Surprisingly, many ecommerce sites waste the thank you or receipt page by making it a dead end. Instead of encouraging your visitors to close the window, continue to engage your customers with one of the following tactics:

1.   Refer a friend form: After the user completes the purchase, ask them if they would be willing to tell a friend or family member about your product or service. Obviously, if they trusted you enough to give you their own money, they might be willing to recommend you to a friend.

2.   How to Track your Order: In order to prevent needless queries to your customer service department, you might consider showing customers the process for tracking their order. Show them how to login, and find out when the order has shipped and what the current status is on the delivery.

3.   Show products related to those ordered: By doing this, you might be surprised at how many people will immediately order again. Just be sure that your customer service team is prepared to deal with customer requesting to add additional items to their orders.

4.   Feedback Survey: Ask your shoppers about the experience they just had. Because the experience is fresh on their mind, they will tell you about any frustrations while using your site.

5.   Coupon for Next Purchase: Encourage customers to bounce right back with a coupon for their next purchase. Make it clear, however, that this discount cannot be used on previous purchases.

In choosing one of the above tactics, your company priorities will apply. For example, if you’re most concerned about providing preemptive customer service, then you might be inclined to use the receipt page to clarify how to track the order. If you’re more concerned about driving sales, you might choose to show related products.

A word of caution applies to these ideas. Before you encourage your customer to perform another action, make it very clear that the purchase process is complete, and order has been submitted. In addition, always send an email confirmation receipt.

By using one of the above tactics, hopefully you’ll steer clear of the mistake many ecommerce sites make on their Thank You pages and continue to build a long lasting, profitable relationship with your customers. 

Hopefully, you’ve already begun to consider any necessary improvements to your site to accommodate the influx of holiday traffic.  Below I’ve compiled holiday improvement ideas for e-commerce sites. I hope you find something here useful.

