High drop-out rates and missing buttons

[seqal]

Since starting to use Actinic a couple of months, ago I've become concerned that the drop-out rate from the checkout processes on our websites is unusually high.

We use Actinic (v9) for websites at www.template-contracts.co.uk and www.website-contracts.co.uk. The drop-out rate for each site over the last month (measured using Google Analytics) is approx 40% - i.e. 40% of users who add a product to their cart do not complete the transaction.

Comments on a thread from 2007 suggested that this was a very high drop-out rate.

Two customers have called us in the last couple of weeks saying that, when they got to the last stage of the checkout process (just before transfer to Protx to make payment) there was no "next" button and so they could not get through to Protx to make payment.

(The automatic transfer to Protx has never worked btw.)

I have been trying to discover what could be causing the missing "next" buttons, but no luck so far. I haven't managed to see them (or rather not see them) myself.

I got a browser version number from one of the customers (IE 7.0.5730) but when I tried using that version from one of my own computers the process worked fine.

Also, Google Analytics doesn't show any disproportionately low levels of sales from any particular browser version.

Any ideas/help would be very much appreciated.

Al Taylor

[Rich Brady]

I've just gone through to Protx and all "Next" Buttons have been there!

[Mike Hughes]

40% drop off from cart to completion is in the right ballpark.

http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=30109

Mike

[seqal]

Thanks very much guys. Support called me a short while ago with a fix (something in the hotshot template) and the page now bounces to Protx, so lack of button shouldn't be a problem now.

[Duncan Rounding]

I've seen this before with a client. The next button was pushed off to the side and couldn't be seen because it was under the right side column div. Reducing the occ template to suit the cart width solved the problem.

[malbro]

The drop-out rate for each site over the last month (measured using Google Analytics) is approx 40% - i.e. 40% of users who add a product to their cart do not complete the transaction.

One problem with Google analytics is it does not handle customers who enter the cart process but then go back to the store and then re-enter the cart. This counts the cart twice or more for a single sale so gives a misleading statistic.

My own information suggests a similar figure to yourself, however a more interesting statistic is the conversion rate of sales against visitors. This statistic is also suspect due to the difficulty of identifying unique visitors to a site, but ultimately this is the best statistic to monitor.