Giles Thomas, Author at Acquire Convert - Page 37 of 40
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[51] Ecommerce Best Practices That Get More Sales Fast

When it comes to conversion rate optimization, and website design in general, there is an ever evolving discussion about what role best practices and conventions should play in your designs.

And the same can be said when considering which tips you should follow.

The truth is best practices and conventions can guide you, but there are no hard and fast rules.

In conversion optimization everything is an assumption, what worked for someone else won’t necessarily work for you.

You can start with ecommerce best practices and follow the lead of the best ecommerce sites…

…but remember…

…you must use a/b testing to validate your hypotheses and website changes.

Blindly pushing changes live to your online store could make your conversion rate decrease and end up costing you some serious dough.

In this post we’ll learn best practices and conventions for your online shop, homepage, product archive, product page and checkout page.

But to be crystal clear, I am not telling you to add every best practice or feature listed in this post to your shop and wait for more sales to roll in.

You ideas and hypotheses for website changes should come from analysis of data collected from your website and customers, you should follow a complete conversion optimization process.

With these best practices I’m simply showing you what experts and experienced ecommerce entrepreneurs have seen work again and again, so you can test what works for you.

Increasing your ecommerce sales is no easy feat and requires constant iteration and testing of your user experience.

Let’s learn how some of the world’s best ecommerce websites convert millions of customers.


Global Ecommerce Best Practices To Test On Every Page In Your Online Store

When a new visitor lands on your website you have a finite amount of time to convince them to stick around.

There are a number of factors to consider when trying to reduce your bounce rate, let’s explore some ecommerce best practices that you should test on every page in your shop (this means these elements probably belong in the header or footer).


A/B Test Adding Security Seals Throughout Your Store

ConversionIQ found in their studies applying McAfee Secure trustmark to ecommerce websites that new visitors responded positively to the added trust factor.

For an Internet Retailer Top 200 supplement supplier they measured a 3% lift in conversion rate for all traffic and a 12% lift in conversion rate for new visitors.

Another McAfee Secure test with a major off road parts supplier measured a 6% increase in average order value for all traffic and a 23% increase in average order value for new visitors.

trustSealsActualInsights

Actual Insights conducted a further study where they asked participants to evaluate the 20 above seals. You can see the heatmap results below.

trustSealsActualInsightsHotSpots

When asked which seals gave them the most reassurance of a safe transaction, Verisign was the clear winner, specifically with the Norton Secured Verisign combination.

BaymardTrustSeal


Test adding your telephone number to your header

One element you can use to build trust is your telephone number.

flowr-number-new

Databox showed in an a/b test that adding a phone number to their homepage increase their conversion rate by +.5%, even though the test was not statistically significant it did show a positive trend.

phone-number


Test adding your company address to your header

Another trust factor often used alongside telephone numbers is your company address.

People like to know the company is real and has a physical address. This helps to remove fear around scams or credit card fraud.


Show standard shipping costs on every page (they should be free)

zappos-free-shipping

Half of online orders include free shipping. If you are charging even small amounts for standard shipping, you could be killing your conversion rate.

An E-tailing Group study showed that free shiping was the number one reason for making a purchase, with more than 70% of people identifying it as ‘critical’ to the purchase.

In this study more than 90% of people felt that free shipping would encourage them to purchase more products.

What about a small shipping fee?

When Amazon implemented free shipping sales went up in every country apart from one. France. Why?

Because in France the shipping was set to 20 cents.

Once they recognized the pattern they changed France to free shipping also, and the sales went up.

Seems like people care about free vs cheap.


What about if you ‘have to’ charge for shipping?

If you do need to charge for shipping make sure to use a flat rate fee and let people know about the costs upfront.

E.g. On every page in your shop in the header and or footer.

Nothing will hurt your bottom line more than surprise costs at the last minute.

In this study 47% of people showed they would abandon a purchase if they got to buy page and learned shipping was extra.

Show shipping costs upfront!


Make the estimated delivery date visible and make it quick!

delivery-date-conversion-optimization

In today’s consumer economy, people don’t expect to be kept waiting for things they are spending hard cash on.

In this infographic the data showed that shoppers are more likely to drop out of the sales funnel if they have to wait a long time for delivery of their goods.

When asked what would encourage them to complete their purchase, 60% of respondents said a guaranteed delivery date.


Test Including a link to your return policy

zappos-returns

When people are shopping on your ecommerce store they have questions in their mind, reservations to the purchase.

Like we just learned these can be:

“How much is shipping?”

or

“What is the expected delivery date of this item or cart?”

Your job as a conversion optimizer is to remove these reservations.

Another common obstacle to the sale I have seen again and again, especially in ecommerce is a company’s return policy.

Not necessarily the details of it, although more favorable return policies will alleviate buyer concerns more. But, whether or not items can be returned.

A great way to get over this hurdle is to simply make it clear how long your returns policy lasts for.

Zappos made this feature famous with their customer centric approach to selling shoes online.

Its free-call number, free shipping and returns, 365-day return policy and 24/7 availability also helped to set it apart.


Make sure you don’t follow minimal design trends and kill global navigation

Historically an ecommerce stores global navigation appears on every page of the website.

This serves two core purposes:

  1. It communicates to the user where they are and allows them to switch between top level categories quickly.
  1. It gives people who don’t land on the homepage (when categories are named well) a descriptive overview of what else is available in the store.

Ok so you can argue that Amazon got rid of their product categories as persistent global navigation. But just because it worked for them doesn’t mean it will work for you.

Unless your visitors are consistently logged in or frequent users or if they rely predominantly on search to navigate, please do not kill your global navigation in exchange for a mobile menu burger or hidden menu!

