Is checkout page setup (in regards to abandonment) this sensitive?!?!

[PedroAndJobu]

About a week ago, I added a google checkout button (which wasn't really positioned well) & option to add a note on my checkout page for my site.  Over the next three days, my cart abandonment was 100%!!!!!   16 customers got to checkout, but all of them dropped out...

I was starting to freak out and finally took the google button & note option down. Since then, I'm back up to about 50% abandonment.

Is the ecosystem of a checkout page really this sensitive?  If so, holy S#$%!

Just wondering if anyone has any general advice or links for me to study up on checkout abandonment.

Maybe we can get a Whiteboard Friday discussing this?

[retailgeek]

Small changes **CAN **have a big affect on e-commerce checkout, but in your case, I'd suspect one of two possibiliteis:

1.  Your customers are using the Google Checkout option, which isn't showing up in your analytics.  If you log into your google wallet dashboard, do you see any completed transactions?  If so, then you just need to make sure your clickstream analytics package is configured on your google checkout pages.  Are you using Google Analytics or another package?  Assuming you have Google Analytics with E-Commerce tracking enabled, you need to make sure that google analytics is enabled; so whichever javascript method you're using (ga.js, ga.js Asynchronous Tracking,
urchin.js, or the brand new analytics.js) needs to be added to your google checkout pages, per these instructions: https://developers.google.com/checkout/developer/checkout_analytics_integration#Overview

2.  You have a flaw in your Google Checkout implementation that is keeping people from checking out.  Ask some friends or family (who aren't too familiar with your webdite) to buy something and checkout.  Get someone to try using the Google Checkout option, and another person to bypass the Google Checkout and use your legacy payment path.  Are both test users able to checkout?  Do your analytics see both success checkouts?

It is possible that your analytics are working perfectly, that you Google Checkout is functioning fine, and that just the extra "cognitive load" of having two payment options is enough to drive abandonment, but I doubt it.  You could use Google Analytics (or another A/B testing tool) to run a marketing experiment with and without google checkout to confirm that the new option is your problem.

Good luck,

-Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg