For this 3 Things entry, let’s take examine creative sales boosting tips retailers are using on their product pages to squeak out more conversions.

Multiple Add to Cart Buttons

If there’s one thing I learned as a salesperson after working 5 years in retail, it’s that you should ask for the sale early and often. On a product page, I suppose the Add to Cart button would be roughly equivalent to asking for the sale. Most product pages contain an add to cart button in a prominent location at the top right corner of the page.

However, what happens if a visitor scrolls down to read a product description, view more images, or to read customer reviews? There is now no longer a call to action in sight. Lately, I ‘ve been seeing quite a few product pages with multiple Add to Cart buttons. Checkout TigerDirect’s product page for an example of multiple add buttons.

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!?

T-shirt seller Glarkware drives urgency with their Stock Level indicator available on every product page. After the customer clicks their size, they are shown an estimate of how many are available in that size. I don’t know for certain, but I’m guessing that a low stock indicator discourages customers from abandoning that item in the shopping cart.

Future Gift Reminders

The next best thing to selling a product today is selling it tomorrow. Delightful Deliveries, an online gift oriented store, boasts an innovative Gift Reminder tool on every product page, allowing customers to setup email notifications reminding them to purchase an item on a future date. Customers can choose the occasion (birthday, anniversary, etc), the date, and how many days in advance to be notified.

What 3 Things does your site need? Get 3 recommendations from Palmer Web Marketing.

Recently I had the privilege of quizzing Aaron Wall from SEO Book regarding eCommerce SEO strategies. Below is the Q and A from the interview. A special thanks to Aaron for his time. After the read, be sure to checkout his SEO Training program.

A: I don’t think you need to get links to every product from external sources to do well…most of your competition suffers from the same issues as your ecommerce site does. Ideally you just want to get your brand featured and try to get some links into key products. Affiliate programs are great for building links. So are contests and any social elements to your site - like a company blog.

Q: What type of keyword strategy would you recommend for an online retailer with a large product catalog? Should the focus be on a few, larger volume keywords or a long tail approach?

A: In general if I had to pick one I would say that a long tail is typically a better approach, but you really need to look at sales data and promote what is selling. If you know a certain category is particularly hot then feature it to drive more of your link equity to that part of the site. If another category is low margin and rarely sells then link to it less often.

Q: Many internet retailers struggle to attain good rankings for their individual product pages. With so much competition on the internet in nearly every niche, how does one make their product pages rank higher in light of the competition?

A: The 7 easiest ways to gain traction are:

1. Ensure your on page SEO and site structure are well optimized.
2. Limit your selection and hold sales events. Woot.com does great with this strategy.
3. Offer leading quality editorial reviews and how to guides that help people trust you and want to do business with you.
4. Create wish lists and other widgets that people can spread virally on their websites…give people a reason to feature your brand.
5. Focus your internal PageRank and anchor text to promote the most important items.
6. Build community, contests, and/or an editorial voice that makes people keep coming back to you for the latest product releases.
7. Aggressively engage in public relations and link building.

Q: Many online retailers struggle with getting all of their product or category pages indexed, due to the large number of pages and content deep within the site architecture. What advice would you give to ensure a deep crawl?

A: Focus your crawling priorities on your most important pages. Add tools, gadgets, editorial information, and engage in public relations / link building to help your site get crawled as deeply as possible.

Make sure your domain does not have pagination issues, canonicalization issues, or low information pages that are sucking up PageRank that can flow to more important pages.

Q: Do you have any other recommendations in regards to eCommerce SEO?

A: Promote seasonal offers with internal link authority at least a month early so search engines see a lot of PageRank pointing at those pages.

If you find that your store is a thin listing store (like a yellow pages website) then look at the 2 year performance of RHD and IAR…the value of thin listings are all going to Google. You really need to have interactivity and editorial to have a sustainable strategy.

cheers

a

The following guest post comes courtesy of Linda Bustos from the Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog. After reading the post, be sure to stop by the blog. It’s a great resource for anything pertaining to Ecommerce, usability, or social media.