WHSmith header

Avoid making your users journey through your sales funnel harder where possible. Show your main categories clearly in a persistent global navigation with sub categories in a megamenu drop down (for desktop) like this.

office depot mega menu and global nav

And if you do change your global navigation to something like this burger below, even on desktop.

office depot mobile product page

Make sure to collect user testing and usability data and understand how the change affects your users and conversion rates.


Get more sales with better search usability

30% of visitors will use internal search and in this case study by econsultancy after investigating 21 ecommerce websites they found that the average revenue generated was highest from visitors who performed searches.

Search can have a huge impact on conversion rates and revenue.

Your internal search should be really easy to locate when a user lands on your shop.

Following design patterns is important when designing your shop layout, users expect to find the site search in the top right or top middle of the screen. Reebok gets this right.

reebok

Don’t hide the search in a search page or behind an icon. This may be challenging for less able users to find.

search-design

Here are a list of other search features and functionality to take into account:

    • Make the search input available in the search results page
    • Offer scoped search so users can search within a category
    • Autocomplete search queries as users type
    • Autocorrect search query misspellings for more useful results
    • Offer related or relevant products when search queries return no products
    • Make your your search performance is fast and can handle multiple concurrent searches
  • Allow B2B sites to save searches for later and recurring use

Make key information accessible in your footer links

Visitors want to remove any and all reservations they have around the purchase. Shipping costs, delivery times, return policy, size charts.

So make all this information easily accessible from every page using your footer links.

cshirts

Ctshirts.com does a great job of this, with a clear and simple ‘Customer Service’ & ‘Hints & Tips’ footer links.


Incentive visitors to join your email newsletter

Email marketing accounts for 7% of all ecommerce transactions, so you need to be collecting your visitors emails without fail.

Don’t simply offer generic opt ins for email capture, use content upgrades or offer discounts.

Sign-up-300x300


Use personalization to tailor your offers to your shoppers

A study by Econsultancy showed that 62% of online retailers are reporting doing some form of personalization.

cro_report

And the Aberdeen Group found 75% of shoppers liked it when stores used personalization for messages and offers.

But most importantly MyBuy found that 40% of consumers buy more from stores that personalize their customer experience.

Here are some personalization options to consider testing in your online store:

  • You the incoming keyword to personalize a landing page
  • Use geolocation to personalize messaging or colloquial copy
  • Test using self segmentation to route visitors through different sales funnels
  • Further reading on ecommerce personalization

Rounding Up: Global Ecommerce Best Practices To A/B Test

sitewide-ecommerce-best-practices


Ecommerce best practices to test on your homepage

Let’s look now at store homepage conventions you can test on your online shop.


Your value proposition is the most important part of your homepage

Optimizing your value proposition helps focus your business and marketing efforts in one direction or on one core pain point within your market.

It stops you from wasting time trying to acquire the wrong customers with the wrong marketing message. Demonstrating to your prospects you understand their needs and what they value in a product or service.

It also helps you align your product with your prospects goals, clearly and concisely communicating to them the outcome of spending money with you.

1

DonorPro increased their revenues by 37% by revamping their value proposition.

Check out my practical guide to value proposition optimization for further reading.


The world’s leading CRO experts hate sliders or rotating banners

It doesn’t take much research to realise this is one best practice that may be universally true (if there is such a thing).

Chris Goward of Wider Funnel hates them, Peep Laja of ConversionXL detests them, even Tim Ash of Site Tuners says: “Just say no!”

And the evidence is clear, the gospel truth spoken by Jakob Neilsen of the Nielson Norman Group is that carousels are just wrong.

In a usability test run by the NNGroup in the U.K. where one user was attempting the following task: “Does Siemens have any special deals on washing machines?” They were shown this website.

siemens-appliances-overlooked-promotion_

Any guesses?

Could the visitor complete the task?

The offer is front and centre.

The visitor failed to answer the question as the auto rotating banner hid the information from her before she found it.

Please, test removing your sliding banner.


Have one clear call to action

When you’re designing your homepage. It’s important not to forget the paradox of choice.

You should focus your homepage design around the one most important action you want your visitor to take.

For an ecommerce store which has a flagship product or a best selling category, then you want to push visitors towards this.

For people who sell premium products, I suggest trying to capture their email address rather than push for the sale.

More expensive, more considered decisions require a longer lead nurturing funnel.

Once you have their email address you can sell to them using a launch sequence or drip email campaign.

For some it will be a try before you buy scenario, like a free trial.

You also need to consider the design of the button, in this case study by Michael Aagaard he changed the button colour of this Danish portals call to action.

Screen-Shot-2013-03-25-at-19.40.22

The test failed, which highlights how careful you have to be when it comes to small details like button design.

A great example is Shopify, it is very easy to spot where they want you to click.

shopify

I would however test changing the call to action button colour to something that contrasts with the brands core green colour palette. To make the button even more prominent in the visual hierarchy.

Shopify’s beautiful design execution segways us nicely into our next point:


Keep your homepage design simple

When it comes to ecommerce homepage designs, it oftens pays to keep things simple. Don’t forget, this is the first step in your funnel, and we want visitors moving down it consistently.

In this case study, the Weather Channel wanted to turn more of their visitors into premium subscribers.

They simplified their homepage and focused (like we just said) on one main call to action.

These changes increased conversions 225%.

1b


Show your products on the homepage

In Keith Hagen’s top ecommerce website comparative analysis, he found 13/13 of his best in class ecommerce websites (for CRO purposes) showed merchandise on the homepage.

createbarrel

He said:

“From this we can see the sites we consider (and track) best-in-class pretty much all offer direct access to specific products from their home pages.  Often eCommerce sites leave out direct access to products citing that they sell too many to call out just a few.  However in the case of these best-in-class sites, we see homepage ares like “Most Popular” or seasonal highlighted products.”