1. Offer Bounce Back Discounts: Think about how much traffic your site will receive during the holidays. How can you harness that traffic to create year long business? Consider offering a good discount incentive for customers to come back and shop in January. You can automatically email them a coupon after each order, or send one along with the package. Make sure that this coupon is not valid until after the holidays.
2. Loosen Up on Your Return Policy: While a 30 day return policy is commonplace for the rest of the year, it may scare off early shoppers during the holidays. Make it clear to your visitors that you will accept returns and exchanges on all Christmas gift purchases.
3. Use a Website Monitoring Service: Odds are, your website will go down at least once during the busy holiday season. If you’re not big enough to have a 24 hour IT department monitoring your server, signup for a website monitoring service such as Alertsite, who will email or text message you if your site goes down.
4. Gift Receipts: Gift givers hate revealing how much they spent on a gift. Make sure you allow customers to click a Gift receipt option that will hide the prices on the packing list from the recipient.
5. Gift Messages: Let your customers add a personal message to their gift. For simplicity, you can have the message appear on the packing list which will already be included in the box.
6. Determine Shipping Cut-off Dates: This is quite possibly the most important information to communicate to customers during the holidays. Check with your shipping carriers to determine what the cutoff days are for the various methods of shipping.
7. Prominent “No Hassle” Return Policy: Your return policy should be easy to find. Consider re-packaging it as a ”no hassle” policy in order to calm the fears of first time buyers.
8. Holiday Graphical Themes: Show some holiday spirit and redesign some of the artwork on your site with a holiday theme. Hopefully, this will get visitors in a buying mood.
9. Increase Server Capacity: Talk with your web host about how you can increase your server performance during the holiday rush. You don’t want to end up like Walmart or Amazon on last year’s cyber Monday. Here’s a sad, but funny example of Macy’s servers getting overloaded.
10. Checkup on your Domain, Web hosting, and Merchants: God forbid that your credit card or domain name expires during the Christmas rush. Double check the basics just to be safe.
11. Audit Your Online Product Catalog: Have a detail oriented person visit each of your product pages to ensure accuracy. Check for typos, broken images, and bad hyperlinks.
12. Seasonal SEO and PPC Landing Pages: Don’t forget to optimize your SEO and PPC campaigns for seasonal keywords. Visitors searching habits change around the holidays, so your marketing strategy should as well.
13. Mystery Shop your Site: Either do it yourself or hire a professional service to mystery shop your site. Mystery shopping should include ordering, contacting customer service, and returning the product back to you.
14. Learn from Your Past Mistakes: Just for fun, checkout your site at Christmas time last year on the wayback machine. You’ll likely spot issues that can be improved this year.
15. Learn from Your Competitors: Also, checkout what your competition was doing last year. It may give you some tips on what or what not to do this year.
16. Build up those Wish Lists: Start encouraging your visitors to build their wish lists now. Come Christmas, they’ll know exactly where to find what they want. Check out this post for Wish list improvement ideas.
17. Offer Online Gift Certificates: If your site doesn’t offer online gift certificates, and your visitors don’t find that perfect gift, they will just leave. Gift certificates make great last minute gifts. In addition, they’re a great way to drive sales at the beginning of next year.
18. Gifts by Price: Organize and suggest gifts by price range. For example, highlight gifts under $10, 25, 50, 100 or whatever price points are appropriate for your business.
19. Gifts by Person: Organize gifts intended for different people groups such as kids, teens, parents, grandparents, etc.
20. Get 404 and 500 Error Notifications: Talk with your webmaster and ask him to setup a script that notifies him every time a 404 (page not found) or 500 (internal server error) occurs on your site. You might be surprised how often errors occur. When we set this up for one of my clients, they received over 1,000 errors in one day. These errors can be costly, especially at Christmas time.
21. Stocking Stuffers: Be sure to highlight low cost products that would make good stocking stuffers. These can be a great way to increase your average order total.
22. Shipping and Return Info on Product Pages: Shipping and return issues will be top of mind for your customers at this time. Assure them your policies are convenient and fair by linking to your shipping and returns page from your product pages.
23. Offer Gift Wrapping: Many don’t like the idea of sending gifts to friends or family wrapped in nothing but bubble wrap or Styrofoam popcorn. If you can, offer gift wrapping services to your online customers. Be sure to charge enough to cover the labor and material costs for this additional service.
24. Emphasize Urgency: Let your customers know it’s not safe to wait until the last minute. To prevent shipping issues or product stock outs, encourage your customers to shop early.
25. Bundle Products: Gift selection is much easier when related items are grouped together in some sort of gift basket or bundle.

Hopefully you’ve found something here useful for your site. Be sure to leave a comment if you have any questions or suggestions.  

We’ve heard it said that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” However, I’d argue that words can be worth a thousand pictures.

Good product descriptions should both inform and persuade your customers. Below I’ve gathered  some tips for spicing up these powerful selling tools.

1. List benefits, not features: Have you ever encountered a salesman who rattles off useless specs and features that you either don’t care about or don’t understand? Don’t be guilty of this with your product descriptions. Suppose you sell a wireless phone that offers a wireless headset feature. Rather than boasting about “Bluetooth wireless technology” phrase the feature as a benefit. “Safe, no-wire hands free operation allows you to keep your hands free for more important tasks.” For more suggestions on selling benefits, not features, checkout this post.
2. Proofread them Thoroughly: There’s nothing more embarrassing than being told by a customer that your product description is erroneous or contains typos. Make sure your descriptions are proof read by someone other than the original copywriter.
3. Let Customers Describe It: Allow your customers to review your products. The information they provide will be very valuable to customers considering a purchase. Visitors may trust a user generated review even more than your own product descriptions.
4. Don’t just sell, educate: When you educate your customers about your products, they feel like you are providing additional value for the price they pay. RadioShack does a nice job of this with their Research library.
5. Use Enticing, Image Oriented Words: Let your customers see, hear, taste, touch, and smell your products through descriptions that create powerful images in their mind. Here’s a great comparison of 2 very different descriptions of the same product.
6. Too Much is a Bad Thing: Don’t overwhelm your customers at the outset with a huge, novel size product description. Crutchfield uses a JavaScript enabled “Read more” link to hide or show additional product information.

As always, please leave a comment if you have any more suggestions to add to these.

