Thursday, October 30, 2008

Ecommerce Conversion Tips

This is a festival season and all online shopping sites would love to increase their sales in this particular period. Christmas, Black Friday and Thanks giving day are the most prominent festival seasons in online sales.

When you try and finish up with some cool features and important features in the website, you can surely convert your visitors into customers. Offers and discounts are the coolest thing which attracts users at the first sight. But when your website has default mistakes itself, users will loose their trust in you / your website and will not go on to purchase from you.

1. Provide security badges like verisign, BBOnline etc in the store front / home page which convey users that their personal information will be kept confidential and the transaction will be quite clear without any hassle.

2. Provide Toll free number and make sure you display in the first fold of the website. Also don't forget to mention the time when you would be available to answer the call.

3. Offer live chat support. Live chat software offered both in terms of free and paid. When you choose to use paid service you can receive some enhance support.

4. Present testimonials and feedbacks from customers in the corresponding product pages. But don't use fake testimonials and if you have decided to use photos use genuine photos don't go for stock photography.

5. Provide the product link after the user added the corresponding product in the shopping card. This helps them to verify whether they have selected the correct product.

6. Place the ADD CART button / link in the prominent place with bright color and bold font.

7. Differentiate the links Add to Cart and Add to Wishlist.

8. Contact Us page is the important one. Provide the full address including phone numbers.

9. If possible list your company's top management photos in the website.

10. Above all make the website simple and make the navigation easy and pages fast loading.

Hope this helps you finding some cool tips for this festival season. If you have any extra tips share it in comment section.

2 comments:

chaitanya said...

Mercy,

The features mentioned above were really informative.

Security budgets, Testimonials and life style photography would definitely increases trust and confirms that companies "do care" about customers privacy.

Apart from the above I would like to add few more points

1.Highlight the points which gain competitive advantage like offers, Discounts etc.(Convey to customers how you are unique)

2. Prioritize home page content to increase cross-sell opportunities.

3. Low-Stock Indicators:
In a retail environment, it’s not difficult to ascertain how many of a given item is in-stock, you simply look on the shelf or ask a sales associate. But how many eCommerce stores take advantage of consumers fear of stockouts? In other words, if there’s only a few left in stock, why doesn’t the site encourage you to order NOW!

Mercy do you think the point "9" mentioned above have an impact on conversion rates?

Thanks,
Chaitanya.

Mercy said...

@Chaitanya - Thanks for the visit and feedback. I do really appreciate your suggestions. Offers and discounts people normally offer for all festival season. And i have mentioned that in my first part of my post itself. your 2nd and 3rd points sounds cool and promising!

And regarding the 9th point in my post, I feel displaying the photos of your own in website(About Us page etc) will help people understand the real people behind the business which increase the website trust and credibility!

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