Enhanced Checkout

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Summary

Like most news organizations now Newsday is keenly focused on growing digital subscription revenue. One of our biggest falloffs in the funnel is our checkout form. At a number higher than the industry standard, it’s a great target for optimization.

The Process

We started with user testing to demystify why people were dropping off. Most of this can be accounted for as purchase anxiety, but we wanted to know more.

By doing a qualitative test we had users run through the purchase flow and explain their thought process as they transversed each step. We learned very fast that there was too many steps. Users didn’t want to fill out all the information we were asking for.

Optimization

We needed to cut down the amount of info we were asking for. What is the least amount of information we need to get the user subscribed for a digital subscription? Turns out, we didn’t need much. We only needed name, email and credit card. We were asking for the users their full address and a bunch of other fields that we could always capture after they were subscribed.

This was huge, make it faster and the user will have less time to bail out. Seems simple enough.

Planning

What if the checkout process was 2 steps? We could clearly mitigate the users concern of having to fill out all this extraneous information.

They just want to read!

So we designed a simple on page checkout form that would allow users to subscribe right on the page they are on and do what they came to do, read.

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