When you run an ecommerce website, you have the potential to sell products to people around the world — even from your own basement. But many online retailers expect to make international sales without doing all they should to help convert international shoppers. Here are a few ideas to help make the online shopping experience smooth for your international customers.

1. Have an International Shipping page

Sure, you could have it buried in an FAQ section, Help area or some other hard-to-find place — but why not make it easy for users to find International Shipping policies by making it its own link visible from every page on the site?

The footer menu is a common location for shipping information, as is the top right hand corner of your page. Conventions like this have conditioned online shoppers to check these areas for shipping information. If it’s not there, customers might just assume it’s not available. Placing this information in one of the two areas the customer is likely to look is a good idea. Placing it in both areas is even better.

Avoid hiding International Shipping information in the “Help” section. People can’t find it easily by scanning the page they are on, and some associate the word “Help” with technical assistance, not customer service.

2. Include Important Information on Shipping Page

Whenever possible, clearly state your:

- Return policies
- Telephone customer service hours of operation (and time zones)
- Estimated shipping times
- Order tracking availability

A list of all countries you ship to is also recommended. Remind customers that they may have to pay additional duties and taxes depending on where they live.

3. Make Your Shipping Policy Searchable

Make sure your international shipping page can be found using your site’s internal search engine. It’s a good idea to program your search engine to deliver this page for searches for “international,” “intl,” “international orders” and “international customers” too.

4. Show International Shipping Availability on Product Pages

You may carry some products that you can’t ship abroad even if you can ship most products. For example, certain health supplements are legal in some countries and illegal in others. It’s a courtesy to mention this before the customer gets to the checkout.

5. Convert Currencies, Weights and Measures on the Product Page

Most of us can’t convert centimeters to inches in our heads (clothing size charts, for example) or kilograms to pounds, let alone currencies that fluctuate daily. Providing conversion tools can increase conversions!

6. Estimate Shipping Costs on Your Product Pages

E-Commerce usability rockstars offer shipping cost tools right on product pages, which not only helps international customers but also locals. FedEx, UPS and USPS all provide API access for your web developer to make this happen. Offering the tool at the product page level also will reduce your rate of abandoned carts.

7. Send a Post-Sale Email

If you can segment your customer database by location, you can send targeted follow up emails to your international customers. For example, as the Canadian dollar rises more Canadians will shop online at US stores. Motivate your Canadian customers to visit you again by offering free shipping, discounts or other offers. Or, send an email from time to time asking how you can improve the shopping experience for international users. Even if they don’t respond, you send a powerful message that your business cares about foreign shoppers.

Of course, your own usability testing with international customers is the best way to learn about how your own site can be improved. There are even consultancies that offer international usability testing services. But these seven tips will give you a head start.

About the guest blogger:

Linda Bustos is an Emerging Media Analyst for Elastic Path ecommerce software. Linda writes daily about ecommerce marketing on the Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.

If you’re reluctant to jump into the world of blogging, you’re not alone. Anytime I recommend to a client they should start blogging, a million questions arise. In this entry, I’ll list 6 benefits of blogging for internet retailers.

1. It Shows your Human Side: Corporations are impersonal. Show your customers there are real people behind your business, and those people care immensely about the opinions of customers. Some companies have their CEO’s or owner’s blog, while others opt for letting all employees blog. Whatever your choice, write in way that reaches out with that personal touch.
2. Product Highlighting: Blogs are a great medium for highlighting new and exciting products. Don’t over do it though, and keep it objective. If your posts smell like hyped up marketing in disguise, your readership will suffer. Rather than selling, consider letting employees review products objectively, explaining the features and benefits in a subtle way.
3. It Gives a Voice to Your Company: Forget stale “Press” pages, use a blog instead! What new or exciting developments are happening in your company? Are there any changes your customers need to know about? Share them on your blog.
4. It Gives a Voice to Your Customers: The enlightenment that comes from unfiltered customer comments is priceless. It’s amazing to me how blogs are magnets for criticism, both positive and negative. While not every comment should get posted, it greatly helps your credibility to answer a challenge or problem from a customer. If the comment is positive, you can’t buy a better brand building tool.
5. It Adds Value to Your Brand: Seth’s recent post, “Who Would Miss You?“, raises a great question that e-tailers in particular need to ask and answer. If you shut down your website today, would your customers miss you, or would they easily find a replacement? Blogging has the unique ability to add value to your brand by creating a irreplaceable relationship with your customers. Sure, your competitor sells your same products, but do they offer weekly tips for using them on their blog like you do?
6. More Visibility on Search Engines: Blog content tends to get favored by Google. You’ll likely find that a product review blog post will outrank your regular product pages.

