“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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

When was the last time you actually took the time to find an answer on a FAQ page? What about searching through a customer service knowledge base?
For me, if information I need is not immediately accessible, I will leave a website immediately. Likewise, most web customers are impatient and demand information at their finger-tips. In [...]

Ahh the shipping page. The un-welcome step in every eCommerce site’s checkout process. Because many sites fail to answer basic questions such as “how long will it take?” or “how much will it cost?”, many sales are lost at this important juncture. Some research shows that shipping concerns top the list of reasons why people [...]

E-tailers have a lot to learn from traditional retailers. It seems that well-known eCommerce sites get away with atrocious usability mistakes simply because the internet as a shopping medium is growing so fast. Web managers may think that because sales numbers are up they must be doing everything right. For many online stores, nothing is [...]

In some ways, it seems search engines have a grudge against eCommerce sites. Often times, I don’t blame them. Many online stores offer little useful content, including dry manufacturer product descriptions, poor internal linking, and no unique, user generated content. Without a doubt eCommerce sites have unique challenges when it comes to SEO. Below I’ve [...]