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Well once again Christmas is rapidly approaching us, people will soon stop complaining about shops going all christmasy too early and start to think about buying presents themselves. For retailers, both online and high street Christmas 2009 is going to be very interesting. It’s fair to say that Christmas 2008 was not easy for many retailers. The so called recession was just taking hold, the media were in a frenzy trying to suggest that capitalism was about to go into melt down. To say it was a tough year for retailers would be an understatement.

I think this year things will be different, despite what we see on the news the capitalist lifestyle goes on, people are still shopping, buying new cars and new clothes. There is still plenty of money sloshing around in the system and those that have it are not afraid to spend it. Indeed without this being the case there might be a real danger of economic melt down.

One sector that has continued to do well throughout the recession is the luxury market. The credit crunch did not affect those who were cash rich, in fact to them it has represented massive opportunity to make money. It is those in debt or who need credit who have suffered dearly. One such example is a company selling chess sets who against all apparent odds established themselves just as the economic downturn took effect.

They were part of a company who had previously sold cut price wooden toys and games but in 2008 they decided to become the UK’s biggest and best online chess retailers, with a speciality in selling very luxury chess sets. They managed to secure an exclusive contract with one of the worlds finest producers of wooden chessmen and then set about marketing these amazing products using modern and dynamic Internet retailing techniques. One excellent thing about their website is the photographs, they are so clear and really show all the detail of the products they are selling.

The results were good, while other companies were scaling things back these guys saw their turnover double! While the competitors blood boiled and they lowered their prices, the customers flocked to this new company and wanted to shop for quality, not discount. They quickly realised that they were onto a good thing so has to set about securing trademark and copy rights over their chess brand and identity.

So this Christmas it might be time to buy a chess set and see for yourself what this new company is all about. It’s nice to be a part of their success, especially at a time when more companies are going bust than starting up. We can guarantee that you wont be disappointed if you do. Oh yes, I almost forgot, if you are looking for them, they are called The Regency Chess Company, look them up, I did!

Most Internet retailers will have some interest in optimising their website for the search engines. For all the paid links, affiliate links and third party sales channels there is nothing quite like sales from traffic that has cost you nothing. A good presence in the natural rankings of the major search engines can breath life into your ecommerce business. While many small Internet businesses will pay an SEO expert to optimise their site there are still plenty who do it themselves. To be fair, it is very possible to achieve very good rankings for your site on your own without the expensive help of an expert, especially if you are in a niche market or cottage industry.

For most who scratch the surface of SEO one of the first things they learn is that inbound links are considered my most to be the lifeblood of a good SEO campaign. The answer of how to go about getting the ranking is there, staring you in the face, it all seems so easy. But the hard work and head scratching begins when you start trying to build links to your site. People talk about high quality links, good links, bad links, pointless links. To the newby SEO it can all seem confusing. I like to look at links like a diet, you need a good variety, nothing in excess, as rich and varied as possible and without overdoing it on one particular food type.

A link building expert I know, Michiel Van Kets has a great way of describing a link building campaign in his email signature which sums things up nicely.

“When it comes to link building, you shouldn’t ask yourself which tactic is the best one; they all have their advantages and disadvantages; in other words; you need all kind of links -> mix them up !”

Below is a list of methods I have used in order to improve the SEO of our main online retail website. I am no authority on SEO and can in no way be considered an expert. The list is just a selection of the methods I have used myself to good effect.

Directory submissions

Directory submissions are where many junior webmasters begin their campaign. There are 1000s of directories on the web, most of which will accept a submission of your site to possibly be included in the directory. The format usually follows an online form and category selection where you need to put details such as the url, your email address and details about the site you are submitting. Many directories are free, other have a small charge. Indeed many start off life as free directories and then once established become paid ones.

Directory links are not considered to be particularly valuable, so many believe the best way to make them work for you is to submit to 100s of them. The thinking goes that if a directory link is worth a tiny tiny amount, then 100s of directory listings will help you site. One problem with this is the time it takes to firstly locate the directories, sort the wheat from the chaff, then submit to each one. If like me you feel like you might fall into a coma out of boredom at the sight of an online form you might want to consider paying someone else to do it for you.