Your homepage needs to load lightning fast!

Page load times are not joke.

47% of consumers say the expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less.

According to akamai.com and gomez.com, a one-second delay in page response can result in a seven percent reduction in conversions. So for an eCommerce site that makes $1,000 a day, the same delay could end up costing them $25,000 in lost sales every year.

So you need to optimize your website for faster load times.

These are the elements you need to consider:

    • CSS compression
    • Javascript compression
    • HTML compression
    • Image compression
    • Server response time
    • Browser caching
  • Content delivery network

Rounding Up: Ecommerce best practices to test on your homepage

 homepage-ecommerce-best-practices

As a bonus read, here are the most violated homepage guidelines. Make sure your homepage is up to scratch.


Ecommerce best practices to test on your product archive

Let’s look now at product archive conventions you can test to increase sales on your ecommerce store.


Use product badging to increase ecommerce conversion rate

Product badges are like digital stickers that you can add to your products in the product archive.

The draw special attention to specific items in your product lists or grids.

Product badging has added as much as $2.7 million to some companies bottom line.

Check out these top ten best practices for product badging by BrandWatch.

3


Add filters to your product archive to improve usability

Filters are really important from both a usability and conversion stand point.

You must evaluate what product criteria are important for your shoppers when searching through your product archive.

You can use methods such as Card Sorting to help choose and name these criteria so users recognise and are aligned with your descriptions.

The convention is to place filters and categories on the left hand side of the page on desktop.

carhartt

You can place your filters above the product archive, but this is only conventional for shops with fewer criteria.

It is however a good way to increase product image sizes.


Make your products sortable

Ensure your products are organised in a logical manner and allow the user to sort the products in a useful manner.

Avoid things such as, ‘Sort by date added’ or ‘Sort by ID’.

These types of filters and sorting do not improve the user experience.

Conventional and useful sorting options are:

    • Best selling
    • Low to high price
    • High to low price
  • Highest rated

Use a consistent image size in your product archive

Something as simple as the consistency of your image sizes within your grid could affect your conversion rate.

In this case study, Blue Acorn tested the below two variations of their product archive.

smartwool-ab-test-856x1024-e1399475511244

After testing 25,000 visitors and with a statistical confidence of 95%, the variation (with consistent image size) beat the original by increasing revenue per user by 17.1% against the baseline.


Make your product archive images large

Not only should your product archive images be consistently sized, but also it seems bigger is better.

This case study by ConversionXL.agency saw a 25% increase in sales, when this boot store went from a four row grid:

4b

To a three row grid:

3b


When using breadcrumbs don’t ignore the information scent

In his book Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success.

Greg Nudelman suggests the biggest problem with breadcrumbs is their “lack of scent” and that the “wording of the individual trail element becomes very important”.

His research showed that providing a clear attribute name label for each of the applied attributes added a great deal of information scent.

Further reading on breadcrumbs


Avoid category names that suck

When designing your site, it is easy to get overly creative and make up fun category names. But clever category names invariably suck.

Descriptive words that users relate to easily are a much better choice, even if they are more dull.

This includes ignoring the pull of making up words or phrases.

Don’t rely on your gut feelings when naming categories, use card sorting and user testing methodologies to learn your users preferences and behaviours.


Make sure to show the price on the product archive

When people are comparison shopping, a common step in a visitors buying process, they are trying to decide if a product is right for them.

The defining factors that ultimately affect this outcome are:

    • Price
    • Product Presentation (Images, video)
  • Copywriting

You must show the price, do not hide it on the archive. And make sure you consider your product naming and description carefully. Great descriptions can improve product archive to single product page click through rates.


Use personalized banner ads to increase conversions

59% of online shoppers believe that it is easier to find more interesting products on personalized online retail stores. And 56% of online shoppers are more likely to return to sites that use personalization.

So serving your users individual messaging is worth testing!

Bedbathstore.com used personalization to improve their conversion rate by 10%.

They served visitors personalized banner ads on their category pages, depending on what the user searched for.

“Now, if a person is searching for bedding, we can do a targeted banner for the bedding category,” marketer Reichman says. “The offer can appear in the bedding category on our site and can say anything from ‘Shop our Luxury Bedding and Save 10 Percent,’ to ‘Free Shipping on All Bedding Orders Over $75.'”


Rounding Up: Ecommerce best practices to test on your product archive

product-archive-ecommerce-best-practices


Ecommerce best practices to test on your product pages

Now we’ve optimized your shop, homepage and product archive, let’s look at some case studies on how the best eccomerce sites improve their single product pages.


Don’t guess what product features are important to your customers

ExpressWatches wanted to test if their customers cared more about a price guarantee or a trust symbol.

So they tested it 😉

Original:

watch1

Variation:

watch2

The replacement of the price guarantee with a trust symbol increased sales by 107%. The lesson here is, don’t presume to know what your customers care about.

Use customer development to learn about their motivations and test your hypotheses using a/b tests.


Use large high quality product images

In this case study, they use larger product images and saw a 9.46% increase in sale.

Original:

2

Variation:

1

Test bigger product images as Mall did.


Use wishlists or Facebook ‘Want Buttons’ to increase traffic and sales

People are often frustrated when they can’t save products to a wishlist or save for later feature.

Make it so visitors can remember what they want to buy later using wishlist or want buttons.

WANT_Button_Shopify_Ecommerce_Blog

Here is an app Shopify users can use to add the want button.

These buttons post to people’s Facebook timelines and drive more traffic to your store.

Make sure to test this, it may prove to be a distraction from conversions!


