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What brought WebTrends to my attention was a case-study on Motorcycle Superstore. I have a personal interest in this company, so it was really engaging to click the link-trail to find out more about the relationship between WebTrends and the very successful Motorcycle Superstore. Near the end of the trail, I came across a white paper with some excellent tips on what is actually important to your online store. The section of the white paper is written by the hired gun, Bryan Eckenberg, author of the “New York Times,” “USA Today,” and “Wall Street Journal” bestseller “Call to Action“.

What really stood out from the very beginning of the top 20 Tips for Lowering Shopping Cart Abandonment section was what I keep hearing from so many people on discussion boards about the number of steps to checkout. Here’s an excerpt:

1. Check how many steps are in your checkout process. This is usually a prime “knee jerk” target for results, but we have found that the number of steps in the checkout process is not all that critical. We were able to bring one client’s checkout process down from 6 steps to 1, but we found no correlation between the abandonment rate to the reduced number of steps. Once people found what they came for, they took the time and found a way to checkout no matter how many steps were involved. Should you change the number of steps? Not necessarily! It may not be worth the time, effort and expense of trying to reduce the steps in the checkout process. Try some of these other ideas first.
More interesting thoughts are in the white paper, which can be found here: