What are some common ecommerce mistakes that hinder conversion?

Our expert this week is Melanie Beam – Director, Business Development for Mountain Media: 

Requiring Login to Order: This is one of many e-tailers’ favorite usability mistakes. Requiring registration is a clear barrier to sales and a definite no no, especially when you have yet to establish a relationship with the customer. First-time shoppers aren’t sure that they’ll return and the feeling that some sort of commitment is required may turn them away from making even the first purchase.

Vague, Hard to Find Return Policies: Ecommerce is increasingly competitive, no matter what your industry is and often, the difference between a sale for you versus your competitor comes down to your return policy. Make the process as easy as possible. Don’t hide your return policy deep within your site or require your customers to jump through hoops to complete the process. Rarely do e- tailers make their return policy a selling point or competitive advantage and they should. Consider using the words, “No-Hassle Return Policy” to reassure the customer that the process is quick and easy.

Poor (or no) SEO: Often online retailers have a ‘Build it, and they will come’ attitude. This could not be more wrong (no matter how great your product is). 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. Let professionals who are trained and knowledgeable in the latest techniques perform optimization and Internet marketing services that will ensure that your site can be found.

Poor Product Descriptions: Product descriptions are the closest thing you have to a 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, hire a copy-writer. Also, you’ll want your description to be unique. So, if you’re using manufacturer’s descriptions, you’ll want to change them so that your descriptions aren’t the same as your competitors.

Poor Merchandising: If you owned a brick and mortar store, you would probably walk your aisles every day to ensure your products are merchandised properly. You’d also most likely have end-caps that feature certain products, signs or posters that call out relevant products and items that you place at the point-of-sale to encourage last minute purchases. Yet many website owners expect their online stores to run themselves, and rarely take time for this important implementation. You need to plan and implement merchandising techniques including upsells and cross-sells to help move your products. Lack of Strong, Clear Calls-to-Action: Make your call-to- action buttons big, bold, and unmistakably clear (but be careful not to make them ugly). Any messaging on the site should also be clear and strong. Every page of the conversion funnel (landing page to product page to checkout) should clearly define the next step in the process.

Lack of Search, Filtering and Sorting: Product search is a must if your catalog is anymore than a few products. Customers simply expect it and your site will look amateur without it. Customers also expect to be able to filter down by criteria such as colors, sizes, or brand. Also, let them sort the listings by price, newness, popularity, etc.

Hard to Find Checkout Button or Add to Cart Button: 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 and keep your ‘Add to Cart’ buttons clearly visible next to or under every product.

Unreachable Customer Service: Online retailers are typically not famous for their customer service. Phone numbers and email addresses should be listed prominently on every page.

Upload your videos to YouTube and help your site get noticed!

Help your company get noticed more on the web. YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. Unregistered users can watch the videos, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos.

If your business has a commercial, promotional video or product demonstration video, YouTube is a perfect place for it. You have the ability to upload unlimited videos and can add helpful tags to these videos to get your company exposed to more people. You can link your video up to your site in your News section or call us and we can add the video link to a page on your site. Having the videos out on the Web will definitely help with your Search Engine Optimization!

Below is a breakdown of a few key items you need to think about when uploading videos.

The title of your video should be the most common search term (the combination of words that most people are likely to type in to the search box)

The description box should also contain this common string of words. Plus other text if you wish to describe the video more in depth.

The tags should contain all the variations of likely typed search words in order. (Very Important! This helps with SEO for your video) for example: if I had a demonstration video showing people how to do assemble a box. I need to make sure as many people can find it.

To do this you need to understand how search engines work. They track, store and deliver words based the order that people string words together in real life. People generally think and type in the order that they speak: ‘How to assemble a box’ ‘I want to learn how to assemble a box’ ‘best tips to assemble a box’ ‘how do I learn to assemble a box’.

With this in mind, this is the basis for completing all the input boxes on YouTube.

Title: “How to assemble a box tutorial” This starts with ‘how to assemble a’… very common search term for anything.. ‘box’ a very specific search term for a package… and lastly ‘tutorial’ because more people think speak and type ‘box tutorial’ than ‘tutorial box’ …. therefore the word ‘tutorial’ must be last. Sure some people won’t use this natural order of words, but most will.

Description: ‘How to assemble a box? Box assembly tutorial, assembling a box, what is a box? how do I learn to assemble a box?’

This area needs to display all the various combinations of what people would type. Without this, your clip wouldn’t stand a chance of being found frequently. You can also add any other text in this section to describe the clip. Focus on popular search terms first! You could put them last, but that isn’t logical if you want things to be found first.