Don’t hide out of stock products

If one or more of your products are out of stock, it is simple to think simply removing them from the store is the best option. Inventory management can be used as a conversion tactic.

In this cast study, the company added a ‘Get notified when back in stock’ email sign up, in place of the ‘Add to cart’ button.
Notify-32

They then sent transactional emails to the visitor to update the visitor the item was available again.

The emails saw a 22.45% increase in conversion rate!

Here is an app you can use for Shopify stores to implement this functionality cheaply.


Build trust with customer submitted reviews

People often look for reviews of things before they buy them.

Adding customer submitted reviews to your single product pages can help improve trust and user experience.

As the visitor doesn’t even need to leave the website to find impartial reviews.

In this case study by VWO Express Watches added inline customer reviews to their single product pages, this helped them achieve a 58.29% increase in conversion rate to sale!


Alert the user that the product has been added to their cart

Even though your average web user is becoming more savvy. When users try to use new sites, well-known usability problems still cause task failures.

And one of the most common mistakes in usability is feedback.

You need to constantly:

    • Show the users the system’s current state
    • Tell users how their commands have been interpreted
  • Tell user’s what’s happening

For example on this VW car designer app, users were confused which wheel was selected and currently being shown on the car, because the selected wheel was ‘greyed out’; which is normally a convention meaning ‘unavailable’.

vw-nonstandard-selection

With this in mind make sure visitors on your ecommerce store know their commands have been interpreted.

The most important commands in terms of conversions are form completions. Such as ‘Add to cart’, ‘Checkout’, ‘Sign Up’.

You wouldn’t leave out a ‘Signed Up!’ page or ‘Purchase Complete!’ confirmation, so don’t leave out ‘Added to your cart’.

You can also show the cart has items and show how many.

GerrettLeight.com does a great job of this with a very obvious mini cart pop out, showing the product and offering a checkout option.

garrettleight


Make more expensive product descriptions longer

When someone is paying a lot for something, especially if the brand is not very established, you need to give them all the details. The specs, the reviews, the full description. More information and more reservations and FAQ’s answered.


If you are selling wearable items, show a size chart in a pop up

It’s a great idea to have a size chart for your products, whether rings or sweaters. All wearable things have at least some size ranges.

Make it easy for visitors to learn which size is best for them.

Don’t however, show the size chart inline. This will distract most visitors (who may already know their size for common goods) and could reduce conversions.

product-pages-example

Instead hide the size chart in a modal window or slide down panel in mobile.


Avoid negative social proof

Taloon a/b tested removing their social sharing buttons from their product pages.

Original:

Original1.png.pagespeed.ce.3xZQI9svJX

Variation:

Challenger.png.pagespeed.ce.CZUcKUtHan

The variation saw an 11.9% increase in CTA clickthroughs as compared to the original.

This was hypothesized as due to negative social proof, most of the pages had zero shares and therefore people thought the products were unpopular.
The share buttons are also a distraction for the one main goal or task for the page which is to get the visitor to click ‘Add to cart’.


Rounding Up: Ecommerce best practices to test on your product pages

product-page-ecommerce-best-practices


Ecommerce best practices to test on your checkout or cart page

Finally ley’s look at ecommerce checkout page best practices and case studies you can learn from and A/B test.


Remove or hide your coupon or discount form field

Marketer Michael Folling recommends removing or hiding your coupon or discount field.

In this case study Bionic Gloves, an online store that designs and sells a range of gloves, in a test to improve their cart abandonment removed their ‘special offer’ and ‘gift card’ fields from the cart page.

This is the original design:

bionic1

This is the variation:

bionic2

The primary goal that they were tracking was the revenue made. The variation won and increased the total revenue by 24.7%, and revenue per visitor by 17.1%.

David from Sq1 the agency behind the test said:

“By showing the Promo Code field on the cart, users were enticed to leave the site in search of a promo code. At that point, the conversion process is interrupted and you are more likely to lose potential customers. As such, hiding it was a very logical test.”


Use this pros and cons list to decide on a single page checkout

There are enough case studies to sink a battleship arguing over single and multi page checkouts.

The truth is, it’s different for different businesses, and it comes down to the execution.

The pros of using a single page, ajax checkout process

    • More conversions as the process is quicker and easier for the user
    • Faster page load times. Studies from Akamai, Shopzilla, Google, and Bing all suggest that consumers won’t tolerate slow loading pages.
  • Higher customer satisfaction through improved experiences as above.

The pros on focusing on a single page checkout relate to customers and profits.

The cons of using a single page, ajax checkout process

    • It won’t work without JavaScript Ajax depends on JavaScript, if a user has JavaScript disabled, the page will revert to server-side validation.
    • Some browser functions won’t work as expected sometimes, like the back button.
  • Ajax requires more investment upfront in development.

Test adding an add to cart button at the top and bottom of your checkout page

Whether or not you believe in ‘the fold’, you’ll probably agree it is easier to checkout on a cart page that has a checkout button above and below the cart.

Amazon-Double-Buy-Button_570

Although many people talk about this in the UX and CRO community, I couldn’t find a case study with any data to back it up. Please post links in the comments!


Don’t add distractions to the cart funnel pages

The last thing you want to do once you get a visitor to the cart page is to distract them away from clicking checkout.

Less of this:

VT-Checkout-Original

More of this:

VT-Checkout-Variaiton

This means, don’t include social share buttons, remove navigation and don’t add a ‘Continue shopping’ button next to your call to action.

If you must have a ‘Continue shopping’ button next to the ‘Checkout’ button, make sure the visual hierarchy highlights the ‘Checkout’ button.


Offer the user to create account ONLY after the checkout is complete

This is a must when it comes to ecommerce CRO.

