Checkout Conversion Index

Do you have a Checkout Abandonment Problem?

Twenty years after the launch of the commercial Internet, most merchants still fail to optimize the online checkout experience. The result is that they stand to lose as much as 44 percent of sales due to the frictions from discovery of the product through the checkout and payment processes. How do you know if you are losing sales?

It’s an Industry-Wide Problem for both Big and Small Merchants

The Checkout Conversion Index is a quarterly report that benchmarks the performance of 650 merchants across 14 merchant categories against 55 attributes that define the optimal online shopping and checkout experience. The Index provides insight into what’s causing checkout conversion issues, as well as what merchants can do to overcome them. The  CCI Index score is a 53, which means that in terms of converting shoppers to buyers, the average eCommerce site is performing only slightly better than average.

What’s in the Index?

The Checkout Conversion Index found many things, here are a just a few of the results:

• The average score was 56.4.
• 18.5% of the merchants studied received an “F”
• Only 10 of the 657 merchants received an “A”
• Bigger isn’t always better: smaller websites — perhaps run by more agile firms, and perhaps having to deal with less legacy software and fewer things to sell — are almost as good as the big guys.
• 100% of the best sites provide trusted security logos when checking out to let their customers know that they care about their financial data and will safeguard it.

Awareness is Half the Battle

Our CEO, Ralph Dangelmaier, has made it his mission to maximize checkout conversions. “We work with merchants daily and see this problem, firsthand,” he says.  “Worse yet, many merchants don’t even know that they have a problem – or the magnitude of it. That’s why we wanted to do something to shine a light on the problem so that we can raise awareness of the problem and, more importantly, help merchants overcome them.”