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Study: Only 7 percent of e-commerce sites offer one-page checkouts

April 18, 2012

The average number of checkout pages required to complete an order on e-commerce sites was three, and only 7 percent of merchants surveyed offered one-page checkout as an option, according to Innotrac Corp.'s SmartHub, an e-commerce benchmark analysis, which was based on a sampling of orders placed in February.

SmartHub evaluated 100 leading U.S. e-retailers across six different product categories in February for its latest report, SmartHub release 2.0.

Other key findings included that:.

• 96 percent of merchants were able to confirm inventory of a purchased item through customer service, however, of those who had more than one distribution channel (e.g., online plus physical stores, or catalog), only 47 percent of CSRs appeared to have visibility into activity happening outside of the e-commerce or direct channel.
• 65 percent could ship packages to customers in three days or less.
• 38 percent utilized some sort of branded packaging, either inside or outside the box, up from 29 percent in Q4. Health/Beauty merchants were most aggressive, with 53 percent using branded packaging.

The addition of several new data points, including those pertaining to customer service, has provided additional insights not seen in previous SmartHub releases. Multichannel visibility is one such area that is now being evaluated, as retailers become more proficient at servicing customers who see no boundaries between online and brick-and-mortar outlets.

"It is particularly interesting that a slight majority of merchants aren't yet providing omnichannel activity to customers through one source," said Jon Eggleton, Innotrac's VP of marketing and e-commerce. "We expect to see this trend change as customers push further for channel transparency."

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