ASOS completely removed the mention of creating an account from their cart page and reduced their checkout abandonment rate by 50%!

Cz6zIZz

Enough said.


B2B ecommerce websites should have a print cart or forward by email function

As some B2B businesses need manager or executive approval before completing a checkout, it is important to make it easy for them to sign off the cart’s contents.

You can do this with a simple print functionality or better still, forward cart via email for sign off function.


Leverage exit intent to decrease lost revenue through cart abandonment

Exit intent’s are those friendly 😉 pop ups that shown up when you move your mouse cursor towards to the browser or tab cross to close the website.

They are very effective at increasing conversions and capturing leads.

They play on a number of emotional buying factors such as the paradox of choice, decision fatigue, analysis paralysis and use a neuro-linguistic programming technique called pattern interrupt.

This sounds complicated but simply means: Do or say something unexpected that disrupts a prospect from their normal pattern.

They also steal one more page view and chance for conversion from the user, without their permission; brilliant!

exit-intent-ecommerce-conversions

You can offer discounts, coupon or even dynamically offer money off their current cart value.


Ecommerce cart design tips

Even once a user has submitted something to the cart, there is still time for product inspection and deliberation.

So make sure you optimize your product details as below and include:

    • Product name
    • Product summary
    • Large product image
    • Updateable quantity and attributes
    • Order number
    • Final price and total price
    • Option to remove an item
    • Cards accepted
    • Shipping details
    • Delivery times
    • Privacy policy link
    • Confirm item is in stock with green visual tick
    • Test including product ratings or testimonials inline or in the sidebar of the cart (warning, may be a distraction!)
    • Make digital download instructions very clear (step 1 etc)
    • Offer multiple payment options
  • If you need detailed information, tell them why and how it helps them get what they want faster

Darren DeMatas of ecommerceCEO suggests:

“Aside from the basic stuff that every cart page should do, I think every ecommerce site cart page should display availability and when it will ship. Adding something like “In Stock, Ships Today” can help boost customer confidence in your brand and give them a sense of urgency. Its important to reassure them that you can fulfill the order quickly. If you’re drop shipping items might take longer, so let your customer know.”


Upsell ecommerce products for increased revenues

In this case study Marketing Results used upselling to increase sales by 56.3%.

Some people think upselling is a dirty word, but in fact it can make your customers happier.

According to Marketing Metrics:

The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%.

probability-of-selling

Here is an app you can use to upsell in Shopify.

You can offer related products or add-on products at the point of checkout as an effective upsell strategy.

For example:

Bose.com recommends accesories in their checkout that match the products included in the cart’s contents.

bose


Upselling is way better than cross-selling

According to a study by econsultancy upselling makes up around 4% of your overall sales. Where cross-selling only around .5%.

PredictiveIntent_graph

So if you’re choosing between the two, I’d go for upselling.


If No Upsell, then Downsell

Downselling is often done after the rejection of the core offer and upsell.

An example would be, Neil Patel’s Quicksprout university:

persuasion-quicksprout-example
He down sold this for 83% off, using exit intent pop ups to drive page abandons to the cart page. (the content is now free)


Leverage live chat to get more sales

Intuit famously increase their conversion rate by 211% using proactive chat.

Speaking with the visitor at the point of sale can help answer any final questions and remove important reservations.

You can then compile the live chat transcripts and analyse them for customer learning.


Use shopping cart abandonment to increase sales

According to SaleCycle the average shopping cart, basket and booking abandonment rate reached 73.6% in Q1 2013, up from 70.7% in Q4 2012.

You can use transactional emails to bring abandoned cart visitors back to your store.

Bass Pro deliver a $20 coupon in an email, toward items already in the user’s cart.

A clear call-to-action invites the user to click through, apply the coupon and continue shopping.

basspro


Implement persistent cart functionality to your online store

A study by SeeWhy showed 16% of males and 26% of females abandoned their cart because they wanted to complete the checkout at a later date.

Many customers expect that their carts will remain intact when they return.

Persistent shopping carts maintain cart contents using persistent cookies.

nord-cart


Use remarketing to get visitors back to your shop to checkout

Remarketing is a smart way to get visitors back to your website who may not have turned into customers during their first visit.

It allows you to position targeted ads in front of a defined audience that had previously visited your website – as they browse elsewhere around the internet.

After looking at data across a myriad of case studies I would say, if you can remarket you should.

In this shop case study remarketing accounted for 16% of all ecommerceconversion in the last six months.

Also CareerIndex according to think with Google, saw a 73% increase in conversion rate and 20% decrease in cost per acquisition after using remarketing.

careerindex-gains-new-users-with-similar-audiences_case-studies_01
Perfect audience is a good choice for people looking to get started with remarketing and retargeting.


Rounding Up: Ecommerce best practices to test on your checkout or cart page

checkout-ecommerce-best-practices


Will your online store become one of the best ecommerce sites?

To increase your ecommerce conversion rates and sales you need to be constantly iterating on your store design and user experience.

Best practices and conventions can guide us and provide inspiration for a/b tests to run…but.

The best way to come up with new ideas and websites changes to test is by talking to your customers.

Remember, quantitative data like analytics can tell us where we have problems in our sales funnel.

But we need qualitative data like customer development calls and user testing to understand why.

The more you understand about your customers the more aligned your offer will be with their needs and motivations.

Basically, customer understanding = more profits.

Categories
Analytics CRO

Increase Ecommerce Conversion Rate [Google Analytics Health Check]

With this case study, I aim to remove your frustration.

You’ll follow along as I document my entire journey improving the conversion rate and profits of a real ecommerce business.