It’s a question I hear asked over and over again. Most eCommerce sites struggle with ranking their product pages due to 3 factors: duplicate content, poor internal linking, and competition. While nothing can be done about the last problem, much can be said about the first two.

In this post, I’ll share some of the tactics I’ve used to improve product page rankings for my clients.

1. Product Reviews: Product reviews are a sure fire way to ensure your pages are rich with unique content that occurs only on your site. Back when we were able to view supplemental results on the Google SERPs, I found that pages that had unique products reviews did not end up as supplemental results. On the contrary, pages without unique descriptions or product reviews did.
2. Keyword Rich URLs: Because most ecommerce sites are linked with a dynamic database, they use ugly url’s which contain at least one number parameter. Convert your category product page URLs into friendly, keywords rich file and folder names. For more info on URL re-writing, check out this Wikipedia article. For IIS users, you might want to consider this software from Isapi Re-write.
3. No Follow Tags: Many sites distribute their internal link juice in such a way that is not favorable to the product detail pages. In order for your pages to rank highly, they need to receive a decent flow of PageRank. I would strongly recommend slapping a no-follow tag on your less important pages from an SEO perspective (e.g. Privacy, security, about us pages). Just be sure to link to them from your sitemap without the no follow. For more info on this tactic, check out this post on the no-follow tag.



4. Avoid Manufacturer Descriptions: Resist the temptation to copy and paste manufacturer provided product descriptions. Why? Because all your competitors use them as well. When Google sees multiple pages with the same content, it will likely favor the site in which the content was published first. In addition, these stock product descriptions often are not the most well written from a sales perspective.
5. Add SEO Keywords to Title Tag: It goes without saying that all your title tags must be unique and contain the product name. However, this is simply not enough. Create an extra field in your product database where you can add alternative SEO keywords. Then have these keywords show up in the Title tag for each product page. For example, while you’ll likely never rank for a high volume keyword search such as “apple ipods”, you may stand a chance at ranking for “discount apple ipods” or “Apple ipod mp3 player” if you add those phrases to the title tag.
6. Internal Contextual Linking: Link to your important product pages internally from a non navigation link. For example, you may want create a keyword rich link in the product description of one product linking to another product page.

I hope you’ll find these suggestions useful. As always, leave a comment if you have any questions or feedback.

Now that everyone and their mother has a website and thinks they know SEO, odds are the number of websites competing for your keywords has increased drastically. Within any business, it’s vital to keep track of what your competitors are doing. This practice is even more important when it comes to SEO. In this post, I’ll share some steps to keep tabs on what your competitors are doing so you’ll remain on top.

1. Identify Your Competitors: Obviously, the easiest way to find your competitors would just be to Google your keywords. Another good way would be Alexa Traffic tool and look at the related sites.
2. Setup Google Keyword Alerts: A great way to monitor your competitors as well as your industry in general is to setup Google Alerts for each of your primary keywords. Every time Google finds a blog post, press release, or article featuring your keywords, you’ll get an email with a link to it. Many times, Google alerts have alerted me to the fact that a competitor was using a less than ethical SEO tactic, such as splogging.
3. Setup Google Company Name Alerts: In addition, setup a Google alert for each of your competitor’s names.
4. Check Your Competitor’s Back links: By using the “link:www.yourcompetitorurl.com” command in Google or Yahoo, you can see where your competitor’s back links are coming from. This is a good way of generating ideas for link building.
5. Check Your Competitor’s On-Site Tactics: What keywords are your competitors targeting on their landing pages? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve discovered keywords on a competing website that I’d never considered.

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Palmer Web Marketing specializes in helping small businesses achieve their online goals with local Search engine placement, email marketing, and eCommerce web usability consulting. To start your company along the path of internet profits, contact us today.

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.

