Let’s face it, ecommerce can be tough, especially when you first start it can be a slog to get momentum. But the biggest problem ecommerce sites face, is converting traffic into sales. There’s an abundance of traffic (potential customers) online, but many customers trust in the larger brands, the elite are taking control so it’s time to fight back and do things better. It’s imperative once you have traffic on your website you do something with it and convert this. Give them something to do and present them with an irresistible offer, an offer to buy your products.
Here’s some random Ecommerce Sales Boosters to give your site some juice:
- Your site needs to be a sales funnel from entry to exit. Any resistance and customers will bail out and not buy. Think about the flow from when they land on your site to the checkout to the order success page. It has to be seamless and lack any resistance.
- Remove resistance especially in the checkout. With typical checkout drop-outs in the 80% range, you have some work to do, but it’s critical you do it. Refine, Refine, Refine. Set up Google Analytics (goals) to track this. It’s really simple.
- Have a very robust and reliable search box which is prominent position in your site header area, and a search box which actually works pulling data from your Product Name/Title Tag/H1 tag.
- Implement strong product filters as some customers like to filter in a complex way and some customers like to filter down in a linear fashion going down each product tier in succession. The more choice the better, but be aware that older people may prefer a simple filter process.
- 80% of sales will come from 20% of your products, give or take. Your stats will tell you what these best sellers are. Push these products hard on your home page, as recommendations, as cross-sells, on your order success (thanks) page. Hammer them in your blogs, email newsletter, RSS feed. Get a Top sellers page, this will automatically pull your top selling X number of products, 3 per row and about 18 tops per page. Don’t go silly and keep it focused.
- Keep your product range fresh where possible and continue to refine the 80/20%. It’s an ongoing process to push the products people want and remove the deadwood from your website.
- Build Social Proof via product reviews, testimonials and possibly case studies. You don’t need to go crazy, just 1 to 3 testimonials, or 1 with a link leading to a separate page with 3-7 displayed top to bottom. Product reviews are imperative to maximize sales.
- Use and display well known and respected trust and security logos, as buying confidence is now absolutely critical.
- Add a physical address if possible to the Contact Page, you can call it Head Office or similar. People don’t know you yet so building trust is very important. Amazon they’ve heard of, YourSite.com probably not.
- Check prices are you competitive? Can you test different prices on a few key best sellers. Prices ending in .97 or .98 can often evoke a higher buying response then say .95 or .99. Price is the trigger, get it wrong and you won’t sell anything. Conversely too high and nobody will buy, too cheap and you won’t make any money. Monitor competitors and test different prices often.
- Offer a 5% discount code/voucher if they sign up to your email newsletter. Or move returns or slow movers with a percentage discount. Think about a discount for first time buyers to gain them as customers.
- Go Social. Hang out where your target customer hangs out and drive the traffic to your website. Once you build rapport, trust and become an expert in your desired social community it will be far easier to convert the sale.