The best part is…I won’t hide anything…this detailed series of blog posts will reveal all the processes, financial and analytics data behind the case study (including dollar amounts).

So you can learn what’s really important when optimizing your ecommerce store for increased conversions and profits.

Here what you’ll learn following this series:

Part 1 (this post)

  • How to create business objectives to measure your conversion process
  • What is a customer theory
  • How to audit your Google Analytics account to collect clean data
  • What types of qualitative and quantitative data to collect

Part 2 – Read it here

  • Ecommerce best practices & conventions
  • Best ecommerce sites
  • Popular ecommerce features and functionality
  • How conventions fit into a CRO process

Part 3 – Read it here

  • How to analyse your data and turn it into a/b test hypothesis
  • Best practice for executing website design and code changes

Part 4 – Read it here

  • Common mistakes to avoid and conventions to follow for a/b testing your website changes

Part 5

  • The complete results of a site wide conversion optimization process and a/b test including the revenue and analytics data

I’m really excited and I hope you are too. Let’s jump in!


Meet Ecommerce Jewellery Store By Charlotte

bycharlotte

Launched in 2012, cult jewellery label By Charlotte is inspired by renowned makeup artist Charlotte Blakeney’s passion for making women feel and look beautiful.

In order to help other ecommerce entrepreneurs succeed, Charlotte agreed to allow me to reveal everything in this in-depth case study.


How to plan a conversion optimization process for your online store

In conversion optimization as with any marketing effort it is important to follow a process.

The process gives you a strategic focus, no more running random campaigns and blindly copying other people’s a/b test case studies.

It also allows you to measure, learn and iterate on the process itself.

Without a proven process to follow, you’re just guessing and basically throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something sticks.

In order to improve Charlotte’s business we first need to understand what it looks like now.

This requires us to complete three main tasks in this first phase:

  1. Set the business objectives for the optimization process
  2. Create a customer theory
  3. Audit the Google Analytics account

Step 1: Set the business objectives for the optimization process

As with any marketing initiative it is important to set objectives to track and measure so you can understand if your efforts have been successful.

The best way to set your business objectives, KPI’s, goals and targets is to base them from historic data.

Let’s take a look at Charlotte’s business now:

(The data we will look at is from the 1st of April until the 30th of June 2015)

3-months-revenue

In the last three months Charlotte has grossed $233,152.73 in sales (good work Charlotte!).

Her monthly averages have been as follows.

Monthly averages for the last quarter

1458 sales / 3 months = 486 average sales per month

$233,152.73 gross revenue / 3 months = $77,717.57

Average basket or order value = $158.78

CRO TIP: Data lies, dig deeper into your analytics and segment!

So the ones of you who are paying attention are now thinking, what’s with the revenue spike in May of 2015?!

Due to a marketing effort with Vogue shopping night in May her monthly averages data is skewed.

There was no google analytics ecommerce data set up at the time to track conversions from referral traffic but we can see in her Shopify report that on the 20th of May (the night of the shopping event) she saw a huge spike in sales.

We can therefore attribute this spike to this one off event.

vogue-shopping-night

For the sake of the CRO process we will now remove this anomaly from the business objective planning data as this is not a recurring marketing effort.

Here is the updated report.

3-months-revenue-adjusted

Understanding sales channels

sales-channels

When we dig deeper into the analytics we find a large percentage of the sales come from a point of sale system in Charlotte’s physical shop in Sydney.

In fact 21.6% of all sales come from the retail store (or 318 sales from the 3 month period).

We will not be able to optimize this sales channel in the process. This would be a service design optimization process.

orders

Let’s look at her corrected monthly averages.

(Corrected) Monthly averages for the last quarter

840 sales / 3 months = 280 average sales per month

$143,466.34 gross revenue / 3 months = $47,822.11 average monthly revenue

$47,822.11 / 280 = $170.79 average basket or order value

Traffic & Conversion Rate

The current traffic for the store is as follows:

(The data we will look at is from the 1st of April until the 30th of June 2015)

visitors

Charlotte has a lot of return visitors monthly. Unfortunately as her Google Analytics is not set up to track conversions we cannot at this stage understand what percentage of those quarterly sales came from returning visitors.

We will investigate this during the CRO process.

traffic

Most of her sales are coming from direct none, which means people are putting her website name straight into the browser.

This is often due to Instagram marketing for fashion ecommerce websites.

instagram

Charlotte also does most of her marketing in print magazines. Where she gets a lot of exposure due to her personal network, this was created through her work as a makeup artist.

Again from this marketing you would expect direct none traffic.

magazines

This is confirmed and echoed by her top search terms, which are all brand search terms.

search-terms

Growth Opportunity: This indicates a huge potential to rank in Google using SEO. Targeting keywords for jewellery to drive more traffic and sales to her business. For example the search term: ‘jewellery australia’ has 880 monthly unique searches. This is a currently untouched marketing channel for By Charlotte.

referrers

Her current top referrers are as expected, brand name, google (brand name) and vogue (the shopping night). Again this shows a huge potential to drive more traffic to her website.

Growth Opportunity: We can leverage guest posting on large fashion blogs using her personal network to drive more traffic and sales to her business. We can reach out to the magazines she is already featured in and pitch guest posts to their online counterparts.

social

Her top social referrals are from Facebook, I believe there is a huge opportunity for her to monetize Pinterest here and perhaps other visual social networks like Tumblr.

Growth Opportunity: Invest in Pinterest marketing (food and fashion are the top two topics on Pinterest and their user base in predominantly women, a great fit for Charlotte’s products.)

countries

The majority of her sales come from Australian customers. This means we should dig deeper and understand conversions by country and see how personalization and location focused marketing could help grow her business.