1. Thou Shalt Use Left-hand or Vertical Menus: Don’t get fancy and put your navigation structure on the right hand side of the site. Since visitors are accustomed to vertical or left navs, this is the equivalent to telling them to drive on the wrong side of the road.
2. Thou Shalt use Breadcrumb Navigation Trails: There is no greater navigation tool than Breadcrumb (aka Cookie crumb) trails. It easily allows visitors to go up or down a level and re-orient themselves when they get lost. Below is an example of a Bread crumb trail:

          Home > Top Category > Middle Category > Lower Category > Page Detail

3. Thou Shalt Not Overwhelm the Visitor with Too Many Options:  Typically, you shouldn’t include more than 7 options on your primary navigation. More than this, and you users will feel overwhelmed.
4. Thou Shalt prioritize Each Menu Item: Make sure your menu items are listed in priority from left to right or from top to bottom. Ask yourself “what action do I want the visitor to take?” Then lead your visitors along this path.
5. Thou Shalt Not Change the Nav on Each Page: Never change anything on your navigation from page to page. This is extremely confusing and unprofessional.
6. Thou Shalt Show the Visitor Where they Are and Where they’ve been: I strongly recommend using some sort of indicator in your primary navigation to show users where they are. For example, if your site uses tabs in the navigation, change the color of the category that is currently being viewed. In addition, be sure to change color of visited text links so the user doesn’t accidentally visit a page he or she has already been to.
7. Thou Shalt Not Rely Solely on Dynamic  Rollover Menus: Remember, not everyone is using the same browser technology as you. Make sure your navigation is useful in all the major browser types. Additionally, ensure that each link is crawl ablea by search engines.
8. Thou Shalt Not Stuff SEO Keywords in Your Navigation: This is both unprofessional and useless from an SEO point of view. Keywords within the universal navigation of a website are rarely considered as a ranking factor.
9. Thou Shalt Not Use Fancy, Unreadable Fonts: Resist the temptation to make your navigation look like a piece of art. While fancy graphics have a very important place in a website, they certainly do not belong in the navigation.
10. Thou Shalt Make the Company Logo Link to the Home Page: This is so basic, yet I run across sites on a daily basis that do not make their company logo (usually located in the upper left corner) clickable.

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’ve compiled a fairly comprehensive list of ideas on improving the checkout process.

