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.

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.

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 (283)

Walking out of a theater last night, I struggled to convey to my wife why I didn’t like the movie. “I can’t tell you exactly what they could’ve done better,” I said, “I just know they did it wrong.”

Odds are, 99% of the internet population is clueless about good web design, just as I’m ignorant about creating a good movie. In other words, if you asked them which elements are most important in creating a professional website, they couldn’t tell you.

What they could identify, although subconsciously, is bad web design. If a customer perceives that little thought and effort was put into designing your site, they may draw a similar conclusion about your products or services.

While many factors contribute to site abandonment, some research suggests bad site design sits at the top of the list.

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 Usable Web Design Principles - How Bad Web Design is Like a Bad Movie: Download (221)

Speed kills. In the case of website usability, the lack of speed kills. Many have erroneously assumed the advent of high speed internet connections would make website performance optimization irrelevant. On the contrary, it seems as internet connection speeds increase, users simply become more impatient and demand faster browsing. Below, I’ve gathered some simple (and advanced) ways to speed up your site.

Before making any changes, I would recommend benchmarking your download time with WebSite Optimization’s webpage optimization tool.

Image Optimizing Tips:

1. Compress .jpg and .gif images: If you use photoshop, always use the “Save for Web” feature. If you don’t have access to PS, there’s a ton of free image compressing freeware out there.
2. Compress or eliminate unnecessary Flash elements: In my opinion, flash is over-rated, slow, and buggy. It has it’s benefits, but make sure you don’t rely on it for navigation or other necessary site elements.
3. Don’t Resize Images within HTML: Don’t use the width or height attribute in the IMG tag to resize larger options. For example, if you resize an image that was originally 300 x 300 to 100 x 100, the user still has to download the full size one. Instead, use thumbnails.
4. Specify Image Dimensions: Don’t leave the width or height attributes blank. By doing so, you’ll slow down the browser rendering of the page, since it doesn’t know how much space to give for each image.
5. Slice Your Images: Slicing doesn’t actually reduce image size (in fact, it increases the overall size). However, it does increase the apparent load time by making each slice appear one at a time rather than one big image popping up after it downloads.

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Tags: 25 Ways Series Web Marketing Website Conversion Tips Website Usability

Just the other night, my wife wanted to buy a purse on an eCommerce site that I have done extensive work for. Just out of curiosity, I decided to stand behind her and watch her interact with the website. As I jotted down notes as she went about shopping, I began to notice things I had never considered before. She tried clicking on things that weren’t intended to be clicked on. Certain areas of the pages caught her attention that I didn’t consider noteworthy.

I was surprised by how much I learned from this simple situation. As I thought about it, I realized that my Google Analytics are not telling me the whole story.

In my opinion, traditional web analytics fail in the following areas:
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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 further from the truth. Below I’ve listed what I consider to be the worst practices of eCommerce sites these days.

