We implemented address autocomplete for on the checkout page at Universal Yums a couple years ago, but had never A/B tested its impact on conversions until recently.

It makes intuitive sense that address autocomplete would reduce friction as it enables customers to complete checkout faster. It has also been implemented by a number of large companies like Shopify and Doordash (which I assume have A/B tested every part of checkout) and appears to be best practice.

Although Google Places API requests are very cheap ($17 per 1000 sessions) they are not free if you exceed the $200 monthly usage credit, so I’ve always been curious if its worth the thousands of dollars we spend on it each year.

A/B Test Results

We ran our A/B test with 33k customers who made it to the checkout page. The results showed that address autocomplete did improve our conversion rate by ~1.5%.

For a $1M business, this improvement in conversion rate would lead to an additional $15k in sales- which should more than justify the cost of the API requests.

It is also fairly straightforward to implement. If you are using WooCommerce for your ecommerce site, check out the free Address Autocomplete with Google Places extension on WordPress.org.

Caveats

As with anything, results can vary depending on your customer base. The majority of our customers are based in the United States and complete their purchase on a mobile device. If you’re doing heavy volume it likely makes sense to run your own A/B test to measure the change. However, I suspect most sites will see a similar or better improvement in conversion as we did.