1. Eliminate pages, eliminate scrolling: Many usability experts decry the benefits of shortening the checkout to as few pages as possible. While in theory this works, sometimes the real world provides other factors that must be considered. For example, suppose you combine your whole checkout into 1 page. Sounds great, unless the page is a mile tall and requires excessive vertical scrolling. In my opinion, the basic rule of thumb should be to condense the checkout into as few pages as possible requiring little to no vertical scrolling.
2. Hide the Navigation: Hide both your top and side navigation once the customer has initiated the checkout in order to prevent distractions. At this point, your goal should be to finalize the order as soon as possible before the visitor loses interest.
3. Hacker Safe Logos: Services from HackerSafe or Control Scan can be a great way to boost confidence during checkout. For more info on Hacker Safe, check this post.
4. Secure Certificate Logos: Most likely, your Payment Gateway and Secure Certificate provider offer a clickable security logo that you can install in your checkout pages. This provides an external way of validating the authenticity of your site.
5. Progress Indicator Bar: Always show shoppers where they are in the process. Everyone likes to know there is light at the end of the tunnel.
6. Prominent 1-800 Number: If you offer a live help line, make sure the number is highly visible everywhere in the checkout screens.
7. Live Chat: For those not wanting to call a 1-800 and wait on hold, Live chat is an excellent customer service feature. I’ve found it to be very effective for businesses with high value items such as jewelry.
8. No Default Credit Card Type: Typically, before or after you enter your credit card you are asked to select what type of card it is. DO NOT default this option to one of credit card types as many people will not notice it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve neglected to change the default option, and tried to use a MasterCard with the Visa option selected. Customers then become confused when they received an error telling them their credit card it invalid.
9. Auto-Detect Credit Card Type: Many card processors, including Authorize.net don’t even require you to have a credit card type drop down box since the first 4 numbers of the card determine that. Paypal does a nice job of automatically detecting and showing the credit card type with AJAX.
10. Don’t Up-Sell or Cross-Sell: Resist the temptation to up sell or cross sell during checkout. Remember, this is not like a supermarket checkout aisle. Users get distracted and are free to abandon their shopping carts at any time for any reason.
11. Gift Receipt / Gift Wrap Option: Customers have begun to expect this, especially during the holidays. No one wants to send a gift with an invoice showing what they paid. At the very least, offer a gift receipt with the prices not showing. Even better, include an option for a gift message.
12. User Friendly Credit Card Errors: I rarely have seen this done, yet it can make worlds of a difference. In the complex world of online credit card processing, it’s crucial to simplify any potential problems for the end user. If their credit card is declined due to an address mismatch, give them a list of possible solutions. For example, maybe they have moved recently and the processor or bank still has the old address on file? Or maybe they don’t know where to find the 3 digit security code on the back of the card.
13. Don’t Require Phone or Email: Though most e-tailors would like to have this information, you must ask yourself if it is important enough to risk losing the sale. Many privacy sensitive customers don’t like to give out this information.
14. Email List Opt-Out: Validate Email Address: Always allow people to opt-out. Though technically this is not required since they are making a purchase, it is a best practice required by most ISPs in order to be considered for white listing.
15. Copy Billing Info to Shipping Info: Most sites have this feature, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Nothing is worse than having to type the same information twice for the billing and shipping.
16. Don’t Require Login: Again, certain people will prefer not to create an account, so don’t risk losing the sale over this. Provide a “checkout without account” option.
17. Prominent “First time signup” Link: If you’re like most businesses, you probably get a significant amount of online business from first time shoppers. For this reason, there should always be a prominent “first time signup” link in the checkout when you ask someone to sign in.
18. Offer Paypal: While I have doubts about certain online payment methods such as Google Checkout and Bill Me Later, I strongly believe adding Paypal will help conversion, especially for international customers or those without credit cards.
19. Offer E-Check Payments: Another common payment method is by an e-check. Many customers who pay this way have checking accounts, but no credit or debit cards.
20. Security Code Explanation: Always provide a clear explanation of what this credit card security code is and why you need it. While most sites provide an image of where to find it, rarely do they answer the question of why they need it. Many shoppers are wary about giving this out, so provide an explanation of why it’s necessary for an online purchase.
21. Disable “Finalize Order” button On Click: A lot is going on technically speaking when the user clicks the “Finalize Order” button. Many users are impatient, and will click this button again and again until something happens. Depending on how your checkout is programmed, this can cause serious problems such as double billing or duplicate orders. Prevent this confusion by disabling the button after it’s clicked.
22. Show Estimated Processing Time: In addition to the above, show something to the nature of ”please allow up to 60 seconds to process your order.” after the shopper clicks the finalize order button.
23. Bookmark able Receipt Page: Make sure your receipt page is not the same page that processes the order via a form post. Shoppers tend to bookmark receipt pages, but if it’s not available later they will be very confused.
24. Shipping Time Estimates: Usually, the first question on a customers mind after submitting an order is “when will I get it?” Prevent needless customer service interactions by providing an estimate of both when the order will ship and when it will arrive.
25. Eliminate Insecure Page Errors: A customer should never have to see a “this page contains insecure items” error right before they enter their credit card. Usually, this is just a case of the webmaster not using relative links properly with images (http:// vs. https://).

I hope you found something here useful for your online business. This is actually the 4th post in my “25 Ways to” series, so please checkout the other posts as well. 

When I hear the term wish list, I immediately see a mental picture of an eager child sitting on Santa’s lap holding a lengthy list of their much desired toys. There seems to be a trend, however, to move away from the narrow term “Wish list”, which are usually employed by a younger audience. Recently, Target took an interesting step in giving their wish list a broader appeal. They now call it simply Target Lists, and they allow people to create lists with themes in mind such as birthdays, Christmas, Housewarmings, shopping lists, etc.Does every e-commerce site need a wish list feature? While not every business it suited to the concept, I think the answer in most cases is yes. In my experience, I’ve seen wish list help in the following areas:

1. Reducing Shopping Cart Abandonment (people use the wish list to store items instead of the cart)
2. Site Stickiness (people come back frequently to edit or view their list)
3. Viral Marketing (people tend to share their lists with others, which provide word of mouth advertising)

Does your site already have a wish list? Below I’ve compiled a fairly comprehensive list of great upgrade features I’ve either used or seen used on other sites.

