Conversion

Having people able to find you and your website is great, but doesn’t really do a lot for you unless they buy something.  That’s called conversion.  Conversion rate is the ratio of the number of people visiting your site, compared to the amount of people buying something from it.  Your goal is high conversion.  You’d rather have 100 people a day come to your site and buy something than have 10,000 people visit, but only 10 people buy something.

Don’t make it difficult for people to buy from you.  If people have to work to buy from your site, they will leave and buy from a website that’s easier to buy from.  Making the buying process unnecessarily complex is not needed and will cost you sales.

There are four areas where you can make it easier for your customers to buy from you.  The first is obvious, but often overlooked.  Your pages should clearly show the price of each product and how to buy it.  Potential customers should not have to scroll, click links, or enter information to get access to this information. 

The second area is your buy button. It should stand out from your web pages so that it’s easy to find.  Forget trying to blend it into the theme of your website, make it stand out so that it can’t be missed.  Make your buy button represent a positive call to action.  Companies often have the debate of whether it’s better to have your buy button say “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart”, but if you look at some of the leading e-commerce websites, Add to Cart seems to be the preferred text.

The third area and, most often the victim of bad implementation, is shipping prices.  Don’t make it any more difficult than necessary for people to find shipping prices.  The most information people should be expected to enter is their zip code and possibly country if international.  Too many websites lose customers by forcing them to create an account, or put in all their personal information before they get quoted a shipping price. 

The method of calculating shipping prices will depend on which shopping cart you use, which shipper or shippers you use, and what you are selling.  Some carts offer live linking to the major shipping companies with real time shipping prices.  You can also offer flat rate shipping, free shipping, or a shipping scale based on price.  Whatever your shipping price structure is, make it as easy as possible for your customers to find the shipping cost.

The final area is the actual checkout process.  A lot of it will be dictated by what shopping cart you use.  Make it as quick and easy as you can.  Customers should have to do as few steps and clicks as possible.  If you can have them enter their personal and payment information on one page, that’s great.