Report: Online retailers focusing on the checkout experience

When an online shopping experience is analyzed, most of the emphasis is usually placed on the "front end" — how the site looks to the visitor upon entrance, how intuitive navigation is, how well upsell opportunities are executed.

But according to new research from Forrester, online retailers understand that they need to work on the back end of the experience and improve the checkout process.

That's among the findings in Forrester's "The State of Retailing Online 2009: Merchandising Report," which surveyed 117 online retailers. Seventy-nine percent of the respondents said they were going to focus on improving the checkout experience in the remaining months of 2009.

Most of the emphasis appears to be placed on shipping transparency, with 88 percent of respondents saying they want to add more shipping information to the site, and 67 percent reporting that they want to better calculate shipping costs before the checkout page.

Emphasis placed in one area naturally means a decreased emphasis somewhere else, and for e-tailers that somewhere else appears to be improvements to the home page — a natural move, in keeping with the prevailing notion that "every page is your home page."

In an era of tight budgets, the increased focus on checkout is balanced by a somewhat lessened focus on home page improvements, with 60 percent of companies saying they would concentrate on improving their home page, down from previous years. According to the report, retailers have learned that many shoppers bypass the home page altogether because comparison shopping engines and search engines often direct them to specific pages on retailers' websites instead. As a result, retailers are focusing more on product detail pages and search results pages.