I’ve been with Solid Cactus before they were Solid Cactus! Whenever they come out with a new feature, you can be pretty sure I’ll be adding it.
—Tony Sakakeeny, SakWorldPaintball.com
Fewer people leave, more of them stay at
SakWorldPaintball.com, as its name implies is, the place to go for all things paintball. Whether it’s the guns themselves, or vests, tanks, pants, jerseys and everything else you could possibly want to wage paint war. The company was born in the Boston area and the primary customers are men between 13 and 30 with an average order totaling around $150. SakWorldPaintball.com has 1,000 products and has been in business since 1998. They’re real e-commerce pioneers. The company has actually been around since before Solid Cactus formed. “I knew one of the early managers before he joined the company and I knew one of the Solid Cactus founders,” Tony recalls. “I’ve been with them since the beginning and vice versa. Solid Cactus has always done my site designs and redesigns.”
SakWorldPaintball.com has been an early subscriber to Solid Cactus products and new features. “I was a Beta tester for the company for years,” Tony recalls. “I know it’s critical to success in this medium that you stay up with every improvement. There is a constant evolution in e-commerce and I think it’s good business to stay as informed as possible.” A year ago Tony signed up for Checkout Manager Optimization. He was battling a problem common to e-commerce operators, shopping cart abandonment.
For stores on the Yahoo! Small Business platform, the checkout process includes customers viewing the shopping cart and checkout through a secondary server that does not integrate the design of the original store. According to Jupiter Research, 17% of online power-shoppers abandon cart because the checkout is too long and confusing. Solid Cactus simplified the aesthetics with Checkout Manager Optimization and added “step” graphics so the shopper was aware of their progress to completion. They redesigned the header graphic to focus on customer service and added the “free shipping countdown” text to encourage upsells. Solid Cactus also removed the navigation from the shopping cart to keep the click stream more conversion focused.
A different but related problem is the team resistance by many customers to logging in and leaving pertinent information with a shopping site. According to Jupiter Research, 24% of customers abandoned cart if they were forced to register for a site login. SakWorldPaintball.com added the customer login, but Solid Cactus made sure shoppers were aware this was an optional step. They also added an 800 number.
Tony noticed the difference immediately. “We started getting a lot more phone calls,” he says. “People called with questions. Then we found they’d either complete the checkout online or finish the order by phone.”
In fact, Solid Cactus was able to lessen the rates of shopping cart abandonment for SakWorldPaintball.com. The new checkout design decreased abandonment by 8.4% to 89.9%. The original initial cart page saw an 86% loss of customers, which decreased to 65% post-optimization. Of those who made it to the shipping/billing page, abandonment rates went from 87.3% pre-optimization to 70.9% post-optimization.
The bottom line is that when fewer people leave, more of them stay and more of them ultimately buy. In the end, the enhancements led to an increase in average order size and revenue by 12%.
Tony Sakakeeny says he’s happy with the increases in conversions, but he’s been in e-commerce a long time and doesn’t take anything for granted. “I’m just completing my latest redesign,” he says. “In this industry it’s easy to get complacent and put things off. Whether it’s a new feature or a new look, we have to keep up. People like variety and they like change in their shopping experience. If we don’t give it to them they’ll shop on sites that will.”
