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.