Companies exist who have lists of good free directories and will submit your site manually to 100s of them for a fee. Often based in third word countries with English speaking staff they sometimes have very good rates. Beware the con merchants as they are plentiful, get yourself onto a good SEO forum and seek referrals from established members. It shouldn’t be too hard to find a decent company to undertake your directory submissions.

Begging for a link

This technique is one that has been forgotten by many SEOs and web masters mainly due to it’s low success rate. You see a relevant, not competing website that has good page rank and ranks well in Google. You email the webmaster and ask them if they might consider adding a link on their site to yours. It all seems so simple and easy, however the usual response to this is a stone wall, silence, maybe even a dash of apathy.

It can be extremely frustrating, there certainly does seem to be a degree of apathy from those webmasters of information based community websites when asked by a purely  commercial website for a link, some selfless help. The usual response is seems to bear the sentiment ‘Why should I help you make money?’

Despite all of this it is possible to get some inbound links in this way, We currently work on a ration of 1/10. Yes, for every ten webmasters we email approximately one will be kind and give us a link on their relevant, content rich page. For those links, it’s worth the other 9 rejections!

Creating your own non commercial content

This method may seem a bit long winded but stay with me. Most SEOs will agree that inbound links from rich, relevant content sites, that have respectable page rank are the gems that make the difference. You can surf the web and most likely find a good number of information or community based websites that are packed full with rich, relevant content and rank well in the search engines. Often emailing the webmasters of these sites to ask for a link is completely useless, they simply ignore your request. Why after all would they want to help YOU make money.

There is a more roundabout way you can get links on these sorts of pages. You create your own websites, information or community based sites that on the face of it have no commercial motive. You can set up a totally separate website, or a simple blog. Using the word press bog software can have pretty much anyone up and running with their own web content within a few short hours. What is good about creating these sites is that gaining inbound links for them is much easier than getting links to your ecommerce website.

There is a community based site that we contacted recently to ask for a link to our web shop, the request and all it’s polite follow ups went ignored! So we then set up two new sites, completely non commercial, and requested links from the same webmaster. Hey presto! He gave us the links. Of course we then add links in our own non commercial sites and blogs to our site, so getting some link juice from him in the end!

Blog Commenting

There is plenty of debate among SEOs about the value of inbound links from blog comments. Most blogs will allow comments to be left under each post. As part of the commenting process there is the opportunity to leave your URL for a link back. Blog commenting has been embraced by the spamming community of prescription drug sales and other similar sites. It’s therefore normal for the webmaster of a blog to be inundated with spam comments.

Newer versions of the popular blogging software such as word press have in built anti spam measures to try to weed out the spam comments. I guess it could be argued that you would be spamming a blog if the sole purpose of the comment is to gain an inbound link. It might be tempting to add comments such as ‘Great post, thanks for the info’ or ‘Thanks for the great content’ but without something interesting to say it’s likely your comment will be rejected or put into the ’spam’ bin.

If you intend to search for blogs relevant to your content and comment on them with your url make sure you read the blog post properly, and leave a sensible intelligent comment that will be an asset to the debated subject. Use google alerts to get daily notifications of new relevant blog posts and comment on the blogs, they can be good sources of traffic as well as inbound links.

There is one fly that flutters and squirms in the ointment that is blog commenting and that’s the ‘no follow’ tag that an increasing number of bloggers add to the comments. No follow is an html tag created by google that a webmaster can add to a link. The idea is that google wont recognise the link for the purposes of ranking making it, in some peoples eyes, a worthless link. Annoyingly for SEOs word press (the most popular blogging software) now inserts the no follow tag as a default, so most bloggers wont even be aware they are doing it! Finding blogs without ‘no follow’ tags can be a challenge. However it’s worth remembering that adding the comments will have numerous other benefits. It will alert the blogger to your existence, generate some traffic, and who knows, may gain you some other links naturally from those that see and manually follow the url in the comment.

