Ecommerce Blog

I recently caught the replay of a web clinic presented by Marketing Experiments titled Affiliate Marketing: Tests and tactics that increased clicks and leads by 165%. The presentation is full of great tips for both retailers and affiliates and I encourage you to watch the whole thing, but there was one point that stood out as a really novel idea:

“Solicit advice from your affiliates, many are seasoned online marketers who can offer you valuable insight on what does and does not work.”

Improving your landing page is essential when you have an affiliate program. Not only does it impact your revenue and your affiliate program performance metrics, but it’s crucial to retain high quality affiliates. According to the 2009 MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Survey, 74% of respondents cited “finding high quality affiliates” as a significant challenge, and 50% “keeping high quality affiliates.”

High quality affiliates are motivated by the profitability of working with you. Even if you have a higher commission, with a stinking conversion rate the affiliate isn’t making maximal money. They are thinking earnings per visit.

Reaching out to your affiliates to work with them on conversion optimization is not just “a bit of free consulting” for yourself, it lets your affiliates know you are committed to increasing their performance as well as your own. Offer affiliates some flexibility in landing page design, product copy or headlines, soliciting their input and facilitating tests. The higher earnings per visit the affiliate can achieve with your program, the more likely the affiliate will promote your offers above others on their own sites and in their email and online advertising campaigns. And the less likely you’ll be tempted to continually up the ante on commissions to retain top affiliates.

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Original post by Linda Bustos

This post is contributed by Janis Lanka (@janislanka, who manages front-end development for Elastic Path Software.

Continuing our case study in conversion optimization for the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store (see last week’s post if you missed it), today we’ll share the results of our product detail page testing.

We began with potential issues with the current design:

• Color and size selection were provided in drop-down menus which were difficult to notice and understand. For example, what do the colors “Juniper”, “Pacific” or “Fern” really look like?
• The Add to Cart button and price often fell below the fold and were hard to find if a product had a long description.

Considering above, the following tweaks (Variation A) were introduced:

• Most crucial elements such as Add to Cart button, price, and amount selector were moved to the right in their own column and switch places with Shop With Confidence block
• Drop-downs were replaced with visual selectors
• Product review information was moved under the product title
• Alternative image thumbnails were increased in size

During the initial review of Variation B, we gathered feedback suggesting that visual selectors for color need to be closer to the main product photo. The reason being some on our team felt the color selectors were too distant from the product photo. We wanted to test this as an alternative hypothesis. Thus, location of visual selectors was the only difference between Variation A and Variation B.

Control

Variation A

Variation B

What We Learned

During the experiment, all three variations were equally distributed to 100% of all traffic. 18 days and 2567 conversions later, Google Website Optimizer found a high confidence winner. Consensus was that both new variations would perform better than the control one, but variation B was the ultimate winner:

• Variation B converted (GWO) 19.2% better than the control variation
• Variation A converted (GWO) 11.2% better than the control variation
• Visits with Variation B resulted in 54.4% less Bounce Rate than the control variation
• Overall Conversion Rate increased by 21.17% (Variation B) or 13.26% (Variation A)

After reviewing this test, some suggested that Variation A performed worse because most products had rather long “short” description, pushing those selectors fairly close or below the fold. A good follow-up test by splitting description into short and long would answer this.

Finally, it is difficult to say what change exactly contributed the most – the move of Add to Cart button or the change of drop-downs into visual selectors. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the luxury of time to localize these experiments and provide more detailed report on that. However, we can say with confidence that fairly minor UI changes can result in rather high improvement.

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None Found

Original post by Janis Lanka

This post is contributed by Janis Lanka, who manages front-end development for Elastic Path Software.

A little while back, I wrote on Elastic Path’s Grep Community blog about our decision to change to a two-page checkout process. We piloted this checkout process on the Hockey Canada Store with the main goals being to reduce abandonment and to increase conversion. The results were extremely positive, but we weren’t content to sit on our laurels. So when we started re-working the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store, we challenged ourselves to take it to the next level — and we cut the checkout process down to just single page.