Tags: ‘how to best tips learning box assembly tutorial box assemble instructions demonstration’ You want to keep these in order of most relevant to least relevant.

Gem of an Idea

Hello everyone,
This is a great success story using an email campaign. It really got my mind going on how I can customize this technique to my business. I hope that it inspires you as much as it did me.  

Bella of Cape Cod moves the Tupperware house party to the web
By Don Davis

Megan Murphy and Catherine Bean like to describe themselves as two stay-at-home moms from Cape Cod who started a jewelry retailing business. But now, they admit, they’re not home all that much.

That’s because of the sudden success of their business, Bella of Cape Cod, which melds the traditional home Tupperware party with the Internet. Instead of a woman inviting her friends over to her house to shop, a consumer invites her friends via e-mail to shop at BellaOfCapeCod.com on a certain day. Shipping is free for the friends, and the hostess receives a credit equal to 20% of the sales.

Murphy and Bean only started selling online in fall 2005, after tiring of organizing house parties to sell their inexpensive jewelry, all items under $25. They had accumulated 1,500 e-mail addresses from house parties and their stalls at flea markets, many of them of consumers from other parts of the country who vacationed in Cape Cod. Their initial e-mail newsletters generated a lot of traffic to the site, and that led them to the idea of organizing virtual house parties online.

Tripling visits

The concept has taken off. Largely as a result of the online parties, there were nearly 883,000 visits to Bella’s site in November, more than triple the 260,000 visits in November 2006. In fact, the heavy traffic over the Thanksgiving weekend crashed Bella’s server, putting the site out of action for five days.

It wasn’t the first time that Bella’s founders learned the hard way lessons about online retailing.

In their first attempt at e-mail marketing in December 2005, they tried to send a newsletter to their 1,500 e-mail addresses from Bean’s personal e-mail account. The mailing looked like spam to her Internet service provider, Verizon, which shut down her service. “It was a real mess,” Bean says.

That led the neophyte e-retailers to look around for a company that could handle its e-mail promotions, and they came up with e-mail service provider Constant Contact. “Once we did our first e-mail blast we got a great response,” Murphy says. “We heard back from customers, and people placed orders.”

Constant Contact charges a monthly fee based on the size of the e-mail marketing list. For 500 to 2,500 addresses, the fee is $30 per month. By December, Bella’s list had grown to over 7,600 names, which would raise the monthly fee to $75.

They also learned about the rules of payment processing in December 2006 when they far exceeded their monthly limit of $10,000 in credit card orders, causing their payment processor to shut them down four days before Christmas. Bella is a privately held company and does not report its sales.

Building trust

Once they began organizing online parties, Murphy and Bean quickly realized that customers would be reluctant to share their friends’ e-mail addresses if they thought Bella was going to bombard those friends with e-mail. Murphy and Bean made clear that anyone can opt out from receiving their e-mails, and emphasized that they didn’t even want the friends’ names, just their e-mail addresses.

“This builds trust with people who are hosting the e-party,” Murphy says. “That makes them feel okay to give up their friends’ e-mail addresses.”

This approach may work for consumers who have attended a Bella party and thus gained confidence in the organizers, but would be trickier for larger merchants, says Patti Freeman Evans, an e-commerce analyst with JupiterResearch. “A lot of major retailers try to get customers to refer friends, but that’s a tough scenario because people don’t want to give major corporations their address books so their friends can get spammed,” Evans says. “The personal approach these guys are taking gives them a different opportunity.”

Once a consumer agrees to host a party, she sends Bella her address book with friends’ e-mails. Bella sends out an invitation three days before the event, and a reminder that morning. Friends who shop that day at the site receive free shipping and a surprise gift if they buy at least $50 worth of merchandise. The hostess receives a pair of earrings as well as a credit equal to 20% of the day’s sales.

Bella extended the concept to fundraisers last March, inspired by the plight of a local family with a son with cancer, and by fall was doing more fundraisers for schools, churches, and other causes than private parties. The only difference is that, instead of giving the hostess a credit for use on the site, Bella writes a check for 20% of the proceeds to the sponsoring organization. By December, Bella had sent out $6,000 in checks from those fundraisers.

A new incentive

Bean and Murphy initially recruited hostesses from customers who inquired about house parties. They later printed up business cards promoting their online parties and handed them out at their flea market stalls and at the store in Hyannis, Mass., they opened last summer—mainly because their operation had gotten too large to operate out of their homes. They also include a card in every order they send out.

But a major way they recruit hostesses is from people who attend an online party. They say they usually book at least one new event from each e-party or fundraiser.