Buying Links

Buying links from other webmasters is a subject surrounded in controversy. Google takes a dim view on paid links as it sees them as patent attempts to manipulate their search results. It might seem simple to email a webmaster in the begging sort of way, but offer them a small cash incentive. I have always avoided the paid links game, mainly through paranoia. There is no doubt that it still goes on but those that get caught out can risk having their sites completely removed from the index. It’s worth remembering that in competitive industries there will be someone out there who wants to bring your rankings down. Don’t give them any help in doing this, stay clean, avoid paid links.

Community web space sites

There are plenty of sites out there that will let you create your own content, one such example being squidoo. This site allows anyone to create a free page, they call it a lens, and add their own content to it. Many SEOs will create relevant squidoo pages and then add in text links to their main site. Squidoo is completely general, you can set up a lens about almost anything. There are also niche websites, community forums etc etc that will let you set up your own profile page or blog. Find the community sites that relate to your industry and set up a profile, add a picture library and start a blog on there. Keep the outbound links to your site to a sensible number and try to be an active member of the community. Moderators will suspend your account if they feel you are only using it for inbound links.

Forums

Web forums are now commonplace, It’s hard to find a subject that doesn’t have it’s own web forum. From cars, specific models of cars and right through to health and well being, there is a forum for everything. Many forums have grown into huge communities and have 1000s of active members. Registering on a forum allows you to post content, which can include links. Most forums allow you a permanent signature that can contain a link and accompanies each post you make. As an online retailer you should be looking to forums for advice on business issues, e marketing and other matters relating to your business. Always make sure you post your link in your signature. Don’t spam the forums, most are heavily moderated and if they feel you are using it just for links it will be bye bye! As with all things web, keep it natural, if you cant, make it look natural.

Article writing and submission

Writing articles and publishing them online is another tool in the SEOs armoury. The web hosts a number of article sites where you can submit your own articles. I could, if I wanted, submit this blog post as an article. To do so I need to register with the article sites and submit it for consideration. If approved they will publish it on their site. You can then submit to other article sites and hope it gets published on each one. If the site allows you to add links within the body text (which not all of them do) you can also benefit hugely if a webmaster uses your article on his high PR site. So it can be a bit mit and miss, you might submit the article and get nothing more than the links dirctly from the article site, or if it gets syndicated you could land yourself some great links. The secret is of course to write great articles!

For those with limited time or poor writing skills you can sub contract this out to link building companies, some of who will have well educated english speaking writers who will generate some good articles for you. They will also be more clued up on the submission process and therefore more likely to get the article pass the approval stage.

Have an amazingly good website

The last method we have used for link building is to put as much effort as we can into our website, how it looks, works and performs. If you are trying to retail online this should be a priority regardless of SEO. Having a brilliant website, with good content can land you the best links of all, the natural ones. Whereby webmasters genuinely feel that their site users will want to see your site so add a link without being asked. This can also be born out of selling good products and offering excellent service. Your customers will tell others about you and one medium of communication they will use will be the Internet. When we check out inbound links we sometimes see links on forums from customers recommending us to other forum members, and occasionally we get a glowing review on a customers blog telling the world how much they enjoyed dealing with us.

If you feel I have missed out any other practical link building methods please feel free to comment and make suggestions.

Once again Amazon have decided to bring in their ‘Christmas selling Guidelines’ for toy and games sellers on their marketplace platform. The guidelines only apply to third party sellers who sell products in the toy and game category on their site. The upshot is that sellers who don’t meet the ‘criteria’ get banned from selling on the site during the peak selling season (Christmas).

What is most galling about this process is the lack of tolerance on Amazons behalf. If a seller suffers a mere 1% order defect rate they will be suspended during Christmas. Contributions to the order defect rate are brought from receiving a negative feedback comment from the customer. So if you make one hundred sales, and one customer leaves a bad comment your business could be left in tatters!