Growth Opportunity: Understand how to convert people from outside of Australia, dig deeper into international shipping costs and delivery times.

Charlotte currently builds an email list from her online store, she then drives traffic and sales to the business through email marketing.

Her Google Analytics account is not currently tracking the number of new emails collected per month.

To improve her conversion rate from visitor to email subscriber we can a/b test better pop ups and lead magnets.

During the CRO process we can learn what percentage of her sales come from email marketing and how to optimize this part of her business.

Growth Opportunity: By understanding what lead magnets generate the most emails from Charlotte’s traffic we can increase her list size and drive more monthly sales to her business via email marketing.

Calculating our business objectives from her current data

conversions

Ok so let’s get down to the meat and create some business objectives!

Her current average conversion rate is 2.83%.

(Later in the series we’ll learn to segment conversion data for different sales channels).

This includes the Vogue shopping night traffic which cannot be segmented at present.

(2.83% of 40581 visitors = roughly 1150 sales)

Let’s look at the average ecommerce conversion rate.

The global ecommerce conversion rate benchmark in Q4 of 2014 according to Monetate was 2.84%.

So Charlotte is bang on the money.

But who wants to be average!

A good benchmark to try and increase your conversion rate is 5% month over month, or 15% quarterly.

So after our first round of a/b testing we want to try to increase the conversion rate to 3%.

(2.83% to 3% = roughly 6% increase in conversion rate)

This might not sound like a lot…but…based on Charlotte’s current monthly average sales and average basket value data her business would improve as follows:

Current: 2.83%, 280 average sales per month

Target: 3%, roughly 296 sales

Results: 16 more sales in month one * $170.79 average basket value = $2732.64

And this doesn’t even include the opportunity to increase the volume of traffic through SEO, guest blogging and social media marketing.

Compounded over the first year this 5 – 6% monthly growth would be worth a lot.

5 – 6% monthly growth all of a sudden doesn’t seem so bad!

NB: It will take more than one month to run a statistically significant a/b test for this store because of the current number of unique visitors and conversions is low. The test would take a few months to run, we will try to reduce this time by increasing traffic with the outlined growth opportunities.

Business Objectives

So our business objectives are as follows:

  • Business Objective: Increase our sales by receiving online orders for our jewellery
  • Business Goal: Increase the number of pieces of jewellery that are sold
  • KPI: The number of pieces sold per month.
  • Target: 296 sales month one

Quant based marketing

We can now use quant based marketing to work out our monthly target to a weekly and daily target to track.

That way we know if we are on course.

Monthly target: 296 sales

Weekly target: 74 sales

Daily target: 10.5 sales

Every day you can then check in on your target vs actual target and make adjustments where necessary.


Step 2: Create a customer theory

A customer theory is a formal representation of your customer understanding.

It represents who you think your customers are, their problems and their motivations around buying your product or service.

Your customer theory includes three documents:

  • Brand positioning statement
  • Value proposition
  • Customer persona

The value of a customer theory is to document your customer learning.

Your customer theory should guide all parts of your business, especially product strategy, marketing and sales.

You should also attempt to iterate on your customer theory with every optimization process and every a/b test you run.

This gives your optimization efforts and a/b tests a focus.

So even if your a/b test loses.

You still improve your customer understanding and therefore win regardless.

We created a customer theory for Charlotte and will iterate on it during the optimization process.

(Sign up to the series to see the By Charlotte Customer Theory & CRO Report)


Step 3: Google Analytics Audit

Now what most people do is jump in and start collecting data.

But before you do that you need to make sure you are collecting not only the right data but clean data.

The truth is, most Google Analytics accounts are set up wrong.

Here is a checklist for making sure your ecommerce google analytics account is set up correctly.

1. Time zone country or territory

Make sure your Time zone country or territory settings are correct. Also ensure they are the same as your store settings (especially for Shopify users)

That way sales will fall into the same day or time period and your two analytics accounts won’t have conflicting data.

Navigate to your Google Analytics & Shopify administration accounts as below and set the correct time, ensuring both admins match:

Navigate to:

Google Analytics > Admin > View > View Settings > Time zone country or territory

time zone country or territory settings

Shopify Admin > Settings > General > Standards and Formats

shopify standards formats

2. Site Search Settings

Check that your site search data collection is enabled. This will allow you to understand how site search functionality affects conversion rates and profits.

Navigate to:

Google Analytics > Admin > View > View Settings > Site Search Tracking

site search tracking settings

Toggle on the ‘Site search Tracking’ and enter the query parameter, for Shopify it is the letter ‘q’.

This is the letter that shows up in the url when a search is performed and allows Google Analytics to record the data.

shopify search query parameter q

3. Google Analytics Goals

Now, when using Google Analytics to track an ecommerce store you should not use Goals to track conversion and conversion rate, use Ecommerce tracking instead.

You can and should however track your email list building and visitor to lead conversion rate using goals.

Here is a quick step by step to set this up:

Navigate to:

Google Analytics > Admin > Goals > New Goal

Click on ‘New Goal’ and go through the below step by step:

Step 1: Choose the ‘Create an account’ goal template

google analytics goal step 1

Step 2: Name the goal and choose the ‘Destination’ goal type

google analytics goal step 2

Step 3: Enter the destination of your thank you page

This is the page on your site that people are forwarded to once the subscribe form is submitted. If this is not on your website, you need to change this. Here is a guide to learn how for Mailchimp and for Campaign Monitor.

google analytics goal step 3

Click on ‘Verify this Goal’ to check if people have been reaching this page when signing up and to confirm that Google Analytics will collect conversion data.

google analytics goal conversion rate verify

If your alert message shows 0% your destination url is wrong (or you’ve previously been sending sign ups to an external thank you page).