Need some inspiration from other retailers? Checkout Get Elastic’s list of over 75 eCommerce blogs.

“How can I SEO my product pages?” - It’s a good question that I hear frequently. After all, who has the time and resources to build links to hundreds, even thousands of individual products on an eCommerce site? Who has the time to write compelling, keyword rich copy for all these pages as well? Obviously, product page SEO must take a different approach. First, let’s start with the problem:

Why Product Pages Get Screwed:

1. Nobody links to them
2. They are buried deep within the site architecture
3. They usually contain crappy, recycled manufacturer product descriptions

In this post, I’ll share the process I use to optimize product pages for long-tail search.

1. Reduce the Number of Clicks from Your Greatest Source of PageRank: First and foremost, if you want your product pages to rank highly, your internal linking structure needs to reflect that desire. If it takes 5 clicks to reach a product, you’re telling crawler bots you don’t think very highly of it. My top recommendation for implementing this is displaying as many products as reasonably possible on your product listing pages. In my experience a/b testing, product category pages with more items always win out. (who wants to click those tiny 2, 3, 4 pagination links anyway?). In addition, it prevents the Googlebot from having to crawl through them as well.
2. Determine Whether the Product is Better Suited for Branded, Non-Branded, or Solution Search: For each product, ask yourself this question: “Will people be searching for this item by brand name, by a generic name, or will it be a solution oriented search?” For example, suppose you were selling running shoes. Here 3 possible target keyword phrases:

Generic	Running Shoes
Branded	Nike MayFly shoes
Solution Oriented	Shoes for running faster

3. Create a Unique Title Tag: Once you’ve completed step #2, place this keyword phrase in the title tag. A heated debate rages regarding where (or even if) the site name should be included in the Title. While I believe there are exceptions to any rule, I strongly believe the site name belongs behind the product’s name and keywords for 2 reasons. First, if a potential customer searches for your target keyphrase, they’ll be looking for that phrase, not your site’s name. Second, odds are search engines consider the order of keywords in the Title when determining the relevance. If all your product page Title start with your site name, it may look slightly boilerplate-ish.
4. Create a Unique Product Description: Too often, product descriptions are a neglected afterthought of online merchandising. Why not just show a few snazzy pics? After all, a picture is worth a thousands words right? While I would never mitigate the importance of good photography, pictures sometimes fall short on communicating specific product details, features, and benefits. If your company has sales people, ask them to write the product descriptions for you, as if they were selling the item face to face with a customer. Getting back to SEO, I don’t generally recommend stuffing keywords in product descriptions. It looks tacky and sounds awkward.
5. Don’t Forget the Meta Tag Keyword & Descriptions: Yes, they still work. Not for endless keyword repetition, but for showing that you took time and effort and care about your product pages. Typically, I will populate the meta keyword tag with the product name, brand, and any other relevant keywords. In the description tag, I simply pull the product description from the database, stripping out any unnecessary html formatting.
6. Display Product Reviews: How do product reviews help you in SEO? Interestingly, customers tend to describe products in ways that you would never think of. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a customer review and thought, “Heck, I never would have described it that way!”. Sometimes, I even take the customer’s lead and optimize the Title & meta tags around a product review.
7. Display Product Tags: Just as you would tag a blog post or a Flickr image, let customers tag your product with words they find relevant. As mentioned in step #6, you may find they think of keywords you didn’t. Checkout Amazon’s product pages for an example of how tagging works.
8. Don’t Forget the Alt’s: Take every opportunity you have to convey information about the content of your product pages. For the product images, populate the Alt text with product name, brand, or other keywords identified in Step #2.
9. Give Special Attention to Your Top Products: Identify what you consider to be your top products and highlight them on your landing pages with the most PageRank. Create anchor text that points to these product using the keyword phrases you’ve isolated in Step #2.
10. Track the Results: So, how do you know if the steps above are working? Personally, I like to monitor the number of total search visitors to product pages divided by the total number of product pages indexed by Google. Over time, you should see this number increase.

