Facts & Figures
A statistical breakdown of the top 100 grossing e-commerce sites
The following stats are based on Baymard Institute's 2012 checkout usability database of the top 100 grossing e-commerce sites, with 508 checkout steps reviewed in total.
On average the 100 sites violated a third of the 63 guidelines presented in our checkout usability report, which can perhaps explain the industry average abandonment rate of 67.35%.
5.08 Checkout steps on average
The average length of a checkout process among the top 100 grossing e-commerce sites - counting from "cart page" to page where the order is placed (most often a "review order" page)
24% Require an account to purchase
This of course means that 76% provided a guest checkout option
44% Decrease in usability on sites grossing more than $1 billion
The top 23 sites with online sales of more than $1 billion scored lower than the 77 other sites on average
81% Presume customers want their newsletter
Newsletter opt-out is the most common (mal)practice. In fact, 32 of the sites automatically signed the customer up to their newsletter with no way of opting out during checkout
50% Ask for the same information more than once
Instead of pre-filling fields, these sites make the customer enter the same information multiple times (typically in different steps), thereby adding needless friction to their checkout experience
10% Auto-detect state and/or city based on ZIP code
While this may seem like a relatively advanced feature, the lowest grossing site benchmarked had $148 million in online sales (Internet Retailer 2010) and could be expected to invest in features like this
41% Use an address validator
However, 12% (relative) of these don't allow the customer to override the validator in case the address isn't recognized but the user is absolutely sure the address is correct
14% Use an accordion design
These accordion checkouts have almost the same length as traditional checkouts with 5.29 steps on average