Structurally, the new single-page checkout looks very much like the two-page checkout, with shipping information first, followed by billing and confirmation.

With A/B split testing, 50% of traffic was redirected to the original checkout, while the other 50% was served the new single-page checkout. After only 300 transactions, the winner was clear and we stopped the experiment after 606 transactions. Google Website Optimizer concluded that the single-page checkout outperformed the out-of-the-box checkout by a whopping 21.8%. But what does that 21.8% really mean?

Control: Original, 2-Step Process

(Click to enlarge, will open new page)

Treatment: Single Page Checkout

The option to create an account after checkout is offered after the order is completed:

The Findings

It’s important to keep in mind that GWO only counts goal conversions and does not link to any ecommerce data in Google Analytics. With a few little hacks, we were able to pass on each test group to Advanced Segments on Analytics for both checkout flows and gather valuable ecommerce data:

• Successful completion rate for the entire checkout process increased by 257.26%.
• Overall site conversion rate increased by 0.54%.
• We also observed some unexpected improvements during this experiment, like an increase of 8.54% in the average order value!

While these kinds of numbers are impressive, they should not be used as the sole indicator of how single-page checkout performs. These are the improvements that we observed when changing from the standard four-page checkout to a single-page checkout process on the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store. Your mileage may vary, depending on your product, target market, et cetera. There’s no silver bullet checkout process that works best for all business models. Doing your own A/B split testing will give you a better idea of what kinds of numbers you can expect.

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Original post by Linda Bustos

Is the Canadian market attractive for online retailers? Both US and Canadian businesses want to know.

Sadly, market size data is near impossible to find, as are conversion rate and average order value (AOV) benchmarks. The most recent analyst research that’s available (Statistics Canada, eMarketer, Forrester Research) dates back to 2007. Newer research should come out soon from both Statistics Canada and Forrester — we’ll keep you updated here on Get Elastic.

In 2008, eMarketer estimated Canadian ʖC ecommerce as 4-6% of all retail and predicted that we will see $18 Billion in Canadian online spending (including travel) in 2010, and double digit growth in 2011 and 2012.

Regarding conversion and AOV, analysts can tell us conversion rates are slightly lower in Canada than the US. This is consistent with many Canadian retailers I’ve spoken to. Of course, your mileage will vary depending on your industry, brand awareness, loyalty and execution of your web strategy. Jim Okamura of JC Williams Group believes lower conversion rates are a function of segmentation and targeting and the lack of choice available. “What drives conversion is selection — the weakest area for Canadian ecommerce.”

The good news is average order value (AOV) is often higher on Canadian ecommerce sites than the average US site. Perhaps this is cultural, Canadians spend 47% more than the average US consumer (hey we’re nice and extravagant). Or maybe it’s due to the smaller pool of online sellers. You’re more likely to be a one-stop shopper if the site’s “the only game in town.”

But that may soon change, as both Canadian and US retailers start looking seriously at the Canadian online consumer.

For US Retailers

Shipping to Canada opens the gate to over 28 Million Internet users. 50% of Canadians made a purchase online last year according to Forrester Research. Visa Canada found 57% of Canadians shopped online last year, with 48% purchasing from a Canadian site, and 29% from an American business.

“The recession has fueled the trend of Canadian expansion as US retailers looking for new, easy to enter market” says Okamura, who has helped a number of top retailers with their internationalization strategies. The Canadian market is followed by the UK market in attractiveness.

To reach this new market, a US company can easily leverage its existing website with far less up-front costs than the Canadian company entering ecommerce for the first time. However, a .ca domain has advantages — the ability to geo-target the domain to Google.ca, Yahoo.ca and Bing.ca will help with rankings in those engines, and click through from Canadians that look for .ca URLs.

Third parties like FiftyOne and Canada Post’s Borderfree services also make it easier than ever for US retailers to sell to Canadians hassle-free.

