I can still remember the first time I drove I-24 through Tennessee.  It was a warm spring day and I was headed from St. Louis to Florida for a little R & R with the family.  The sky was blue and the wife and I were packed in the car with our two kids cruising along peacefully at 80 miles per hour.  At the time, I wasn’t too familiar with the theories of repetition in advertising, but I was about to get a quick 20 point lesson.

1)  The first sign for Rock City was shortly after we crossed the Tennessee state line.  I have a long standing belief that the restrooms at welcome centers are the nicest restrooms on the highway, so I was worried about switching into the exit lane and I didn’t even see it.

2)   The second sign for Rock City was right after the welcome center.  I glanced at it, but I didn’t really notice it.

3)  The third sign for Rock City was a few miles down the road.  I gave it a good look.  It was black and red and it had words.

4)  I saw the fourth sign for Rock City only a few minutes later.  I realized that it was also black and red and that the words on it said something about Rock City.

5)  The fifth sign for Rock City was a few miles outside of Nashville.  It read “Visit Rock City” exit 27 172 miles ahead.

6)  The sixth sign was somewhere in Nashville.  I laughed.  “Why are they advertising something that’s 165 miles away?”

7)  I saw the seventh sign as we were leaving Nashville.  I was getting sick of them.

8)  When I saw the eighth one, I woke up Raffi.  “Look at these fools,” I quipped.  She had been asleep, so it was the first one she saw.  She had no idea what I was talking about.

9)  I saw the ninth one, and I started to wonder what Rock City is like.

10)  After the tenth one, I woke up Raffi and asked her if she had ever heard of it.  “Yeah,” she said, “it was on that sign you woke me up to look at 10 minutes ago.”

11)  By the eleventh sign, I wondered how the heck Rock City could afford all these billboards.

12)  When we passed the twelfth sign a few miles later, I figured that if they could afford all these signs, they must have a lot of visitors.  If they have a lot of visitors, they must have a fun attraction.  It was very logical.

13)   At the thirteenth sign, they were starting to advertise seeing Ruby Falls with admission to Rock City.  It was starting to sound like a pretty good deal.

14)  As I was passing the fourteenth sign, I was thinking about how I had been wanting to do a little vacation where we do nothing but stop at kitschy roadside attractions.

15)  When I saw the fifteenth sign, the cold hard reality hit me that we just wouldn’t have time to stop at Rock City.

16)  By the sixteenth sign, I had come to peace with the fact that we’d just have to plan to hit it on a future trip.

17)  When I passed the seventeenth sign, I was making a mental note to look into a southeastern Tennessee vacation for next fall.

18)  The eighteenth sign was only 10 miles from Rock City.  It was such a clear day and I cursed the fact the I wouldn’t have the opportunity to see 7 states from one vantage point.

19)  The nineteenth sign informed me that I needed to get off at the next exit if I was going to ride the incline railway to the top of lookout mountain to see Rock City.

20)  The twentieth sign told me I needed to exit right now.  The rest of the family was asleep, and I switched to the right lane.  It took a lot of willpower to keep driving, especially because the twenty-first sign said something along the lines of “You just missed Rock-City, you dumbf*ck”. 

One major mistake people make is paying a lot of money for a single one time run ad in a huge publication.  It’s far better to hit fewer people more times than more people once.  If you don’t believe me, just drive from Clarksville to Chattanooga on I-24.  Send me a postcard from Rock City, high atop Lookout Mountain. 

I’m willing to bet that if you asked 10 random people on the street what the optimal number of pages for the checkout process of an e-commerce website is, you’d get the following result:

7 would ignore you completely.

1 would raise an eyebrow at you and give you that “You talkin’ to me?” look. 

1 would ask you to repeat the question, then tell you they don’t know what an e-commerce website is

1 would say “1″

If the first seven hadn’t ignored you, they’d have probably replied with a “1″ or a “2″.  Most people don’t like to waste their timenavigating through endless confirmation pages to finally get to a receipt for the item they’re buying.  Or, do they?

Elastipath recently released a report of the e-commerce tactics of the top 100 online retailers.  Although the data are affected by other factors, the report shows that vendors using 3 pages in the checkout process have a higher conversion rate, converting an average of 6.3% of their visitors into sales.  Four, five and seven checkout pages all convert at an average of 5.6%-5.7%.  The much heralded one checkout page converts at an average of only 2.5%.

What can explain this counterintuitive result?  One argument is that even though they don’t like to admit it, people feel more comfortable with the long checkout process.  One checkout page just seems like someone is trying to scam them out of their money.  Multiple checkout pages give customers a chance to reassure themselves that the busieness is reputable, everything will ship to the right address and the proper card will be charged.

Whatever the reason, this is good news for your online store.  You can safely use multiple checkout pages without the fear of losing your customers.