How Increasing Your Conversion Rate can Improve Your Ecommerce Store

Monte: Right. And how does your ecommerce solution help someone get to…I mean, if I’m the customers…I mean I’m your customer so I want to obviously get somebody to the point of purchase so that I’m acquiring a customer, giving them the best user experience that they’ve had, and they want to come back and shop with me. What are some of the steps that your product and service provide that really help them get to that? Because that is one of the most important thing…you lose so many people at the point of purchase, especially when you’re on the web. There’s the question of trust, and then there’s the flow, there’s the number of steps involved. I mean, all these things go into factors of how successful you are on acquiring the customer, giving them the good user experience, and you guys have all obviously been pretty successful at that. What are some of the key points that you guys have in your product that actually get somebody from looking at a product and service, and then to the point of purchase?

Stefanie: Sure, that’s a great question. A couple of the biggest things that we have, and really the key here, is merchant flexibility. There are some rules that I would like to talk about in terms of how to take a site and really make it sell. If you get a hundred visitors to your site, how many of those hundred visitors complete your checkout? That’s something that a lot of merchants don’t focus one. They focus on doubling their traffic as opposed to doubling their conversion rate.

Monte: Right, that’s a very important point.

Stefanie: Absolutely, I mean some common things to think about would be the actual text that appears on the…what I call the “add to cart” button. A lot of people use the term “buy” or they’ll make text on that button that says “buy.” However, you know, if you look at the statistics, the words “add to cart” actually convert a lot higher. To me, it’s a commitment question. You know, I joke around and I say, “Monte, will you go on a date with me?”, you might say yes. If I say, “Monte, will you marry me?”, you probably would say no. It’s just because it’s a lower level of commitment. This same thing…

Monte: I would say yes to both, but my wife would kill me (laughing).

Stefanie: (laughing) Well, that’s good to know. I’ll keep that in mind.

(both laughing)

Stefanie: Yea, and you have to cater to what your clients are thinking, keeping “buy” buttons and “check-out” buttons, or “add to cart” buttons above the fold is really important. I saw a survey recently from CoreMetrics that said that for web sites, its final “submit order” button is below the fold, their conversion rate is on average 10% lower than sites that have their “checkout” button or their final “submit order” button above the fold. There are a lot of other things that you can do, making sure your on-site search works well. You know, we focus a lot on Yahoo! and Google, but I always ask merchants, “Is your site search working well? Do you log search queries and see what your visitors are actually searching for, and are the most popular queries returning great results with your best selling products.” And you would be surprised at the number of people that can’t give good answers to those questions. Really, just spending time focusing on your site, calling a neighbor or a friend and asking them to navigate your site and check out and just watching over their shoulder and having them speak out loud about what they are thinking really can give people great insights. If you stare at a site every day, sometimes you just have no idea the things that might seem obvious that really aren’t to your shoppers.

Monte: Yea, definitely. We’re going through an off-site conversion right now, a new web site and a new shopping cart, and all these things, and it is definitely something that I think we are actually end up talking to you guys about, that’s for sure, because what we…what our perception of how it should work is totally different what our customers expect, obviously. But those are some really interesting points that the word “buy” is something that people are not as comfortable with as they are adding to the cart because it’s a less abrasive or less aggressive statement and people would feel more comfortable with “adding to cart.”

Stefanie: Yea, there’s a number of purchases that were seen on the web. It seems like the number of people that returned to a cart and actually make those purchases is going up significantly. So, we see people possibly shopping online for a few hours, getting offline, maybe going and making dinner, and then returning to their computer later that night to actually complete the purchase. And to those people, “add to cart” makes sense, cause that’s what they’re trying to do, they’re trying to fill up a cart and possibly purchase it later. “Buy” really implies that they need to do it right now. We don’t see people using “wish list” a lot; however, filling up that cart and saving it for later is becoming very, very popular, very common online behavior.