Of course Amazon feel that this is all justified in the name of preserving the customer experience. We would all agree that keeping bad sellers off the platform is vital, all year round, not just at select times of the year. I sense there is a second motive, one whereby they wish to cull a certain number of sellers in this category. Why else would they set such low tolerance and draconian criteria for their sellers at this critical time?

The whole system is drastically unfair. Amazon ask their customers to rate the shopping experience after they have purchased from a third party seller. In the innocent eyes of the customer they are simply leaving a comment, nothing more, nothing less. They are completely unaware of the fact that if they decide to give a low feedback score the end result could be a small business shutting down, the staff being made redundant and sent home all due to the main sales channel of the company has been removed!

It’s likely we will never know the true reasons behind Amazons crazy plan for the Christmas Selling Guidelines, what ever they are the net result is a huge amount of stress for small business owners who rely heavily on Amazon for their sales income. At a time when the economy is in recession and business needs all the help it can get it comes as a very poor show from Amazon to implement this vile policy for a second year running!

Website testing, we have all done it right? What do we mean by website testing? Too many online retailers are neglecting this essential practice, instead focusing their efforts on trying to get more targeted traffic to their website. Of course, everyone tests their website in the very beginning. That first live test purchase on the company credit card to ensure everything is working as it should. But what about real testing, what we are talking about is of course usability testing.

When you are involved in the design and building of a website it soon becomes impossible to look upon it objectively. It’s too easy to assume that all of your visitors are finding the navigation, checkout and purchasing processes just as easy as you do. This is however a big mistake, until your site has undergone proper testing you will have very little information about where things are going wrong for your visitors and what might be standing in the way of them buying something or completing a conversion.

Ask yourself what you do when you are browsing a website and you get stuck, the navigation is not doing what you think it should, you can’t find something, or a web form is not playing ball. The usual course of action is to hite the nuke button and leave the site never to return.

Our online chess set retailing business recently embarked on a series of website tests. Prior to this we had spent hours if not days staring at our site, our checkout pages and navigation in an attempt to try and refine the customer experience and make it a easy as possible to buy from our site. The website testing really is the acid test. Having now undergone the testing we can see that before it took place we were essentially fumbling around in the dark. Imagine a new software program tested by the guy who programmed it, is he the best person to test it?

Usability testing can take on a number of forms, in it’s most primitive form it can involve a test subject sat at a P.C using the website with a video camera behind them taping the screen. These days things have moved on. We have software such as Snapz Pro that allows you to record everything that takes place on the screen and also include an audio track. There are also live online solutions that will record the screen activity of your actual live visitors, although last time we checked this was still beyond the budget scope of the average small E-retailer.

More complex forms of testing involve eye direction sensors that actually record where abouts on the screen the user is looking. A large sample frame of testing subjects results in data that looks rather like a weather temperature map, with a hot orange colour for the areas that gained most attention, and cold blues or the areas that gained the least attention. These tests have been used extensively to evaluate the effect of online advertising. Tests like this on major search engines have showed that (not surprisingly) people dedicate most of their attention to the top left hand side of the page, avoiding the sponsored ads on the right and losing their attention further down the page.

Testing for small online retailers on a tight budget

Testing doesn’t need to involve huge cost, gadgets and expensive consultants. You can undertake your own testing quite simply and easily. Download some software that will allow you to capture the session and save it as a movie, ideally with a sound track. You then need some test subjects. It’s prudent to get as many possible test subjects as you can. At least ten to start with, maybe twenty or thirty if you can muster it. The aim of the exercise is to record the web browsing activities of your test subjects and then analyse the video to see where they had difficulties in using the site.

Reverse your goals

In order to create some consistency within your testing group it’s wise to set a goal and ask your test subjects to enter the site from the home page and then try to achieve this goal. We have created scenarios for people to work through with an ultimate goal of them purchasing a product. We provided them with the test credit card details from our payment gateway so that spending real money wasn’t going to be necessary.

The Revelation

The results were, as we thought they would be, very surprising. We were shocked to see some testers getting completely stuck at stages in the checkout and aborting their purchase. As well as the videos we asked the test subjects to provide some verbal feedback on their user experience. The results meant we were put to work making improvements to our site, specifically the checkout process, pretty much straight away.