1. Requiring Login to Order: I would agree with Get Elastic’s Linda Bustos that this is one of many e-tailers’ favorite usability mistakes. Requiring registration is very obnoxious, especially when you have yet to establish any relationship with a retailer, and you have not idea if you’ll ever purchase again.
2. Not Showing Shipping Prices Upfront: I’ve abandoned dozens of online orders because of this. Sure, asking for the customers address may ensure a more accurate shipping cost for you, but its not worth losing a customer over. In my opinion, the best practice is to simply base your shipping costs on the merchandise total. It might not be the most accurate way, but if you average it out, it works great.
3. Vague, Hard to Find Return Policies: For me, returning products to an online retailer is right up there with getting my teeth drilled. Don’t make the process worse by hiding your return policy deep within your site or requiring your customers to jump through hoops to complete the process. Rarely do e-tailers make their return policy a selling point or competitive advantage. Wherever I can, I like to use the words “No-Hassle Return Policy” to reassure the customer that the process is quick and easy.
4. Poor SEO: Build it, and they will not come, unless your eCommerce site is on good terms with Google. Retailers tend to forget that search engines are the highways and byways of the internet. An eCommerce site not optimized for search is equivalent to a brick and mortar store conveniently located underground.
5. Poor Product Descriptions: Your product descriptions are the closest thing you have to an face to face salesperson. Make them work for you. Improving your product descriptions is one of the easiest, yet most neglected ways to improve your online sales. If your product catalog is large enough to justify hiring a copy-writer, than do it. If not, hire someone on the side to write your copy.
6. Lack of Filtering & Sorting: Imagine yourself walking unto a used car lot. What do you ask the salesperson in order to narrow down your options? You’ll likely say something like “show me all the vehicles this color, with this amount of mileage, or this make and model.” The same principle should be applied to your product department pages. Don’t overwhelm your audience with too many options. Let them filter down by criteria such as colors, sizes, or brand. Also, let them sort the listings by price, newness, popularity, etc.
7. Hard to Find Checkout Button: Imagine not being able to find the checkout lane at a grocery store. Many online stores assume shoppers know that the shopping cart is the first step of the checkout process. To prevent confusion of your customers, always have a clear “checkout” button visible on every page.
8. Poor Merchandising: If you owned a brick and mortar store, I’m going to bet you would walk your aisles every day to ensure your products are merchandised properly. Yet I think website owners expect their online stores to run themselves, and rarely take time for this important audit. Once a day, try to shop your store as if you were going to buy something. I’ll bet you’ll find one or two things out of place.
9. Getting too Personal: Do you really need your customer’s date of birth to complete an order? Even asking for information such as email or telephone number may arouse suspicion in your customers. Ask yourself an important question for each additional form field you add, “Is this worth losing a sale over?”
10. No Calls to Action: Don’t just assume your visitors will click on your image maps or “Click Here” links. Make your call to action buttons big, bold, and unmistakably clear. Every page of the conversion funnel (landing page to department page to product page to checkout) should clearly define the next step in the process.
11. No Error Reporting: From a technical point of view, it’s very simple to setup error notifications when certain unexpected events occur on your website. Montastic offers a completely free website monitoring service. In addition, ask your webmaster to setup email alerts for every time a 500 (internal server) error or 404 (page not found) error occurs.
12. Inaccurate Cross Sells: Embarrassing cross-sells can sometimes lead to more than just more than just missed opportunities. If your system for suggesting add-ons, cross sells, or up-sells doesn’t work, you’re probably better off not using it.
13. Unreachable Customer Service: Online retailers are typically not famous for their customer service. Phone numbers and emails should be listed prominently on every page. Responses to customer requests should be prompt and courteous. In a previous post, I outlined 25 tips for improving your online customer service.

I’m sure I didn’t mention everything, so be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts or experiences. 

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About PWM

Justin Palmer offers expert eCommerce consulting and SEO consulting in Orange County, California. Justin also has written an e-Commere e-book entitled The e-Commerce Roadmap.

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.

Why do we hate car salesmen? Simple, we don’t trust them. It’s not that we don’t want the car, we just don’t find the salesman’s claims to be credible. Because of the lack of face to face interaction between you and your website visitors, customers will judge your company based on your website. Your products may be incredible, but if your site isn’t credible, you’ll never close the deal.

Below I’ve listed my top 5 tips for improving your website’s credibility.

1. Clean, Professional Site Design: Nothing says amateur more than an ugly or unprofessional website design. It’s painfully obvious when websites are designs by “techies” rather than graphic designers. While it’s certainly possible to go overboard with graphics, they are none the less important.
2. Personal Contact or About Page: More often than we realize, customers use contact or about pages to determine whether your company is reachable and or credible. Make sure you prominently display contact information on your contact page. In addition, you may want to add a personal touch by showing pictures of your customer service staff with their direct contact info.
3. Trust Logos: Secure logos from your SSL provider, Hacker Safe, or BBBOnline can go a long way to show credibility.
4. Privacy/Security Page: Display your privacy policy (you do have one, right?) for your customers to review. Assure them their information is kept safe and secure. Allow them to validate your SSL with click-through verification (most SSL providers offer this.)
5. Unfiltered Customer Reviews: If your site sells products, I would highly recommend allowing customers to review them. While it’s tempting to remove negative customer reviews from the site, they can be a great way to convince your customers that you are open and transparent about your products.

I hope you foundthese suggestions useful. Be sure to leave a comment if you have any other ideas.