1. Email Your List Feature: An “email your list” feature is a perfect way to empower your customers with the ability to share their lists with family and friends. For an example of this and many other of the features below, checkout C28’s wishlist.
2. Comments Field for Each Product: Allowing users to add comments to each item on their list will help them remember specific product details, or help them share relevant information to other looking at the list.
3. Email Me When It’s Re-stocked: In many cases, items remain in wish lists for long periods of time, sometimes allowing the items to go out of stock. If this happens, allow user to request to be notified when list items are re-stocked.
4. Email Me Before It Sells Out: Better yet, prevent the situation above by automatically emailing list users when an item is almost sold out. Customer will greatly appreciate it, and you will drive sales creating a sense of urgency.
5. Show Shipping Info: When friends and family are buying an item out of the wish list of someone, they might not know where to have it shipped to. When someone buys a wish list item, allow them to see the shipping address of the list user.
6. Make It Linkable: Make it easy for users to share their lists with other by giving them a unique and easy to remember url to access the wishlist. For example, www.yousite.com/wishlist/customername. Some sites hide the wish list behind a form post url or something that requires login. Avoid this.
7. Wish List Banner Ads: Even better, provide your wish list users with a copy and paste banner that they can post on their myspace, blog, or even email signature. This can provide great brand exposure, as well as drive traffic.
8. Remove Purchased Items: When someone makes a purchase from someone’s list, be sure to flag that item and purchased. Otherwise, multiple people may buy one item as a gift. This happened to me with a client one time during the busy Christmas season. (not fun!)
9. Multiple Search Options: For those looking up another person’s list, make sure you allow them to search by more than just an email address. Searching by first and last name or even address would be helpful.
10. Reward / Affiliate System: Reward your list users by giving them an incentive to share their lists with others. What can be better than emailing your wish list to friends and earning 10% if they buy something for you?
11. Diversify Your Wish Lists: As a mentioned above, Target diversified their lists by letting users choose a theme such as birthday lists, Christmas lists, shopping lists, etc. You will find that each list type caters to a different type of customer.

I hope some of the ideas above gave you something to think about. Be sure to leave a comment letting me know what your experience is in this area. 

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 their complexity and may not suite all businesses, I hope you’ll find something you can implement on your site.