If you are the webmaster of an e commerce website and you are not testing, you should be. Effective testing and implementation of improvements will increase your conversion rates, which in turn means you will get a lot more bang for your buck when it comes to paid traffic. As the old saying goes…. testing testing, one, two, three!

The situation is very familiar to online merchants. Shortly after your website goes live and your first google sponsored ads are launched the phone rings. “Can I speak to the person in charge of your online marketing please?” Seasoned E merchants will know exactly what I am referring to. A company calls you to offer you an amazing opportunity to be one of the merchants within their highly successful sales platform. They have a slot for a merchant selling just the sort of products you sell and they want you to fill it.

They promise 1000s of sales, for which they will take a commission, but there is a small sign up and integration fee, often in the region of £1000. At this point you might have conjured up images of a large Nigerian man on the other end of the phone trying his best with the latest scam. The reality is that the person on the other end of the phone is working in the UK, for a UK registered eMarketing company, but you were right about the scam part!

For legal reasons I will mention no names in this blog post but it’s safe to say that eTailers both young and old need to be extremely careful when signing up for these so called sales platforms. It’s quite typical for these companies to mention a selection of household names, brands and newspapers that they are affiliated with, indeed one of them even associates themselves with a member of the House of Lords! Don’t be fooled by the verbal tirade of positive affirmations about the so called product they are trying to sell you.

Changing names, changing faces

The massive amount of bad press that these companies receive online, on blogs and in forum posts has lead to the unsurprising situation whereby many of them have undergone a name change. As all good marketing professionals will tell you, changing the name of your reputable & established brand is a great idea! (That was me being sarcastic by the way).

It seems that every time they call there is a new member of the sales team, staff turnover in these places is high, very high. With poor record keeping and no joined up thinking the result is that no matter how loudly you shout the word “no” you can expect a freshed faced sales recruit to be back on the phone to you within six months. I have lost count of the number of calls I have had from a relatively small number of companies.

Avoiding the scams

On my travels I have spoken to many internet merchants who have fallen foul of these marketing companies, it pains me every time I hear of another small business who have handed £1000 or more over to one of these truth dodging organisations. Here is my top five checklist for dealing with these companies.

1. Do your research. Google their company name, check out what others say on forums and do some detective work

2. Offer a bigger commission. There is logic to the madness, offer to pay them an increased sales commission per transaction in exchange for wiping the joining fee to zero. If they know that x% of nothing is … well… nothing then they are certain to turn your offer down.

3. Contact other merchants on the platform. If you are seriously thinking of signing up try contacting another merchant who is already on the platform, ask them how they are finding it.

4. There is no magic bullet. Always remember that with internet marketing there is no single marketing method that is going to bring you all the sales you want. If someone is trying to tell you otherwise, they are lying!

5. Bin the hard sell. If a cold call marketing sales person is giving you the sort of hard sell you would expect from a double glazing salesman then end the call. Serious internet marketing plans are not made on the spot and they don’t require you to ‘Sign up today’.

As an online retailer based in the UK we have seen plenty of ups and downs over the last few years. With all this talk of recession, depression and economic meltdown it certainly hasn’t been business as usual. During the summer of 2008 we decided that we wouldn’t be one of those companies that battons down the hatches and waits for the storm to pass. Instead we took it upon ourselves to develop a new arm to the business, expand our product range and begin targeting new customers.

Since 2005 we had been selling a range of budget priced goods online, we had noticed that along with the economic downturn our sales had taken a hit, in fact turnover was down around 20%. Part of the new expansion involved developing a range of luxury products aimed at customers who were not feeling the pinch so badly. Let us not forget, there are still 1000s of very well off people in Britain and Europe who despite the recession still have extensive amounts of disposable income.