Borderfree accepts the US retailer’s product catalog in XML format and determines the duty rates of commodities and whether or not the product can be imported, then sends the updated catalog back to the retailer so the necessary duties, taxes and shipping costs can be collected at time of purchase. Borderfree also handles returns. Canadian shoppers can browse the merchant directory to find Canuck-friendly e-shops like Sephora, Eddie Bauer and Crate and Barrel.

FiftyOne boasts customers like Overstock, Drugstore.com, Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom. It offers multicurrency localization, international payment and fraud management, customs clearance, parcel fulfillment and international returns. Neither shoppers nor retailer need to worry about footing surprise customs and duty.

Roughly half of the e-stores using FiftyOne apply geolocation to identify non-US visitors, showing the visitor’s country and currency with the option to continue shopping in his or her own currency, or to override and proceed as a US customer.

Another option is a “landed” business that operates in Canada with its own warehouse and customer service staff. Examples include Amazon and American Apparel. Though this eliminates any customs, duty and shipping delays, the costs are appreciably higher and the risk greater. For example, it requires careful inventory planning with foresight into what Canadians want to buy and how much of it you think you can sell.

Regardless of which method used, expanding into Canada could account for 10% of your revenues, according to Forrester. I believe with a good Canadian awareness campaign, a Canadian-friendly site and geo-targeting to Canadian search engines, 5% of total revenues is a realistic figure to shoot for.

Leveraging pay per click is one way to get the word out…

For Canadian Retailers

Offering a cross-channel shopping experience can:

• Bolster customer loyalty and satisfaction
• Expand reach beyond urban centers
• Introduce the brand to new customers through search
• Liquidate clearance merchandise leaving more retail space for regular price merchandise
• Provide a way to monetize the corporate website

But many Canadian retailers are not as bullish on the Canadian ecommerce market as their neighbors to the South. The costs of building an ecommerce site can be as much for a Canadian e-tailer as an American, and for a market less than 1/10th the size of the US it’s harder to make the project profitable. Another problem is it’s difficult to make solid business decisions with the lack of Canadian specific data on market size and conversion rates.

The fact that some of the largest Canadian brands have recently backed out of ecommerce only adds to the anxiety, though retailers like Lululemon are realizing ecommerce success. Indigo Books enjoyed 17% growth in 2008, The Shopping Channel 9.5% and Mountain Equipment Co-Op 15% according to Internet Retailer.

However, Canadian retailers must consider that online retail is still growing faster than brick-and-mortar sales. B2C ecommerce will enjoy a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.6% according to eMarketer’s projections, and US retailers are well aware of the opportunity and are moving fast.

“Increased competition is forcing Canadian retailers to give their websites a closer look,” says Okamura.

Bonus: Random Characteristics of Canadian e-Consumers

• The catalog industry was never as big in Canada as it was in the US (13,000+ US catalogers vs. 150 in Canada). Much of ecommerce’s early success in the US was the online channel made available to catalog shoppers. In Canada, it’s tech-savvy 25-34 year olds with the highest propensity to buy online (Visa Canada / Yahoo) vs. the high discretionary income “Boomer” generation that fueled ecommerce adoption in the US.

• Close to half of all Canadians say they are shopping online because they are finding better deals than in stores.

• Compared to their American counterparts, Canadians have been historically quicker to adopt debit cards, high-speed Internet, online banking and online bill-pay. One of the reasons why online banking took off faster than in the US was Canadian banks made online bill payment free (US banks charged up to $5 per month), bundling the functionality into the checking account.

• Canadians trust their financial institutions much more than retailers. According to Forrester Research, the number one reason Canadians avoid online shopping is the fear of sharing personal financial information over the Internet. A June, 2009 PayPal survey found that 51% of Canadians feel anxious about purchasing online. 40% feel anxiety due to a lack of confidence in the merchant’s security, compared to only 27% of American shoppers.

• Alternative payments like PayPal and online debit may attract these wary shoppers. A June, 2009 study by Visa Canada found 59% of Canadians are interested in a debit card that allows them to purchase online directly from their bank account, 74% among the 18-24 set.

• Canadians are most interested in buying books, CDs, DVDs, apparel, software, travel and entertainment/tickets.

