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. List benefits, not features: Have you ever encountered a salesman who rattles off [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

When I was in college, I worked part time at an electronics retailer, where I was paid on commission. For the first year or so that I worked there, my sales performance was decent, but nothing spectacular. Many times I would spend hours telling customers the benefits of a product, only to hear them say, “Thanks for the info, [...]