Optimize for Online Sales

One way to increase conversion is to create a website that focuses on shoppers, not search engines. Too many websites are designed to target search engines. There is nothing ‘active’ on the site for shoppers. Most consumers are impulse shoppers, the value comes from the act of shopping as much as acquiring the product.

Real-world retailers use human-motivations to sell: prestige, affluence, fun, entertainment, and social acceptance. Many ‘get rich quick’ sites convince the average person to part with their money on a daily basis by promising to make life easy, solve problems, and make us beautiful. Webmasters could learn a lesson here.

Many ecommerce websites are so focused on search engine placement, they overlook the subtle art of selling.

Ask For The Sale

One of the most overlooked aspects of ecommerce is ‘asking for the sale.’ This involves more than placing a ‘buy now’ button on the website. It involves asking for the sale, and then letting the consumer buy.

Most abandoned shopping carts are the result of using the shopping cart as a marketing tool, not a buy-now tool. Here are a few common shopping cart problems:

•Ask for personal information
•Include a form to fill out
•Ask for shipping information before the sale is in the final stage
•Try to up-sell, add extra products to the sale, ask consumer to complete a non-sale action.
•Have more than three clicks from the ‘buy now’ button and the end of the sale

Consumer Focused Optimization

The most important customer-optimizing feature is the SLL security logo. It needs to be placed in a prominent spot on every page of the website. Statistics have proven that a security logo can increase a conversion rate substantially.

Here are a few tools that increase the conversion rate:

• Write the PPC ‘click’ text so that it solves a problem, and then lead to a webpage that solves the problem. This eliminates the confusion. Too many PPC campaigns lead to an index page and force the consumer to click through the site looking for the information, product, or service, they want.
• Include a customer review/ranking system.
• Let shoppers write reviews, and reward them for the review.
• Focus on selling, not ‘product cataloguing’ on the item pages.

These changes should generate results, even for a DIY ecommerce owner. The task of optimizing will never end. It is a constant battle to stay ahead of the competition, but it is a quest that is well worth the rewards.