1. More Items Per Page: In the past, it was advantageous to show only a few products per page due to slower dial up connections. With most surfers on DSL now, it makes sense to show more products per page, so users don’t have to constantly click to the next page. Also, be sure to allow them to view more than the preset amount of items.
2. AJAX Popup Feature: Many sites are now allowing you to view more product details such as more photos or the description directly on the product listing page. This is a great time saver when used with
   AJAX, because it doesn’t require the customer to leave the product category page. Checkout the “Quick Look” feature on Gap.com.
3. Add to Cart Button: Don’t underestimate the eagerness of your customers to buy. If they know what they are looking for, many won’t need to go all the way to the product page in order to click add to cart. If possible, put the “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” button directly on the product listings page. For an example, see C28’s music pages.
4. Sort by Price: Let’s face it. Price is one of the most important factors for most consumers. Give them a way to answer the ubiquitous question, “which one’s the cheapest?” by letting them sort by price.
5. Sort by Sale / Clearance: Every customer base has its bargain hunters. Highlight sale or clearance price merchandise by letting them view those items first.
6. Sort by Age: Your repeat visitors will greatly appreciate this. The first thing on the repeat customers mind when they hit your site will be “What’s new?”
7. Sort by User Ratings: Product peer reviews are becoming increasingly important to online shoppers. Many have begun the expect them. Let people easily see which products are rated the best by other buyers.
8. Sort by Best Seller: No one likes to feel they are the first one buying something. Ever heard of this psychological merchandising trick? Make a perfectly stacked pile of widgets and place them in a prime location in a store, and they won’t sell. However, take a few widgets out of the pile, and people think they are selling like hot-cakes and grab one for themselves. All that to say… let your visitors view the top selling products first.
9. Filter by Brand: For the brand conscience, let people filter down and eliminate items they don’t want to see. Remember, once they are on your product listing pages, your goal should not be to show them as many products as possible, but rather to filter down to the ones they are interested in.
10. Filter by Color/Size/etc: Have you ever shopped the clearance rack at a clothing store? Usually, items are merchandised by size. Or take shopping for paint at a hardware store. Most people walk right to the color family they desire, then decide from there. What your e-business sells will determine what type of filters you should create. View a good example of filtering here.
11. “Save These Settings” Feature: Suppose you’re browsing a certain product category on a site. After telling the website you want to see the items sorted by lowest price first with 50 products per page, you’re irritated to find that your settings have been lost when you move to a different product category. To prevent situations like this, save a user’s settings to the most recently selected ones, or allow them to click an option to save them across the whole site.
12. Breadcrumb Navigation: It’s easy for visitors to get lost in an endless trail of sub-sub-sub categories. Show them where they are and where they’ve been with cookie crumb navs.
13. View All Feature: It’s easiest to compare products when they are all displayed on one page. Give your visitors the option of to ”view all.”
14. Unique Content in Title & Meta Tags: One of the most challenging issues with product category pages from an SEO point of view is that they all appear similar and contain little content. If possible, ensure that the title and meta tag content for each page within a product category is unique.
15. Click to Any Page Navigation: I can’t stand it when a website only gives you a “previous” and “next” button to click through the product category. Allow visitors to go exactly to the page number they desire by creating hyperlinks to each page number.
16. Sorting & Filtering Options at Top and Bottom: It’s important to show your filtering options on both the top and bottom of your category pages. While most sites show them on top, many neglect to feature them for easy access at the bottom of the page as well.
17. Eliminate Parameters from URL: Here’s a rule of thumb, if your category urls are so ugly that it’s impossible to remember one, then odds are the search engines won’t remember them either. If you must use a parameter in the url (i.e. ID=123), try to use only one.
18. Create SEO Friendly URLs: Better yet, convert url’s like this: http://abc.com/?category1=widget&category2=gadgets to something like http://abc.com/widgets-and-gadgets.html. This can be accomplished by using a re-write engine.
19. Highlight New & Sale Merchandise: Include an icon or other indicator to show that an item is on sale or is brand new.
20. Show “Real Life” Photos: Showing pics of your products in real life situations brings your pages to life and is much more appealing than a dull list of names and prices.
21. Prominent Search Function: People tend to use search as the first resort or the last resort. If they are unable to find what they want from browsing your category pages, they will look for a search option. Make this feature available on every page of your site.
22. Make Product Images Clickable: I’m still surprised when I see sites that force you to click on the text of the product name to get to the product page. Make sure the product image is clickable as well.
23. Auto Following Nav: Most sites have a left or top navigation structure. However, unless the site uses frames, when the user scrolls down, this navigation will not be accessible. Create a dynamic navigation that follows them down the page. This will ensure they are able easily move to a different category.
24. Compare Checkbox: Allow customers to easily compare items by placing a checkbox next to each product listing. For an example of this, see CompUSA’s product categories.
25. Need Help Deciding? It’s a well-known fact that having to many products to choose from can be just as bad as not having enough. Help your customers make a decision by linking to a “Help Me Decide” page that compares the benefits of each product type. Again, see the bottom of CompUSA’s product listings for an example.

I hope something here has sparked your interest. Be sure to also checkout my other posts on 25 ways to improve your shopping cart and product pages.  

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.