And finally, here are some tips for making your site Canadian-friendly:

Subscribers: can’t see video? View this post on the Web.

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Original post by Linda Bustos

Unfortunately, the holiday season’s higher sales often precede high levels of returned merchandise in January. Not a great way to start the New Year. But there is a silver lining, you can glean some benefit from the return if collect the reasons for return from your customers. You may already have a policy where you always ask customers the reason for return for in-store purchases. If so, you’re sitting on a goldmine of information that can improve your product pages online.

Whether you process returns from in-store or online purchases, pass these reasons on to your Web content team. Just like the presence of negative reviews, sharing reasons for return on your site helps build trust with the consumer (shows you’re open and have nothing to hide, helps the customer make an informed purchase decision). You can work the reasons for return into product description copy or even include a separate section on the product page. One example is Shoeline’s Return-O-Meter, but you can also just list them in text format like customer reviews.

Taking this one step further, you can post reasons for return in a Question and Answer tool, with your store staff commenting on alternative products (with links) or other advice such as “this brand fits snug, so try a size larger.”

Example:

“Reason for return: Brought the desk home and it was not the right white for our daughter’s room. Drawers also a bit too small.”

Staff tip: “This desk is a very creamy white (a bit of a yellow tint) and may not look right if your walls are white-white or the decor has bluish white or grayish white in it. Looks good in rooms with pink, yellow, orange and other warm tones. The drawers are 8×12×6″ which holds items like crayons, CDs, jewelry and small toys but may not be suitable for larger toys or books.”

Using a cross-sell strategy like Amazon’s What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item? feature can direct customers who “pass” on the item to similar products from your store that might better suit their needs:

The more trust you can build with future customers, the better chance they will favor your business and make many happy returns to your site. Being open about the reasons for return saves yourself for accepting returns in the future — customers can make more informed purchase decisions.

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Original post by Linda Bustos

Back when I was hostessing at a casual dining restaurant, we were always told to “romance the features” after seating our guests. This meant saying a thing or two about the monthly featured items or the daily feature. For example, our cedar planked salmon was “so soft you don’t even need teeth to eat it.”

I’ve shared my shoe store war stories here before, but that was another trick up my sleeve when selling shoes. I made sure I always had something unique or positive to say about the shoe in the customer’s hand. If I didn’t have anything good to say about it, I would steer her to something that did have a selling feature to “romance.” Did you know that you can throw your canvas Keds in the washing machine?

Most product descriptions do not sell at all. They’re impersonal. They say nothing about why someone should buy something, only what they would be buying. They don’t tell customers why they are going to love this product and wonder how they ever lived without it, how they can use it for so much more than a typical [widget], how this model’s unique features make it the best choice.

But occasionally I come across some very well written descriptions that give me a glimmer of hope for online retail. I’d like to share a few with you.

Typical product description:

Indie Dress

The Indie Dress features a cross-over neckline and empire bodice. Made from 18.5 micron New Zealand merino wool. Side slash pockets. Relaxed Hood. Machine washable. By Ibex.

Yawn.

Product description with personality (by Title Nine):

Indie Dress

Free yourself from fussy when you pull on the Indie. Cross-over neckline and empire bodice move easily from well-dressed to “WOW,” but never compromises on easy care and comfort. Made of the finest blend of merino wool from only the best and happiest New Zealand sheep. 18.5 micron means wool so fine that there’s zero itch. Side slash pockets, relaxed hood. Machine washable. By Ibex.

Typical product description

Iceman Crewneck Sweater

The Iceman crewneck sweater 100% Cashmoore® and great for casual or dressed-up occasions. Includes shark tooth detail at neck, color blocking on raglan sleeves and spandex binding at cuffs.

Hip product description (HornyToad.com)

Iceman Crew

For the guy who cares but doesn’t want to work too hard to look good, the low-key Iceman crew has just enough spice in the sleeve stripes to inspire confidence without distraction. Guaranteed chill defying, the Iceman is comfortable, made from our gift-to-mankind, soft Cashmoore®. Easy-does-it details: shark’s tooth detail at crew neck, color blocking on raglan sleeves and spandex binding at cuffs. For chillin’.