To cut a long story short we managed to turn our fortunes around by early 2009, we launched our luxury brand and began to successfully retail luxury goods with price points we had previously had no experience of. Needless to say we wanted to build upon this success. It was decided that some capital was needed to grow the business over a two year period. The need for the cash was essentially to buy stock, grow the range and bring those products to an online audience.

A business plan was drawn up by our company accountant and a meeting arranged with our bank. Now it’s worth noting we have a very good credit history, no unauthorised overdraft use, and we have never defaulted on any business loans in the last. It was decided that we would apply for a loan around £50,000 under the enterprise finance guarantee scheme. Our bank of 4 years confirmed that with no security this would be the best option and that securing the funds should be no problem.

All seemed positive until after going through the motions they turned round at the last minute and rejected the application. There was repeated use of the phrase ‘in the current climate’ with remarks about it being impossible for us to increase turnover in a sector (retail) that is suffering so badly in the recession. There was a total lack of understanding for our business plan, and they refused to see any difference between the suffering sector of high street retail and the still progressive online retail sector.

By this stage our business was getting desperate for extra funds, sales were getting better, the brand growing, but without the funds progress was going to be slow and painful. As a member of the FSB I rang the company that they reccomend for securing business finance after they sent me a letter stating that “Business finance IS still out there” I gave them all of the particulars, emailed them our business plan and waited for the response. Nothing!

I then contacted a local business consultancy and explained the problem and my dire frustrations. It seemed I made the right call! I engaged with the consultants who basically outlined the current situation frankly and honestly. Certain banks (who will remain nameless for legal reasons) are simply not lending to businesses. They say they are, are even going as far as advertising it on their websites, but the reality is that they are turning down all but a fraction of applications for business funding. No wonder there is a recession on!

I was advised of two banks that were lending under the EFG scheme and told that as long as my business plan was viable and profitable they could probably get me the finance, for a fee of course. In this case 1.5% of the loan total! It seemed like the right choice, these guys knew the banks well and were also highly experienced at getting finance for SMEs.

They drew me up a new business plan that was fresh, extremely well presented and made logical commercial sense. It was in fact so well presented that a 5 year old could have understood it, I figured that if this was the case a banker just might be able to grasp it too. What I didn’t know was that the plan had been created to fit perfectly into the slot thats required for bank approval. A meeting was set up with the bank, the consultants came with me and together we presented the plan and the company to the bank manager.

Well what a result! Here I am writing this 4 weeks later with the money in the bank! A total of £60,000 borrowing has been secured with most of that guaranteed by the government under the EFG scheme. Having to switch banks is a small price to pay for having the extra capital injected into the business.

There is no doubt that obtaining business finance is certaily harder now that it was two years ago, but it IS still available and can be accessed if your business plan and application is presented in the right way. It’s worth noting that many banks wont entertain a second reading of your application if the first attempt falls flat on it’s face. You need to get the application right first time or lose your chance with that bank for the forseeable future. The word on the street today is that the government owned banks are the ones to target when you are seeking finance.

For those of you selling a tangible product online the issue of product photography will no doubt be something you have had to deal with. The importance of product photography is one of those things that is so often overlooked by internet merchants. When faced with the task of uploading an inventory to a selling platform merchants will either resort to the CD full of jpegs that their wholesaler sends them or worse still, copies images of the same product from other merchants.

The desperation to have the entire inventory uploaded and online often comes ahead of quality assurance when it comes to product photos. In the world of web 2.0 and intense competition it’s becoming increasingly important to ensure that you have good quality and clear shots of your products. We have consistently found success in marketing products through the use of clean, crisp images of the products and a varied selection of images of each product. Competitors selling identical products to us are losing out because their images are poor quality, dull and don’t give the customer enough information.

How have we achieved such good product images?

All of our product shots are taken ‘in house’ using a selection of photography gear we bought online. The equipment includes a second hand Digital SLR camera, two high quality lenses, lights, a cube tent and some reflectors. We probably spent just under £2000 on the set up which has been an excellent investment, not least because the second hand lenses and camera body could (if we wanted) be liquidated on ebay for pretty much what we paid for them.