In fact, one of their plans for the new year is to encourage hostesses to talk up how easy it was to host a party by offering them a 50% discount on a piece of jewelry if one of their invited guests agrees to host her own online event.

Website Imagery

Just a few pointers for imagery used on e-commerce sites, There’s alwasy room fro improvement…

The Quality:
The quality of a website and its products can be obtained by the quality of the images displayed on the site. Users of a website have no other visual cues to help them when making purchases, therefore product shots are very important.

The more professional the images on a website, the more professional the website looks. The investment in high quality professional photographs and product shots is definitely worth the investment, with sales conversions having been known to double with the addition of better imagery.

The Quantity:
There is one thing that is clear. Users like seeing more than one image of a product. Unfortunately, many ecommerce websites only show one view of the product. This takes away the user’s ability to fully grasp the scope of the product.

The best thing to do by rule of thumb is to have roughly 2-3 images of a product. This will help give the impression and control the user may have of a product in a physical store, whilst helping them decide whether or not the product is suitable for them.

The Size:
To give the users the best possible shopping experience, images need to be available in a larger version, so the product can be examined in detail. The most common practice of this is having a “Thumbnail” (or small version) and an “Full View” (Enlarged high-resolution version).

It is also most common practice to have the image shots appear in a pop-up window, although with technology today there are many alternatives such as “Lightbox” which will backout the screen and focus the user’s attention on the large preview of the image in the centre of the screen.

The Speed:
Unfortunately, the larger the images and previews get, the longer the time it takes to download the images on a users internet connection. The best solution to this is to have a high quality web server. This will provide optimal speeds to the customers of your website, enabling them to download the images quickly, enhancing their online shopping experience.

If you have a large quantity of users viewing your website, you may also consider having additional media servers to serve the images from multiple locations around the world; this can help ensure all users have a pleasant shopping experience. Speak to your Rival Professionals for more information on web hosting services.

The Detail:
Depending on the products you are selling, they may have smaller or more complex areas that may require more detail.
For example, if you were photographing a laptop computer, customers would most likely want to see the connections on the front, rear and sides of the computer to make sure it meets their needs. The solution? Include close up shots of all the complex areas of the product.

A good method to use is to take 1 full view of the product, then smaller close up views of areas of importance. Having these detailed photos could be the difference in an online sale or not.

The Package:
Some products may include one or more smaller packages. For example a digital camera. It is one thing to include a photo of the camera itself, but what about all the extras? It is good to answer all the customers’ questions before they even think of them! The best way to accomplish this is to take a “Full Package Shot” of the contents of the package.

It is also a good idea to include the product box in these photographs if possible, jus in case the product has multiple versions which may be similar in one way or another.

The Relevance:
One of the most important things to remember when dealing with ecommerce imagery is relevance of the images. Irrelevant pictures detract from the message trying to be portrayed by the store owner. It is best to keep the image precise and clear, don’t include images that could confuse the user or make them doubt the products quality.

Summary
Professional, high quality website images help sell products online. Fact.

The internet sometimes gets a negative spin put on it because of users not getting the products they “thought” they were getting. It is best to keep your ecommerce site professional and remain loyal to your customers by providing precise and detailed images.

Hello Shreveport Bossier Internet sales group

April meeting will be at 11:30 at CafeUSA on Wed April 16

Mark Stewart will talk about UPS OnLine Tools that they allow customers to integrate specific application programming interfaces (APIs) with an enterprise applications or web sites, and how it can improve our customer’s experience and reduce total cost.

Some of the tools available are:

• Tracking
• rate and service selections
• address validation

Attending                                                                                                                  

Harvey, Jim Queen, Randy Miller, Linda, Josh, TANYA, MARY LOUISA, MARK STEWART quest speaker UPS, JOHN FOX, Al Peterson, Kem Brown, Pat Burch, Glen Bundrick,

 NOT ABLE TO ATTEND – Machael, Jim, and Audrey

We are open for suggestions for May’s meeting location, if you know of somewhere we can get a room for our meeting please let me know.  Mary Louisa has volunteer to help with the locations.  Mary Louisa’s life before UPS was as an event planner, so that means we will have to start booking the expo hall for our meetings.  I also would like your input on topics as well, I need your help.  Any input to help us grow and learn is most welcome.  If you know of anyone in the ecommerce business that would like to attend please invite them and let me add them to our list.

The internet business is exciting and after our meetings each month I can’t wait to put to work what I have learned.  I sure hope everyone else gets excite too.  This is a great opportunity for us.  AND IT FREE