In a blog post back in March, (“First Things First – Examine the Analytics Data & Establish the Facts” I wrote about a friend of mine who has an ecommerce website which had a fair bit of traffic but not many sales.

Since then we put a Google Analytics Goal Funnel in place on the checkout funnel pages to examine what site users were doing when they got to the point of checking out on the site. A screenshot of a one-month view of the funnel is below.

This shows us that almost 9 out of 10 people who click on the “Check Out” button abandon the process along the way. See that only 18 of the 90 people who attempted to check out proceeded on to step 2 of the process, i.e. 72 people abandoned the check out on the “Login/Create Account” page. So we have an almost 90% funnel abandonment rate!

So this Login/Create Account page is the major culprit, causing the loss of 80% of potential sales on the site). So we need to take a very good look at this page and redesign and re-test it.

This site is built on Zen Cart, which is a great open-source template-based online store system. Now the default templates that come with Zen Cart are usually just customised by adding page styling by the web designers who build the site, as is the case with this site, but the overall structure and wording of the page templates are not changed. These default checkout page templates leave a lot to be desired regarding conversion optimisation, and they really need to be changed to achieve better performance.

A great resource for getting off to a flying start with optimising your Zen Cart site (or an online store site built on any platform for that matter) is the free e-book written by Eric Leuenberger from ZenCartOptimization.com. The ebook is available for free download at http://www.zencartoptimization.com/2007/05/09/20-surefire-ways-to-increase-sales-using-zen-cart/. This ebook details ways in which you can change your e-commerce page and site design so that you achieve a much higher sales conversion rate.

So that is where we are at now with this site. We are going to totally overhaul the Login/Create Account page, and keep an eye on the Goal Funnel, to see how the new design performs. From that we can expect at least a doubling of sales on this site.

Other pages such as the Checkout Payment page, also need an overhaul (its causing 30% of visitors to bail, just as they are about to pay), so we’ll implement the suggestions from Eric’s ebook on this also.

We will update this series of posts with a post on how our newly optimised pages are performing, and I will also be writing a separate blog post on how exactly the funnel is implemented on the Google Analytics account in a short while. Its pretty simple really, when you know how.

We appreciate your comments in the meantime.