Typical Yawnworthy Product Description

Moosejaw Latika Jacket

100% polyester, 360g fleece makes this jacket much warmer than your typical fleece. Wear it on the hills or on the town. Poly/spandex overlays with knit and woven polyester lining. Machine washable. Standard fit.

Creative and funny product description

Moosejaw Latika Jacket

The Latika was recently named The World’s Best Fleece Jacket Ever by my sister. That’s actually true. Here are some reasons the Latika is so awesome and you should for sure read this before deciding which jacket to get because, forgetting all the dumb stuff I wrote below, the features on the Latika happen to be incredibly compelling. Here we go:

* Super warm thanks to plush 360g fleece and a snug hem cinch cord.
* My guess is that no human person will know how 360g compares to other jackets. So, please just know that it’s way warmer than your typical fleece.
* Luxuriously fully lined with a soft knit body and silky woven arms to make it easy to get on.
* Everyone likes the word Luxuriously. I like the words elegant, nuance and onslaught too but those words have nothing to do with the Latika.
* Two cozy hand pockets which is perfect for everyone looking for two cozy hand pockets, and who isn’t these days?
* Hidden forearm pocket perfect for stashing your stashworthy stuff.
* I don’t like what I wrote in number 5 above. Please don’t reread it.
* Ultra Standard Fit. That means you don’t have to be the most fit climber in the world to wear it. You can still tell people you’re a climber though.
* I thought I made up the phrase Ultra Standard but I just looked it up and I didn’t make it up.
* Machine washable so you can wear it for full-on mud wrestling on Monday and then Ladies Night on Tuesday.
* Made of the highest quality materials – 100% polyester fleece, poly/spandex overlays, knitted and woven polyester lining and YKK zipper.
* If you get a Latika we’re willing to guarantee that either your life or my life will be better.

How to Improve Your Product Descriptions

Check out a few of your product descriptions – do they reflect your brand promise? Are they interesting or vanilla? Would you buy this product based on the description?

If you need some inspiration, check out Title Nine, Horny Toad and Moosejaw’s online stores. They’ve got some good content. Also look at customer reviews from your site and your competitors.

Want to know the conversion impact of improving your product descriptions? Run your new and old descriptions concurrently with an A/B split test.

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Original post by Linda Bustos

Econsultancy recently announced the winners of its 2009 Innovation Awards. You have to “see” the winner in the ecommerce category – Glassesdirect.co.uk

Glasses Direct wins for its use of augmented reality tool that allows you to “try on” glasses virtually, and I have to say it looks pretty good, check it out: (email and RSS subscribers, if you can’t see the video, click here).

Not only do augmented reality tools help customers make a more confident decision (and improve conversion rates), they also reduce returned merchandise by reducing the risk of ordering something that won’t look good in real life.

Rich Relevance has a similar product for apparel called “Fashionista” which it demonstrated at the Shop.org Summit in Las Vegas. There’s no doubt Fashionista is an amazing technology and many of the younger female set will find this fun. But superimposing a 2-Dimensional outfit is not the same as trying on a garment — I don’t think augmented reality for apparel will have the same impact on conversion and return rates.

Augmented reality tools are one more stop in the never-ending quest to make online shopping more like offline, and offline shopping more like online.

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Original post by Linda Bustos

It’s Black Friday and the 2009 holiday season is “officially” underway. Retailers are hoping for higher online sales, but paradoxically, will most likely see higher-than-average rates of cart abandonment. SeeWhy, a company that tracks shopping cart abandonment rates, reports the average across industries in October 2009 was 71%).

But if your abandonment rate is 71%, it doesn’t mean you’ve lost 71% for good.

We know that there’s no one reason a cart is abandoned. Forrester Research surveyed men and women who shop online and ranked the following reasons:

1. Sticker shock (tax and shipping charges revealed in cart too high)
2. Customer not ready to purchase
3. Comparison shopping
4. Second thoughts on price
5. Just wanted to save for later

(If you’re an email subscriber with images off, please turn them on to see the survey graph).