Once the photos come off the camera we put them into a well known image editing software to clean them up and re size them. Images for your website will need to be compressed, which is going to affect the quality, using a professional piece of software to do this is essential to guarantee good results. Adobe Photoshops ’save for web’ feature is ideal.   The fact remains that the better your product images are the more products you are going to sell. Your clean and clear images can be another positive edge you have over the competition. Don’t be put off by the high upfront costs involved in either buying the gear or commissioning a freelance photographer. If you are serious about selling online it will pay not to be penny wise and pound senseless when it comes to product images for your online selling platforms.

The majority of Internet retailers will hopefully identify with having somewhat of an obsession with Internet marketing. Whether it be pay per click, SEO, social networking or email marketing, the goal setting is often focused too much on traffic volumes. How many Internet merchants have said to themselves “If only I could rank number one on google for “said”  search term I would be sorted’ ?

The fact of the matter is that traffic, brand awareness & advertising are all going to become very diluted if conversion rates are not looked at first. A quick glance around some business forums shows that conversion rates do vary considerably. Rates of less then 1% up to around 5% seem typical, not very high on the face of it. That means that for every 100 visitors you send to your site a tiny handful will convert into a paying sale. Sticking with the maths for a moment, what if you could double your conversion rate, or even triple it? That would mean your marketing budget and effort could go twice as far, maybe even three times.

If you are already marketing your website, have a good level of daily traffic and are paying for clicks and traffic then it’s time to begin looking into making better commercial use of that traffic. If for every 100 visits you gain one sale, why not try for two instead? The first thing that many internet merchants need to do is find out what their conversion rate is. This may seem shocking to many of you but I speak to plenty of merchants who simply don’t know! Google analytics is a great tool for anaylising traffic, it will also tell you what your conversion rates are and track them over time.

How do I get more conversions from the same number of visitors?

On our quest for better conversion rates we came across this conversion rate blog which is a brilliant source of information. The blog is run by The Conversion Rate Experts who will get involved with merchants with a view to improving their conversions. You don’t need to pay these guys any money to begin improving your conversion rates, many improvements can be made just by putting into action some of the methods they kindly publish on their blog and website.

After reading their blog we began going through our website with a fine tooth comb to try and tighten up weak spots, remove any nuke buttons and make life easier for our customers. The results so far? A 0.8% improvement in our conversion rate!

What did you do to actually improve the conversions?

The first thing we did was to set up a conversion ‘goal’ in our google analytics account. The goals tool is really useful and quite exciting if you are as interested in conversion rates as we are. It allows you to see how many visitors reach each stage of the checkout process, where they most commonly leave, and where they go afterwards. If you haven’t already set goals in your anayltics then do it, I guarantee you will find the results interesting.

We used this data to see common leakage points within our checkout system and to identify where people were ditching their shopping carts and going elsewhere. This allowed us to target any improvements to the weak areas. The end result was a slicker, easier and faster checkout system on our website which in turn brought in more sales.

The second thing we did was to remove all nuke buttons. Nuke buttons are mentioned in the conversion rate blog, they are buttons on your site that simply nuke a transaction before it’s had a chance to flourish into a full blown order. A common nuke button is ‘empty cart’ and amazingly is present on a great number of e-commerce websites. Another great example is ‘clear form’ one of those buttons that has been around for as long as you or I can remember but serves little purpose apart from making people go bananas when they hit it by accident. The general rule of thumb is that if a button isn’t there to help your visitor complete their purchase goal, then it shouldn’t be there in the first place.

There are hosts of other techniques that you can use to improve conversions on your website. Another thing we did was to introduce a colour coded checkout system whereby the customer needs to contine clicking the ‘green button’ in order to proceed. Graphically it works very well and gives our customer a clear picture of where they need to click next, even if they can’t be bothered to read the online instructions (we can all be guilty of this from time to time).

To conclude

So there you have it! If you hadn’t been thinking about conversion rates before you should be now. They are simply too important to overlook and if optimised correctly will reward your internet marketing work many times over. Good luck and happy selling!