We’ve all heard it said “you don’t lose wait by weighing yourself.” However, I beg to differ. Not in regards to weight loss, but rather in reference to monitoring web analytics. Everytime I check my site stats and see improvement, I’m motivated to create even better results.
Below I’ve compiled a list of what I consider to be the most important metrics to monitor for eCommerce sites.

New Visitor Conversion Rate: Most etailers rarely differentiate between …

Every website has two conversion rates. One for your first time visitors, and one for your returning visitors. Combining the two results in your overall conversion rate.
Recently, while reviewing a client’s Pay Per Click campaign, I was dismayed to find several high volume ad groups were resulting in a 1% conversion. Compared to the site’s overall conversion rate of 2%, this finding was disappointing. However, as I began to compare these results with the conversion …

Good website navigation is the quintessential web usability principle. Yet so often it is neglected in favor of more glamorous site improvements. Just as a city cannot function without efficient roads and highways, your site will suffer without a logical, simple, and consistent navigation menu. Below I’ve gathered 10 Do’s and don’ts regarding website navigation.

Thou Shalt Use Left-hand or Vertical Menus: Don’t get fancy and put your navigation structure on the right hand side of the …

When you consider the competitive advantages of an online retailer, customer service is usually not the first thing that comes to mind. Many e-commerce sites, even the large well-known ones, are known for impersonal, mediocre customer service practices. And yet, the few e-tailors that differentiate themselves on serving their customers such as Zappos become well-known case studies in client care. In this post, I’ll share some of the unique best practices I’ve seen over the …

Imagine walking into a busy, high traffic grocery store. Despite the large number of customers in the store, you notice abandoned shopping carts strewn about the aisles and checkout lanes. For many online businesses, this example illustrates perfectly the predicament many online retailers find themselves in. Why? For one, I believe many online retailers rarely actually test their own checkouts from the user’s perspective. If they had, they would have identified stumbling blocks. Below …

I suppose this post is a good prequel to 25 Ways to Improve Your Product Pages. An extremely crucial step in the buying process occurs on the product category page. Basically, product category pages show listings for all products within a certain category, and provide a link to get more detail on the product page. Every product based e-commerce store has them, but not all of them are equally optimized. While the suggestions below vary greatly in …

Shopping cart abandonment is every online merchant’s worst fear. After all, with all that you invest in marketing your website, it’s painful to leave money on the table when would-be buyers don’t convert to sales. In this post, I’ll share some ways to improve your shopping cart that I’ve used or seen used by other savvy online retailers.

Add Product Thumbnail Images: It’s easy for visitors to forget what they added to their cart. Remind them …

I’m constantly astonished at how many large e-commerce sites have seriously deficient product pages. Many large companies, especially click-and-mortar retailers, seem to forget that products cannot be touched, tasted, or tested over the internet. While the internet will never perfectly mimic the in-store experience, there are dozens of tactics that can be implemented on the product page to increase customer engagement and convert visitors into buyers. Below I’ll describe 25 methods I’ve either used or …

I know what you’re thinking. The rel=”nofollow” tag is only used when you link to external websites right? According to Wikipedia, the no follow tag is “ a relation tag (rel=”nofollow”) which can be added to any link and is technically a request from the website to search engines to ignore the link.” Basically, it stops the flow of the link juice, not passing any page rank.
Why would you want to use this on your site? …

First off, this is not a sponsored post.
However, it will speak very favorably about Scan Alert’s HackerSafe service based on an experience I had with one of my clients.Basically, there are 3 purported benefits for using the Scan Alert logo and scanning service.

Customer’s who see logo feel more secure when checking out, which will increase conversions
Scanning exposes loopholes in site where hackers can penetrate
As a deterrent to future hackers who see the logo

In my experience with …