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The things we go through to get folks to click that button.

To create the sales page, we—

• Sweat blood over the perfect headline
• Labor over the list of benefits
  Not the features, never the features…sell the sizzle, not the steak, blah blah
• Corral testimonials from famous folk (or scavenge ‘em from whoever we can find) and
• Craft a no-risk money-back guarantee that we gotta have but hope no one uses

And that’s not the end of it, is it? Then there’s the promotion deluge, where we—

• Pummel our mailing list about the product
• Pummel other people’s mailing lists about the product
• Write blog posts about the product
• Ask other people to write blog posts about the product
• Write guest posts about the product
• Host teleseminars about the product
• Tweet about the product, and
• Ask for retweets about the product, and on and on…

And then there’s the affiliate promotions, which is all that same stuff done by other people for mutual benefit.

Gah!

And it can go on for weeks, right? Like, up to a month…right? Which, by the way, can be two to four times longer than it took to create the product in the first place.

All to get folks to click that big, blessed, beautious, bountiful Buy button…

…that sends them to a piece o’ shit shopping cart.

Yeah, uh huh. You know what I’m talking about.

Beyond the Buy Button: Why You Should Care

According to Web Design for ROI, “An average of 59.8% of all visitors entering a checkout process abandon it before completion.”

Which means that only 40.2% of potential buyers followed through. This is a big problem. Huge.

(If you’re not feeling the size of the problem, be sure to read the next bits…)

Because failing sucks. And below average performance sucks, too.

Back when I was in school, a 40.2% on a test meant we got an F. We failed. And the next step up was a D for below average.

Is that why we spent all that time and expertise on making, marketing, and promoting our product? To, essentially, fail? And to have the next best thing be less-than-average performance?

I didn’t think so.

Because you can make (a lot) more money

Picture this: It’s your big product launch day and all your loving, skillful effort gets 1,000 people to click the Buy button for your $49 product! Woohoo!

But only 402 folks actually buy.

Because that’s what a 59.8% cart abandonment rate means. It means you were in line for launch day earnings of $49,000, but $29,302 slipped away between the Buy button and the Thank You! page.

It means you lost more than you made.

(Do you feel it now?)

The World Beyond the Buy Button

The good news is people like @SandraNiehaus and Lance @Loveday recognize this problem, work through real-world solutions, and most important for us: write books.

Because what if you could reduce that cart abandonment rate with some design tweaks? Not a shopping cart overhaul or switching service providers…just changing the look and removing a few fields? How much of a bottom-line improvement could that make?

How about 20%?

In Web Design for ROI, there’s a case study that starts on page 166 that says, “a design facelift to [the client's] checkout process resulted in a 20% reduction in the cart abandonment rate.”

As I read it, that means if their abandonment rate was the average 59.8%, then the design tweaks improved it to 39.8%.

Which means out of 100o folks who click the Buy button, 602 folks will finish buying, not just 402.

Which means you would have earned more than you lost on that hypothetical launch day—$9,800 more, if my math is right.

So.

Your sales page is the middle of the sale, not the end game.

Your shopping cart that is supposed to process purchases can kill them before they’re completed.

And you don’t have to do huge scary heart-wrenching things to fix that. Small changes can make a (very) big difference and sell more of your stuff.

Things like—

• Tweak your shopping cart to look like your site (as much as possible)
  A shopping cart page that looks dramatically different can chase off the uncertain
• Simplify your checkout pages
  Highlight what’s important, remove what doesn’t matter, and organize everything else
• Emphasize your secure process
  Security signals like https, the lock icon, and the words “secure checkout” ease the mind
• Display your checkout steps
  Checkout processes can seem endless, so show folks how close they are to the finish line

And other stuff. It’s all in the book.

What matters most now is—

• Does your current shopping cart do these things that sell more of your stuff?
  If it does these things, then Yay!
  If it doesn’t do those things…
• Can you tweak it to sell more of your stuff?
  If you can tweak your current cart, then Yay!
  If you can’t tweak it to sell more of your stuff…?

Well, maybe you need another shopping cart.

Just saying.

Photo credit: PayPal

Math credit: @risingstarideas @janetbailey @victoriashmoria @beth_andrus @lauriefoley