• They also observed some unexpected improvements during this experiment, like an increase of 8.54% in the average order value!

The option to create an account after checkout is offered after the order is completed:

Note: It’s important to keep in mind that Google Web Optimiser only counts goal conversions and does not link to any ecommerce data in Google Analytics. With a few little hacks, they were able to pass on each test group to Advanced Segments on Analytics for both checkout flows and gather valuable ecommerce data

While these kinds of numbers are impressive, they should not be used as the sole indicator of how a single-page checkout performs. These were the improvements that we observed when changing from the standard four-page checkout to a single-page checkout process on the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store.

This is only an indicator and with all the different variables such as your product and target market you should remember that there is  no silver bullet checkout process that works best for all business models. Doing your own A/B split testing will give you a better idea of what kinds of numbers you can expect.

There are many ways to increase  your online stores revenue and reduce costs.

The use of Online Video Reviews in an Ecommerce website has been shown to provide an improvement of up to 30% in conversion rates ( we covered this in a recent article on this blog).

So is your eCommerce site a one page checkout  or is it multi-step?