4. Filter traffic

To make sure traffic from your developer or you or your staff don’t get counted in your analytics data, you need to filter out traffic from your IP address.

Here is a step by step for how to do that.

Navigate to:

Google Analytics > Admin > Account > All Filters

Step 1: Click on the ‘New Filter’ button

filter google analytics

Step 2: Complete the filter form

Follow the settings as shown below in the image, just swap out ‘enter your ip address’ for your ip address instead.

google analytics ip address filter

5. Ecommerce Settings

Probably the most important settings is your ecommerce settings.

Navigate to:

Google Analytics > Admin > View > Ecommerce Settings

Step 1: Enable ecommerce settings

Toggle the Status switch on.

google analytics enable ecommerce settings

Step 2: Enable enhanced ecommerce settings

Toggle the enhanced ecommerce settings on.

google analytics enhanced ecommerce settings

I advise to leave the checkout labeling blank.

6. Property Settings

Next up you need to make sure you have ‘Demographics and interest reports’ and ‘In-page Analytics’ enabled.

These will help you understand better how demographics affect your conversion rates and how people behave on your website.

Navigate to:

Google Analytics > Admin > Property > Property Settings

Step 1: Toggle on demographics and in-page analytics

google analytics property settings

Toggle on the switches and click save.

Step 2: Update your tracking code

Next you need to add two lines of code to your tracking code.

To find your tracking code.

Navigate to:

Google Analytics > Admin > Property > Tracking Info > Tracking Code

Copy and paste this code into a text document.

Then update your tracking code to include the enhanced link attribution in-page analytics code.

google analytics enhanced link attribution

And update it to include the display features code for demographics and interest report tracking.

google analytics display features

Once added your code should go from this:

google-analytics-tracking-code

To this:

updated google analytics tracking code

Basically you add ga(‘require’, ‘linkid’, ‘linkid.js’); and ga(‘require’, ‘displayfeatures’);.

Make sure this code is present on every page in your website. To do this for Shopify include it in the theme.liquid file or for WordPress include it in the footer.php/header.php file.

7. Webmasters

Ensure your Google Webmaster’s account is connected to your Google Analytics profile.

Navigate to:

Google Analytics > Admin > Property > Webmaster Tools

google analytics webmaster settings

Connect your Google Webmaster’s account, it should be set up using the same email as your Google Analytic account.

8. Use Google tag manager

You can also use Google tag manager to organise and manage your tags, this is great for non technical people.

Your site will then track demographic and interest report and in-page analytics data.


What types of qualitative and quantitative data to collect

Now your Google Analytics account is set up correctly we are going to collect qualitative and quantitative data to inform our a/b test hypotheses.

Data we will collect:

Mouse tracking 

This will teach us how people behave on the website, what items we want them to click they are missing and what items are being clicked that shouldn’t be (items that are a distraction to the conversion!)

User testing 

We’ll capture user sessions on the website and learn how people navigate around the store. We’ll analyse this data to learn user behaviour and find roadblocks in the stores sales funnel.

Live chat 

Charlotte’s team will chat real time with customers during office hours to answer queries and reservations they have around the sale.

We’ll analyse the live chat transcripts to find ways to improve the store and remove the reservations shoppers have (increasing the number who checkout)

Customer Surveys 

Survey Charlotte’s existing and potential customers (leads) to learn how to better position the brand and refine Charlotte’s value proposition and differentiators.

Website & Exit Intent Polls 

Poll users on Charlotte’s store in real time, asking them questions at key points in the sales funnel (especially at drop off points to learn why they are bouncing)

Usability Evaluation 

We’ll perform an expert analysis of the stores usability, considering ecommerce conventions and best practices.

On page SEO audit 

We’ll audit the on page SEO of the store to improve search engine ranking and organic traffic.

Accessibility evaluation

Audit the accessibility of the store and improve markup, this in turn will improve search engine ranking.

Sales funnel audit 

We’ll dig deeper into the stores sales funnel, segmenting data and creating funnels manually to double check funnel data. Once we find where the traffic is leaving the sales funnel we’ll use qualitative data sources to try to understand why.

Browser & device conversion rate audit 

Learn which browsers and devices require more optimization and if there are any functional errors in the store.

Internal search audit 

We’ll learn how internal search affects conversion rate and audit the search functionality.

Shopping cart abandonment audit

Learn what percentage of shopping carts are being abandoned and put systems in place to reduce the number of lost sales.


Rounding up part 1

That concludes part one in this five part ecommerce conversion rate optimization series.

So far we:

  • Created business objectives
  • Created a customer theory
  • Audited the Google Analytics account
  • Started to collect qualitative and quantitative data from Charlotte’s website

In the next post we’ll look at:

  • Ecommerce best practices & conventions
  • Ecommerce best in class websites
  • Popular ecommerce features and functionality
  • How conventions fit into a CRO process

Increasing Ecommerce Sales

As an ecommerce entrepreneur it is important to be constantly iterating on and improving your store.

Ecommerce conversion optimization can help you to increase the percentage of your visitors who checkout.

But you must remember, conversion optimization is a process, one that includes collecting and analysing not only quantitative data but qualitative data too.

Quantitative data is mostly collected through analytics software like Google Analytics. Qualitative data is collected through an exploration of user behaviour.

Quantitative data can teach us what happened, where and how much, but we need qualitative data to learn why.

Remember, what conversion optimization is really about is increasing your conversion rate and profits through a deeper understanding of your customer.

Let me know about your process for increasing your ecommerce conversion rate in the comments below.

Just say, ‘Hey Giles, we measure ____ & ____ to learn how to increase our ecommerce sales’.