Watched an interesting screencast on increasing holiday sales at GrokDotCom yesterday and it prompted a few modifications to a shopping cart on our retail site today. Far from being just about holiday selling, the screencast could apply year ’round. The main topic/technique to improve conversions was something called “point of action assurances”.

I’ve been doing a lot of digging on cart conversion and abandonment lately and slowly tweaking to get the highest rates possible, and ”point of action assurances” struck a chord. The idea in the screencast is simple; at each point a shopper is called to action, they make a decision yes or no. Any anxiety may lead to a no, so if you can offer just enough assurance that yes is a good, sound and safe choice, you close the sale.

The holiday season example given was the idea of returns. The customer stares at the checkout button and thinks “If I buy this dress for my wife, and it turns out she was really hinting at the boots, can I return it?” They may or may not click that button, but if they saw a small message nearby saying “No restocking fees if returned within 30 days” they might be pushed over the edge. 

It’s a great example for the holidays, but the same type of logic can be true throughout the year. Customers worried about giving their credit cards online may need a security notice, customers worried about spam may need a short message on privacy, etc.

In looking over our cart I decided to add 3 small boxes to the side of the billing info form saying the cart is secure, we don’t share/sell customer data and offer a 30 exchange window for unused merchandise, as well as a message on the CC page stating that we don’t store customer credit card information. I am using Google Analytics’ goal funnel report to monitor conversion and cart abandonment at each step of the checkout process, so should have some interesting data when all is said and done.

Our existing rates are decent, but I’m curious if such minor edits can give us a few percent at each step. That could really add up over time. Will try to post results soon, if I don’t OD on turkey and cranberry sauce…