Whether the customer is comparison shopping, “sleeping on” the decision or using you cart as a lazy man’s (or woman’s) wish list (and who can blame them when most wish lists require account registration), it pays to hold the cart contents. An abandoned cart does not mean a lost sale. A ScanAlert study found 28% of shoppers took longer than a day to convert, and 14% longer than a week. Granted, the study is 5 years old, but decision making doesn’t necessarily change because ecommerce websites have advanced. The point is many conversions happen after 2 or more days or visits. And to complicate matters, many convert in a subsequent reporting period – a November visit converts in December, but is not accounted for in the November conversion report.

Support multi-session shoppers

Make sure you’re leaving persistent cookies for Santa customers that hold contents in the cart, and you’ll want to set these cookies to hang around for at least 30 days. You’ll have a better chance of converting customers who take longer to make their decision and who expect to find their carts in tact when they return to your site.

Holding a cart’s contents across sessions – sounds like a no-brainer, right? In 2007, the E-tailing Group found that 29% of top online retailers did not use persistent shopping carts. Has that number improved in 2 short years? I did a quick test on 50 of the Internet Retailer Hot 100 and 7 did not hold my cart overnight, or 14%. Still, that’s 14% too many!

One feature that I really appreciated as a customer was seeing the quantity or dollar amount of items in the cart, clearly. When returning to the site, I want to know without digging that my cart was saved.

Track your visits to purchase and days to purchase

Google Analytics’ Avinash Kaushik explains how you can and why you should measure days to purchase and visits to purchase in your Web analytics tool. (Too bad Google Analytics’ Benchmarks feature, which if you opt in can give you benchmarks for sites in your category/industry doesn’t track those metrics though it will show you benchmarks for visits, bounce rates, page views, average time on site, page views per visit and percent new visits). Santa Avinash, benchmarked days and visits to purchase are on our Christmas 2010 Google Analytics wish list.

Measure customer behavior across time periods

Another tip is to measure your customer behavior including repeat visits and conversions across reporting periods. Longer cookie durations help you track that accurately. MineThatData’s Kevin Hillstrom shares his tips on how to measure conversion rates across time on his blog.

The takeaway

To get the best picture of what your true holiday performance is, you need to factor in customer behavior, provide the usability to support multi-session shoppers (persistent cookies) and understand what metrics to track and how to track them.

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Original post by Linda Bustos

One of the tips I shared in my interview with Shawna Fennell of eComExperts last week was to position yourself as a one-stop-shop this Christmas to boost your AOV (Average Order Value). The idea is to sell the customer on the idea that he or she can shop for everyone on the Christmas list (or as many as possible) in your store. The problem is not everyone has figured out what gifts they should get – a lot need some help. Gift finders by gender, age, recipient type and interests are a great help to customers, and can certainly help convert browsers into satisfied (and relieved) buyers.

Gift finders can be interactive tools (think of a stepped-survey or wizard) or simply special categories like “Gifts for Him” or “Gifts for Her.”

Toys R Us stepped gift finder

Target.com Gift Categories

Most sites that offer these do a great job showing them off on home pages and in navigation menus, but they fail to carry the message through to the cart summary. Instead of a vanilla “Continue Shopping” link, why not link back to gifting tools? Remind your customer about your one-stop value proposition!

Test

Testing Hypothesis: Including a call-to-action for the gift finder or gift categories in the cart summary will remind customers to keep shopping for other gifts.

I’ve never seen this tactic in practice, so let’s mock up what a test could look like for Target.com:

Control: Target’s actual cart summary page

Treatment A: Continue Shopping link below item details

Treatment B: Continue Shopping links above item details

Treatment C: Link to gift finder (button) with text “Gifts for everyone on your list!”

Images too small? Quick tip: hit CTRL+ to zoom to enlarge the images a bit…

What to measure?

