The battle of one page vs multiple page checkout pros and cons

The

Battle

Of

One-Page

Vs

Multiple-Page

Checkout- Pros And Cons

When we talk about eCommerce checkout optimization, there is so much we think about doing. And after knowing that about 70 % of abandonments occur from checkout page itself, we start to see our site’s checkout with a doubtful look.

Is my checkout process efficient?

Are shoppers happy with my checkout?

What else should I do to ensure happy checkouts?

You can keep on A/B testing your checkout page and learn new things to tweak your checkout process.

Hold on for a minute!

Before you start changing the button color, CTA Text hoping for a massive improvement, maybe you should think about it again.

Is it the color of the CTA button or the text on the CTA button alone that is creating unhappy customers? I guess not. It's the checkout length and ease that matters.

It brings me to my main point here. How would you decide the length of your checkout?

For most of us simply installing a one-page checkout extension or

module seems to be the best solution here. Just install a module and reduce the number of pages to just a single page, and everything is sorted.

Are one-page checkouts the ultimate solution?

That depends! because it does not matter if you are using a single page checkout or a multiple page checkout until it is optimized. Yes, one-page checkouts have some advantages over the multiple page checkouts (that we will discuss soon below), but it doesn't mean multi-page checkout are not usable.

We often tend to follow the conventions being followed by everyone without even giving it a second thought. And the same convention has also spread the words like one-page checkouts are undoubtedly and always better than multi-page checkouts.

Baymard Institute, when carried a usability research on one-page checkouts and multi-page checkouts, they had some really interesting conclusions to make. “There do exists some A/B cases where one page checkouts outperform multi-step checkouts significantly. These cases however often compare a non-optimized multi-step checkout with a new optimized one page checkout.

During the research for our checkout usability report we found that users in general had relatively few problems navigating between multiple steps (as long as a few simple guidelines are adhered to) – the usability issues were primarily caused by what the customer had to do at each step.

When A/B testing a non-optimized multi-step checkout (being A) against a one page checkout (B), I’d say if a C version were introduced that took precisely the same form fields as the one page, but split it across two pages (address on page one, credit card details on page two) – there wouldn’t be much, if any, difference in abandonment/completion rates between B and C.” What it means is, it doesn't matter how many pages you have, until you are using an optimized checkout. An optimized checkout is what that asks for only the necessary information, keeps the form short, gives easy shipping choices, has multiple payment options, provides multiple checkout options- registered, guest, Register new account, social login. You can achieve these optimizations on both the types of checkout.

Just look at these 8 Awesome eCommerce checkout examples, you will see not all are one-page, some are multi-paged too.

So, which option is best?

Again, it depends. I am enlisting the pros and cons of both the forms of checkout here. It will help you to decide.

One page checkout Pros 1. Speed- One a single page checkout, the customers can quickly fill all the forms and details, as they don't have to wait for moving from pages to pages to fill out the next form. At least, there is a significant difference in the speed of checkout as compared to multi-page checkout.

2. Psychological boost- When customers can see everything on a single page, they remain updated with the progress of the process.

They know how many details they have filled and how many yet to fill. It gives a psychological motivation to finish it off.

3. Navigation- It’s a major advantage of single page checkouts, where there is almost no need for navigation. All the fields, forms, payment options, shipping options, cart preview everything is on the same page, so customers won’t have to go to any other page if they want to review any detail.

4. Easy optimization without coding- One-page checkouts are general third-party modules and extensions. They are more advanced and have some features that are not found in default checkouts. For example, With this Magento one page checkout extension: √

You can Add or Remove any field from the checkout process, without messing with the codes. You can do so from the back-office itself.

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You can make any field optional or required to fill

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You can change the order of details. Say, you can just drag and drop to move ‘City’ field above the ‘State’ field.

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You can allow Social Login in addition to guest and registered checkout options.

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You can change the layout of the page to one column, two column, or three column.

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You can add your personalized HTML contents on the checkout page.

Cons 1. Layout may be distorted- It's really tough to show every checkout step on a single page only. Sometimes, with so many elements, the layout may look cluttered. It would just backfire if your one-page checkout cannot handle the layout optimization.

Though the layout problem may be solved by avoiding the silly mistakes in website form design, it doesn't always mean every website owner can do all by themselves. It's good if your plugin provider provides the after-sales services to do the tweaks, otherwise, it is a headache.

2. Tough to find pitfalls- When everything is on a single page, it becomes so hard to track the pitfall when a customer abandons from the checkout page. You won’t be able to get it easily which element is killing your checkout process.

Luckily, website owners nowadays have gone smart enough and they use analytic tools to track the users’ behavior. A heatmapping would be helpful to track lagging element, while A/B testing would work best to improve it with certain tweaks.

Multi-page checkout Pros 1. Easy to capture the pitfalls: It quite easy to capture the pitfall here. Say a customer filled the information on the first page (say login page), selected the shipping option on the second page, and suddenly abandoned the cart from the third page. Here, you can easily use the Google Analytics tool, to get an insight from where the customer abandoned the cart.

2. Clean layout- Since there is no restriction of accumulating everything on a single page, you can design a clean checkout process by focusing on every step on every page in the process.

3. Email collection - By dividing the checkout into multiple pages, you can still collect the customer data filled by them in the earlier pages even if they abandon the cart from subsequent pages. For example, if the customers fill the email address on page one, and leaves the process from page two, you will still have the email address and can contact him/her with your reminder emails.

Cons Checkout length- Practically, checkout length does not depend on the number of pages. However, psychologically, customers when seeing multiple pages start to feel like it's a long checkout process.

Seeing 5 more pages to go after filling on the first page can be quite disheartening.

To conclude At the end, it you who have to decide which checkout is best- one page or multi-page checkout? Don't adopt a single page checkout because everyone is doing so. What's working for Jack might not work for Jill.

If you think that you multi-page checkout is not efficient, and it does not have enough of the customization scope, you may go for a third party checkout extension. However, before that, do some heatmapping, and find the gray areas of your current checkout, A/B test your improvement ideas and see if it's working for you. If it has no scope, one-page checkout is there to the rescue, but don't fail to optimize your one-page checkout too.