Thanks For Your Order… Part Two
As a follow up to my last post, “Thanks For Your Order … Your Total Is …” I want to point that there are legitimate reasons why some e-merchants decide to omit the order review page prior to checkout (even though I hate it when they do).
In fact, I just now learned that Yahoo!’s Checkout Manager and most other shopping cart platforms purposely give you the option of either presenting the order review page or not.
“You may wish to disable this page to present one less page in the checkout process and streamline the checkout flow,” a Checkout Manager help page in the Small Business section on Yahoo! states.
But it adds: “You should exercise caution in deciding not to display the order review page, as removing the page has advantages as well as disadvantages.”
So what are the pros and cons of including the order review page?
Among the pros, it allows shoppers “to pause and review shipping and billing information as well as total charges” (which is obvious). It also allows the shopper to “feel in control of the purchase process by including an extra step where they explicitly choose to place the order after reviewing all information. This can be especially important if the order total is high and your shoppers are typically first-time buyers.”
Among the cons, it adds “an extra step to checkout process which may increase shopping cart abandonment” – and, as I implied in my last post, “it may deter impulse buys by giving the buyer another chance to back out of sale.”
So what are the pros and cons of omitting the order review page?
Well, among the pros it “streamlines the checkout flow, which may help to increase conversions from shoppers to buyers.” Also, “if you sell low cost items, or order totals are typically small, and you have many repeat shoppers, the buyer may not need the extra step in checkout.”
The only downside of omitting the page is that “buyers expecting an order review page may initiate a chargeback if they feel they inadvertently ordered a product.”
To me it sounds like the advantages of pushing these pages out to customers far outweighs the advantages of hiding them … especially when the customer comes away with the feeling (as I did) that the e-merchant was being less than forthcoming by not showing them their order total prior to checkout.
December 11th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
good tips. although online shopping has become much safer and more mainstream, there are still people out there abusing your privacy.
i’ve found it’s not so much out of malice as it is ignorance. one of my favorite mistakes is when joe merchant tosses up an online form to collect your credit card information and has the form send him an email. All without encrypting your card number.
that may sound like gobbledy-gock to the non-web savvy, but here’s a site that seems to be legit and has some good tips when it comes to online shopping ….
http://www.safeshopping.org/