Atypon’s Literatum eCommerce Workflow Increases Pay-Per-View Sales
Site Includes Guest Checkout, Persistent Carts, and an Accelerated User Journey
Background
Taylor & Francis is one of the world’s leading scholarly and professional publishers, with more than 2,500 journals and 4 million articles, reference works, and eBooks. All are hosted on Literatum, Atypon’s online publishing platform.
Challenge
Taylor & Francis experienced a downward trend in pay-per-view (PPV) sales in 2016 and 2017. A website audit revealed that a protracted eCommerce workflow was leading to frequent cart abandonment and decreased sales. As many as 13 steps were required to purchase a single PPV article.
The publisher attempted to counter this trend by implementing the auto-validation of customer data to reduce failed transactions and by accepting debit cards in addition to credit cards to limit cart abandonment—but the changes had a negligible effect on boosting PPV sales.
Solution
Taylor & Francis adopted Atypon’s eCommerce workflow, which is now standard on all Literatum websites. Modeled after popular consumer eCommerce sites, the new workflow increased the publisher’s PPV sales by improving their users’ experience. The Atypon eCommerce workflow:
- Enables customers to save content in their cart for purchase at a later time
- Allows users to check out as a guest rather than requiring an account be created
- Lets shoppers use third-party payment services
- Provides an accelerated checkout process that eliminates avoidable extra steps
Results
Atypon’s modernized and streamlined eCommerce workflow reduced the number of PPV checkout steps from 13 to 5 and resulted in a 16% year-over-year increase in site-generated revenue.
This substantial increase took place within a month of implementing the eCommerce upgrade, suggesting it was directly responsible for the growth in sales. Guest checkout is now a popular option, accounting for 21% of all transactions.
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