Transactional Website Conversion Explorer

Try modeling different types of drop-out within your e-commerce site. You'll be amazed how much improving conversion by a 1% at any step in the process can affect the bottom line.

Modify the funnel to represent your e-commerce or transaction flow. Study the graphical model to understand your most precipitious drops. To create your mode, use add (++) / delete (--) to remove or add steps for your task flow. Click on the task names to edit the name to match your domain.

After you create a model, you can save it to your clipboard. You can then generate a report to share the conversion differences of model variations.

Model It!

Saved Models

Generate Report

Step Name click to edit	Conversion %	Manage Steps
Starting Point - Homepage	100%	++
Homepage Clickthrough	%	++ --
Add to Cart	%	++ --
Checkout Start	%	++ --
Checkout End	%
Total Conversion % Save Model

Thinking about Conversion

How often does your website accomplish it's goals?

In related terms, are you doing a good job maximizing the intersection of your business goals and your customer's needs?

The default configuration provided here is typical for an e-commerce transaction flow, but the principles of conversion can apply to lead generation and generally any type of workflow in which key landmarks in your clickstream can be used to monitor business success.

Typical Conversion Flow

The Homepage Bounce

In my experience, almost every website experiences significant issues with engaging visitors. Many visitors will reach your homepage but go no further. They may have come to the site with the wrong expectations, the phone might ring or the baby begin to cry, or the site may not have engaged them. The last of these causes is the one to focus on primarily. While good copy can help search engine referrals enter with better expectations, you're not likely to reduce telemarketing or infant biorhythms!

Getting a Tentative Commitment: Add to Cart

In an e-commerce scenario, a variety of factors can influence add-to-cart behavior, both from internet technology and basic business principles:

Business Variable	Technology Variable
Brand name	Perceived trustworthiness via design
Product selection	Product presentation
Product pricing
	Add to cart UI
Customer service & fulfillment	UI around fulfillment policies

Thinking about these factors in relation to your add-to-cart or other first step engagement user actions may help you try out ways to improve this part of conversion.

Transactional Flows: Avoiding Dropout

Common wisdom on e-commerce checkout flows has produced some basic standards:

Keep the user informed: Don't hide details like shipping costs or return policy behind several forms with required fields.
Keep the user informed: Tell then how far along in the process they are.
Prevent user error: Good form design makes credit card or date formats understandable
Enable easy recovery from error: If the user does enter an input which server side validation says is unusable, be sure to preserve the user's effort in filling out the form when you ask for a correction.

Keep the user informed, prevent user error, and enable recovery from error are 3 of a set of 10 usability principles that are useful sanity checks for your transactional flow, e-commerce or otherwise. Browse the full list at Jakob Nielsen's UseIt site.

About this Tool

This is an update to the Uzilla funnel concept with a 2006 DHTML implementation using the MochiKit library. Read more about how mochi helped.

Send feedback to conversionFunnel (at) gmail.com.