Yes, SEO-ing product pages can be overwhelming. If the thought of individually optimizing hundreds, maybe thousands of items makes you break out in a cold sweat, slow down, and take it one step at a time. Over a period of several weeks or months, this daunting task can be completed. The end result will be worth the effort.

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About Palmer Web Marketing

Palmer Web Marketing provides modern, effective, & affordable internet marketing consulting services. For personalized Do It Yourself SEO recommendations, checkout MySEOPlan.

When was the last time took a look at your top exit pages? Odds are, there’s a few pages that suffer from higher than average abandonment rates.

Off course, at some point, visitors will leave your site. But why not keep them there as long as possible? Below I’ve listed what I think are the most common exit pages on an eCommerce website. I’ll also cover some tactics for keeping the visitor engaged after they reach this page.

1. Order Confirmation Receipt Pages: After an order is completed, there are several ways to keep customers engaged. How about asking them to take a survey or to refer a friend? You may also do some pre-emptive customer service by showing them how to track their order or contact customer support. Checkout my previous post, where I discussed in more detail how to not waste your order confirmation page.
2. Email Subscription Sign up Confirmation Pages: Recently, I signed up for Gap’s email list. Rather that leaving me hanging with a dead end page, the confirmation screen displayed a large “Start Shopping Now” button.
3. Product Detail Pages: While product detail pages don’t seem like an obvious dead end, they often are. Consider the flow from the landing page, to the product category page, to the product detail page. If the visitor doesn’t like the product they’re viewing, they may abandon the effort rather than hit the back button. Make sure you display related items above the fold or a clear “Back” button they will take them back to the product category page.
4. No Search Results Found Pages: This is a tough one. When a visitor performs a site search that returns no results, frustration will often lead them to exit your site. While you can’t ensure that every search query returns a relevant result, there are several ways to optimize your internal site search. When a query returns no results, consider at least showing your most popular product categories in order to prevent frustrated searchers from abandoning their effort.
5. 404 Error Pages: Hopefully, your website doesn’t have any broken internal links, but it doesn’t hurt to optimize your 404 page to keep visitors on your site. Offer to take them back to the home page or the previous page they were on.
6. Customer Service Inquiry Confirmation Pages: After a customer sends a message to customer service through your site, show FAQs or suggested solutions to their problem. Nobody wants to wait for customer service to get back with you in order to proceed.

Imagine walking into a brick-and-mortar store, asking an employee a question, and being outright ignored.

How about asking a specific, well-thought out question to a store clerk, then watching the employee thumb through a procedure manual, and read you a canned answer that completely misses your question.

Sounds ridiculous, but these are everyday occurrences in the land online customer service, where too many e-tailers hide behind the anonymity of eCommerce. Email responses take too long, contain pat, irrelevant answers, or even worse, never come.

The novelty internet shopping has faded. No longer does the convenience of “anytime anywhere” shopping trump service. As the internet landscape matures, I believe companies will need to differentiate themselves using more ways, including service.

Why Is Online Service More Important than Offline?

1. Because Competition Is Closer: No longer is your competitor across town or down the street, they’re just a click away. Customers are becoming more sophisticated, and they demand better service online.
2. Because Negative PR Spreads Like a Virus: Consumer advocate groups such as Consumer Affairs and Complaints.com give customers easy avenues to express their discontent about the service they received. Just ask Dell, who is still reeling from negative publicity about its failed customer service practices.
3. Because Competing only on Price and Selection is Bad Business: Now that there’s a plethora of bargain basement priced e-tailers in nearly every niche, low prices are no longer a justification for bad service. Smart retailers, especially smaller businesses, will differentiate themselves with service, knowing that service is harder to emulate. In addition, someone will always offer a better selection than you. Just look at Walmart, who’s now selling SEO services.

