A while back, I wrote about our decision to change to a two-page checkout process, with the main goal being to reduce checkout process abandonment. We piloted this checkout process on the Hockey Canada store and the results were extremely positive, but we weren't content to sit on our laurels. So, when we started re-designing the official Vancouver 2010 Olympic store, we challenged ourselves to take it to the next level -- and we cut the checkout process down to just one page.

Structurally, the new single-page checkout looks very much like the two-page checkout, with shipping information first, followed by billing and confirmation. The Elastic Path Commerce platform is flexible enough to handle multiple checkout process flows for the same store, so there was no significant Google Website Optimizer integration required to make this work.

Variant A (Control): Multi-page Checkout

Page 1 (sign in):

Page 2 (shipping address):

Page 3 (shipping method):

Page 4 (billing & review):

Page 5 (receipt)

Variant B: Single Page Checkout

Page 1 (shipping, billing):

Page 2 (receipt and optional user registration form):

In A/B split testing, 50% of site traffic was redirected to the OOTB checkout, while the other 50% was served the new single-page checkout. By the time we reached 300 transactions, the winner was clear, and we stopped the experiment after 606 transactions. Google Website Optimizer concluded that the single-page checkout outperformed the out-of-the-box checkout by a whopping 21.8%. But what does that 21.8% really mean? GWO only counts goal conversions and does not link to any ecommerce data on Google Analytics, so we used Advanced Segments to get this data passed on to Google Analytics.

We defined two Advanced Segments by creating the following expressions:

• Multi-step checkout: /(?:checkout|shipping-address|billing-address|delivery-options|billing-and-review)\.html.*
• Single page checkout: /check-out\.html.*

This allowed us to track metrics like Average Order Value and Conversion Rate for each experiment variation.

Here's what we observed:

• Successful completion rate for the entire checkout process increased by 257.26%.
• Overall site conversion rate increased by 0.54%.
• We also observed some unexpected improvements during this experiment, like an increase of 8.54% in the average order value!

While these numbers are impressive, they should not be used as the sole indicator of how single-page checkout performs. This is just what we observed when changing from the standard four-page checkout to a single-page checkout process on the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store. Your mileage may vary, depending on your product, target market, etc. There's no silver bullet checkout process that works best for all business models. Doing your own A/B split testing will give you a better idea of what kinds of numbers you can expect.