On the way to checkout
What we sell at e-commerce sites is only part of the story. How we present the products and information correlates with how many people make it through the purchasing steps to checkout.
Does your site get a lower-than-desired conversion rate? A lot of abandoned shopping carts? Let’s look at some ways to turn more of those visits into sales.
Price displays
Shoppers won’t buy if the prices are too high for them — or if they’re perceived as too high. How the prices are displayed as well as the prices themselves influences purchasing decisions.
Does it matter if the prices are shown as $20 or $19.95? For different reasons in different cultures, yes.
In the US and Canada, consumers are used to seeing prices such as $19.95 or $199.99 instead of $20 or $200. We’re aware of how this tactic is supposed to work, and we might think that such pricing …

SSO: Store Site Optimization – Why Aren´t They Buying?
If you own a commercial site and you’ve performed all of your search engine optimization (SEO) chores, you should be listed with the major search engines and visitors should be finding their way to your on-line boutique.
Driving traffic to a commercial site is difficult in the first place. So, once that traffic starts showing up, the last thing you want those potential buyers to do is to leave before making a purchase, especially true if they found you via PPC because that visitor is going to cost you money for that unfruitful click through.
The question becomes: once you have a visitor on site, how do you induce that person to make a purchase? Store Site Optimization, or SSO, is the ticket.
SSO: The Trust Factor
Most on-line purchases are made using a visitor’s credit card and those names and card numbers are hacked all …

Behavioral Segmentation and Targeting: Engaging Recent and Returning Site Visitors
Consumers arrive at your site, look around, come back a few times, and finally decide to make a purchase — or not. If those consumers are interested enough in your products or services to return to your website, what can you do to help convert them to customers? And how can you get their attention if they’ve been to your site only once and are still shopping for products or services that you offer? According to useit.com (article published in 2005), 75 percent of orders are placed within a day of the consumer first visiting the site. That leaves 25 percent of consumers who come back to a site, perhaps more than once, before deciding to buy. With higher-priced items, the purchase cycle tends to be longer. The above article gives an average conversion rate of two percent, and the percentages …

Data Mining: Solid Gold Information
Data mining is the practice of collecting and storing information in humongous data bases. The information is gathered from opt ins, on-line surveys, forms and other “voluntary” means of collecting information, usually from customers and buyers and about customers and buyers.
Who uses data mining? Retail outlets, insurance companies, banks, airlines and other industries that not only collect data, but derive benefit from analyzing that data in a scientific, systematic manner to improve service and profit margins. And if it works for the big guys, it’ll work for you (only on a slightly smaller scale).
What are we looking for?
Using data mining technology, industries are looking for trends before they become trends. Relationships between customer A and widget B. Patterns of activity, unusual events – the list is endless and growing all the time.
The fact is, billions and billions of pages are stored on computers and …

Turn Your Ecommerce Website Into a Photo Gallery
First, let’s start with a basic, fundamental principle of advertising: products on your ecommerce website sell better when people can see them. That’s why every product in your Lands’ End catalog has a nice (really nice) product picture taken by a pro photographer using professional models. Oh, and a Nikon commercial, digital camera that costs more than $2000 before you start adding lenses.
Here’s the thing: you don’t have to be a pro, use professional models or own a $2K digital camera to improve the quality of your product shots. Even if you take them into Photoshop to enhance them, Photoshop can only work with what you’ve produced so take a lesson on producing product shots that sell the product.
The Only Thing Worse Than No Photo on your Ecommerce Store Is a Bad Photo
Pop over to eBay to see this point in action. The …