So your online shop has lots of visitors but few sales…
Yes I know this is an old well worn subject and yes there are many articles on the subject, but I just wonder how many people miss the obvious.
Of course there can be navigation issues and I’ll mention a few later in this article, but can I ask if you’ve looked at the obvious?
Price
Firstly try searching for the terms that you would like to be ranked for and whether you’re there or not (which is another issue altogether), make a note of the domains that are there (in the top 10) and then taking your top 10 best sellers and create a spreadsheet of prices to compare – where do you stand in the price comparison? Cheapest? Most expensive? Now I’m not saying you should be either cheapest or the most expensive, but if you repeat that exercise with the items you would like to sell more of, you’ll begin to build an interesting bit of information which will help you establish why your sales conversion is low. There is price comparison software out there that you can purchase for more in depth analysis but this is a simple enough exercise to give you an indication of competitive price points.
Purchasing Process
Of course now you’re getting into a bit of analysis, the next most obvious step is to look at bounce rate – the number of visitors who land on your website and finding it not suitable or appropriate for what they were searching for, “bounce” straight back off again – ask yourself why someone would think they could (for a trite example) buy widgets from you and getting to the site didn’t bother. There are of course a number of reasons. The most obvious being that either you rank for widgets when you don’t sell them OR you rank for widgets and want to sell them, but when a user arrives at your site its unclear how to buy widgets.
These are all really simple basic questions and processes, but the answers will be truly revealing.
Trust
Another revealing insight is that of trust. Trust has become a more and more common reason for people not wanting to buy from a given site. Prominent security information and genuine public reviews as well as money back guarantees will all go to build trust. If you’re not sure ask a few people what they think and be open minded.
Check Out/Shopping Cart Process
Another big challenge is if a high percentage of your users try buying but give up at the shopping cart stage and this can be for a number of reasons including an over complicated purchasing experience or not enough instruction how to buy.
Well I could write more and more, but I hope this gives you some simple ideas and your sales increase as a result.
