As an e-commerce retailer, you want to make it as easy as possible for your users to navigate from your homepage to purchasing the product they want.
Each click in your purchasing process is a hurdle that separates you from your user’s money. Your aim must be to streamline that process to as few clicks as possible.
In this post I analyse four top online retailers; Nike, ASOS, Amazon and Zara to see exactly how many clicks are required for a user to purchase a t-shirt on each of these sites.
Nike – 7 clicks to purchase
Nike beats the competition with only seven clicks required to make a purchase, shown as follows:
- Click 1 – Homepage with a mega menu linking directly to the desired product category.
- Click 2 – Product category page for t-shirts.
- Click 3 – Product detail page for a t-shirt.
- Click 4 – Add to cart, which then shows a beautiful pop-up of the item in my cart and an option to checkout, see the screenshot below:
- Click 5 – Checkout
- Click 6 – Enter shipping details with an option to copy the info to the billing details fields.
- Click 7 – Enter credit card details and purchase.
An extremely streamlined, uncluttered process with only seven clicks from the homepage to purchasing the product makes Nike the e-commerce winner.
(Check out my next post to see a review of Nike’s awesome checkout page).
ASOS – 9 clicks to purchase
ASOS is one of the world’s leading online fashion retailers, worth over two and a half Billion pounds, or roughly five billion USD, so they should know a thing or two about selling products online. However, they’re purchasing process involves two more step than Nike’s, and goes as follows:
- Click 1 – Homepage showing mega menu to product categories (like Nike).
- Click 2 – Product category page (t-shirts).
- Click 3 – Product detail page for a t-shirt.
- Click 4 – Add to cart button which reveals cart pop up, Like Nike’s but messier, see screenshot:
- Click 5 – Pay Now.
- Click 6 – This is where ASOS loses points, by insisting the user creates an account before they can complete their purchase. See screenshot:
- Click 7 – Billing & delivery details.
- Click 8 – Enter credit card details. They also lose points here as I should be able to complete the purchase from this step.
- Click 9 – Confirm and pay.
In my opinion, ASOS has two unnecessary steps for the user to take in their purchasing process, which are forcing users to login to create an account and then another step after submitting their credit card details to confirm and pay…..silly sausages.
I wonder what the user drop off rates at each of these two steps are?
Amazon – 10 clicks to purchase
According to the Economist magazine, Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer and accounts for a mind boggling 5% of the USA’s total retail sales – both offline & online.
This makes Amazon the world’s best online shop with the world’s best e-commerce store.
However!
Buying t-shirts from Amazon.com is a clunky ten step process. Admittedly, Amazon’s product range is a billion times the size of Nike’s or anyone elses, so we would expect them to have more ‘layers’ in their shop, but I still found the process messy and clunky.
Here it is:
- Click 1 – Homepage with a product search bar.
- Click 2 – Product category page (t-shirts).
- Click 3 – Product detail page for a t-shirt.
- Click 4 – Add to cart. By the way, after I’ve added my product to the cart, look at the amount of sheisser on the page. So distracting with a myriad of offers competing for my attention:
- Click 5 – Proceed to checkout.
- Click 6 – A page insisting you sign in.
- Click 7 – Enter delivery details.
- Click 8 – Choose shipping options.
- Click 9 – Choose payment method.
- Click 10 – Purchase.
Zara – 11 clicks to purchase
According to Wikipedia Zara is a Spanish clothing and accessories retailer and the main brand of the Inditex group, the world’s largest apparel retailer. Zara had revenues of almost 12 billion euros in 2015.
I found their online purchasing process far longer than it could be and there is some obvious low hanging fruit to be applied to make it easier to buy their clothes online.
The process goes:
- Click 1 – Homepage but with no mega menu showing product categories, I can only click on the “man” link to go to all products for men.
- Click 2 – All products for men (such an unnecessary step!)
- Click 3 – Product category for t-shirts.
- Click 4 – Product detail page for a t-shirt.
- Click 5 – Add to basket.
- Click 6 – See shopping bag.
- Click 7 – Cart page, continue to checkout.
- Click 8 – Login or create a new account – again unnecessary.
- Click 9 – Enter contact details and choose a shipping method.
- Click 10 – Choose payment method
- Click 11 – Enter credit card details and finalise the order.
11 clicks is just too many. As a comparison, this is almost 60% more clicks than Nike’s purchasing process. Imagine the increase in conversions on Zara if they streamlined this process down to seven clicks!
The bottom line is if you’re setting up or optimising an e-commerce store, take a look at how Nike make their purchasing process as simple as possible with a minimal number of clicks required to go from the homepage to purchasing an item.