Customer Service: A Cost Center or Profit Center?

Customer service has traditionally been viewed as a cost-center, having relatively nothing to do with increases or decreases in sales, customer longevity, and brand loyalty. I believe this is especially true with eCommerce, where the lack of face to face interaction creates a disconnect between customers and eCommerce managers. In the brick and mortar world, it’s not uncommon for managers to work the sales floor once in a while in order to keep a finger on the pulse of their customers. I wonder how many eCommerce directors know or care what their customers think.

A few months ago, I did a post on 25 ways to improve online customer service. I wish more e-tailers would adopt these suggestions.

Anyway, if you’ve made it through my whole rant on internet customer service, I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinion. Is customer service as important in the online world as the offline? Is the patience of internet shoppers growing thin, or will they accept sub-par service in order to save a few bucks buying online?

The ultimate disappointment for a customer is viewing the product page of an item they really want, and finding it’s not available. Recently, I came across several sites that take a unique approach with handling out-of-stock or discontinued items.

Example #1: Lancome-USA

Makeup retailer Lancome offers an extremely innovative “Since you liked… Now you’ll Love” feature to satisfy customers looking for discontinued makeup. This is a great sale-saver for picky customers looking for that perfect color.

Example #2: BPAV

It’s not uncommon for customers to land on the product page of an out-of-stock item either through the site navigation or directly from a search engine. If an item on your site is only temporarily out, a great way to save the sale (and capture an opt-in email addy) is letting customer request to be emailed when it’s re-stocked. BPAV.com does this nicely with their “Notify Me When It’s Back in Stock” feature.

Example #3: Threadless

Displaying “Old” items on a separate product listings page can have it’s advantages. Customers may want to compare new items to old ones, or maybe they need information on a product they already own. Threadless displays sold out or retired t-shirts separately and allows customers to request the design to be re-printed. Very innovative if you ask me.

In addition, Threadless also emphasizes urgency for in-stock items by showing a inventory level indicator on every product page. Messages like “A few in-stock” or “Only 2 Left” help turn browsers into buyers.

I believe eCommerce sites that innovate with useful and brand building features such as these will continue to thrive. Seen any other creative eCommerce site functions lately? Be sure to leave a comment.

 Handling eCommerce Stockout : 3 Best Practicies: Download (284)

Google has raised the bar. If you misspell a word, it tells you. If you perform a search returning millions of results, they prioritize the results by showing you the most relevant page (usually).

Compare that to most internal site search features on eCommerce sites. Not only can they not handle misspellings, they usually to a poor job of ranking results. Combine a poor site search feature with a confusing navigation, and you’ve got a usability nightmare. Below I’ve gathered up 11 ideas for improving your internal site search feature.
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Christmas is over, and now the fun begins…. the Handling the returns. As anyone whose ever sent a product back to an online retailer knows, the process is almost as fun as going to the dentist.

Some research suggests that even the thought of sending back a return is enough to keep people from buying. As such, it makes sense that an easy, hassle free return procedure will ensure that customers order again. In this post, I’ll share some best practices for handling return I’ve learned from dealing with internet retailers in the past.

1. Answer the Basics: Clearly explaining the process is the obvious first step in handling a return. Chinook Webs has a great example of an effective return policy that answers what, when, where, and how. For example, what products can be returned? How long do customers have to return them? Where do they back the merchandise?
2. Keep Customers Updated: When you receive a return shipment, email the customer. When you begin processing a return, email the customer. When you refund their money or send out the exchange merchandise, email the customer. Constant progress updates will keep customers from contacting you about the status. In addition, they will appreciate the thoughtfulness.
3. Find out Why: A “no questions asked” return policy is great marketing, but tells you little about what’s causing customers to return products. Find a non-pushy way of asking them why they’re returning the merchandise. This can be a simple question on the return form or an email survey sent out after the transaction. Emphasize the information will be used to improve your products.

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Tags: customer service E commerce e commerce return policies ecommerce return best practices internet returns simplifying the online return process