1. Add Product Thumbnail Images: It’s easy for visitors to forget what they added to their cart. Remind them by displaying a small product image next to the name. Remember, visitors don’t know the product names as well as you do, so they need a visual reminder.
2. Your Just X Dollars away from Free shipping: Most e-commerce sites offer free shipping at a certain level. Remind your customers of this by displaying a prominent message letting them know how much more they need to spend to receive the promotion.
3. Buy X Get X Free: If you offer some sort of BOGO promotion, the shopping cart is a great place to
   display a message such as “Buy 1 more, get a 3rd FREE.”
4. Show Shipping Prices: For me, the thing that frustrates me most is when websites require me to enter my shipping info in order to calculate the shipping price. Simplify this by showing the shipping prices as early as possible. If your website calculate shipping prices based on the destination zip code, allow visitors to calculate the cost without having to enter all their personal info.
5. Show Shipping Times estimate: UPS, Fedex, and USPS offer different service time commitments to different parts of the country. Show a map of these estimated to shipping times to re-assure your customers they will get their order on tine.
6. Show What Method(s) order will ship: For many, the shipping method is as important as the shipping price. Some customers may have reservations about certain shipping methods. In addition, customer with rural address may only be able to get service from UPS or Fedex. Customer with PO Boxes will only be able to get deliveries from US Mail.
7. Cross-sell Items: The shopping cart is a great place to suggest
   similar items to that which are already in the cart. Just make sure the suggestions does not get in the way of the checkout process.
8. Up-sell Items: The shopping cart is a great place to let customers know about another product that may better serve their needs. Again, remember to soft sell so as to not confuse the checkout process.
9. Link Back to the Product Page: It’s very easy to forget the features or other details about the products in your cart. Make it easy for your buyers to get back to the product page by providing a link from the shopping cart.
10. Feature Comparison: Show as much detail as possible on the cart page in order to let shoppers compare features. If you can’t fit all the relevant information, include a “compare” link that allows them to compare all the features at a glance.
11. Progress Bar: People want to know that your checkout process is fast and easy. Display a progress indicator to let them know where they are, and how much further they need to go.
12. Make Your Cart Button Highly Visible: Above anything else, the “Checkout” button should be the most prominent feature on the shopping cart page. Make it large and bold enough to reach out and grab the user’s attention.
13. Add “Checkout” to Cart Button: Most site’s have a ubiquitous “View Cart” button on every page of the site, usually located in the upper right hand of the page. Consider also including the word “Checkout”, since not everyone
    knows that “View Cart” is the first step to checking out.
14. Express Checkout: Make repeat purchases quick as easy by allowing return customers to login from the shopping cart page.
15. Email Customers with Abandoned Carts: An extremely effective way of capturing lost sales opportunities is to email those customers who abandon their shopping carts. Better yet, offer them a coupon or some other discount to come back and finish the purchase.
16. Show Stock on Hand: There’s no greater way to stress urgency than to let customers
    know how much product you have on hand. While you might not want to show the exact quantity in inventory, you should
    definitely warn them when a product is close to selling out.
17. 1 Click Ordering:
    Surprisingly, a great way to increase your conversion is to skip as much of the shopping cart/checkout process as possible. Pioneered by Amazon, 1 click ordering is a great way to speed up the checkout process.
18. See More Items Like Those In Your Cart: Give them an incentive to spend more by suggesting other items
    similar to those already in the shopping cart.
19. Live Chat Link: Don’t let customers abandon their order due to a nagging question. Provide an easy way to get an instant answer to their query.
20. Prominent Phone Support Number: Again, always provide an easy way to speak to a live person.
21. Show Payment Options Early: Customers will be curious as to what payment options you
    accept early on in the process. Let them know by displaying credit card logos, the Paypal logo, and an e-Check representation.
22. Auto-Submit Form Changes: It’s common for customers to change the quantity of an item in the cart, and then click “checkout” instead of first clicking the “update” button. You can prevent later confusion by refreshing the quantities in their cart automatically if it is changed.
23. Save for Later Button: Let’s face it, not everyone will complete the purchase the same day they add the item to their cart. Assure them that the items will remain in the cart by allowing them to save it for later. Better yet, email them after a certain amount of time to remind them.
24. Security and Privacy Reminder: Assure your visitors your website is secure and trustworthy.
    Display emblems such as the HackerSafe logo or the BBB Online logo. Also, let your visitors know their personal information will be kept private by linking to your privacy policy.
25. Link to Your Return / Exchange Policy: One of the greatest hesitations to buying is worrying about returning a product to an online retailer. Assuage the fears of your customers by linking to your “No Hassle Return Policy.”

I sincerely hope some of the ideas above will be helpful to your online business. Remember, each shopping cart feature that helps to improve or simplify the shopping process will become a competitive advantage and another memorable reason for your customers to come back.