To determine success, don’t just measure conversion rate improvement. Track clicks on the each call-to-action, items per sale, average order value and profit per sale.

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Original post by Linda Bustos

This week I had the pleasure of sitting down (virtually) with Shawna Fennell of One Choice for Your Store for an interview on her Webmaster Radio show, Ecom Experts titled Holiday Preparations for Online Retailers (on-demand link).

One of the questions Shawna asked was What should retailers be doing during the holiday season now that it’s too late to be working on the site or strategy? This post is a recap of what I believe retailers should be doing now to really be “in the game” rather than a benchwarmer this season.

Monitor and Optimize Performance

Even the largest, most famous online stores have gone down on Black Friday and other peak traffic days, or at least slowed down significantly. We know that page load speed affects whether a person is going to stick around on your site. It is the “first impressions” that count, because if your first page loads slow, the customer expects the rest of the experience to be painful. This affects your bounce and abandonment rates and ultimately your conversion rates.

If you’ve seen Forrester Research and Akamai’s latest report, almost half of broadband shoppers expect your pages to load in 2 seconds or less, and top retailers are setting the bar at sub-second loads.

While your site may not crash, other performance problems like slower page loads often fly under the radar because you’re still making more sales than the rest of the year. But when these performance problems happen, you have no way to quantify the sales you could have made if your site was tip-top.

You need to be aware that performance typically suffers most in the checkout. Your payment gateway may be very slow, or your tax and shipping tables live on other servers or on another website. So it’s really important that you know what to monitor. And don’t give yourself a false sense of security by testing only your home page.

Sometimes your performance takes a hit because IT and marketing haven’t been communicating. So marketing deploys a major midnight madness sale by email – and the site isn’t prepared. Did you know our next webinar is on IT-marketing relations in January? (/End shameless plug for upcoming webinar).

There are lots of services that can help you with performance monitoring like Akamai, Gomez and Keynote. Our site performance webinar recap is full of tips you can do to reduce your load.

Use Your Web Analytics

How ridiculous would it be for a football team to only bring in a coach at the end of the season, and all the coach does is drop off a video tape of all the playoff games and says: “Here you go.” That would be insane but it’s how a lot of online retailers are doing web analytics. They wait until the season is over to see what happened, rather than using that data to make better decisions while the games are on. (This is especially sad when the web analyst does nothing but send reports without any analysis or actionable insights).

Perhaps it’s because web analytics tools spit out so much data – ecommerce managers are not sure what to care about. I have 3 suggestions to get you thinking:

1. Use your site overlay reports. These can show you where people are clicking, right now, this season, every day. Which offers and calls to action are working? Which navigation categories are clicked most? Gifts? Sale? Top rated? New arrivals? Brands? These are all clues to what your customers are interested in, and this can give you ideas of what to promote more heavily on your home page.

2. Look for high bounce rate pages. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors that abandon your site in under 5 or 10 seconds (depending on your analytics tool). Are the top bounce pages different than the rest of the year? Is there a problem you were unaware of? For example, you may discover that a paid search ad for Tickle Me Elmo uses the wrong destination URL and is sending traffic to Tickle Me Cookie Monster and it’s bleeding money ten times faster than it did during the rest of the year.

3. Segment your traffic sources. Your site conversion rate may be 4%, but look under the hood you may discover your pay-per-click campaign converts at 0.5%, your email at 20% and your affiliates at 10%. You may take that money from your PPC campaign and turn off underperforming ad groups, and instead reach out to your top performing affiliates and offer higher commissions to promote you more heavily.

4. Boost your intelligence. Google Analytics has a new feature called Intelligence (rolling out in Beta and not available to all markets yet). Intelligence has a feature that sends you an alert when there’s a sudden statistically significant increase or dropoff in traffic, conversion or any metric you’re tracking. Avinash Kaushik has a nice explanation of Google Analytics’ new intelligent features.

Keep Testing

You may be in a code freeze, but this winter’s no time for a testing freeze. Shopping behavior is different during the holidays. The shopper’s purchase role is geared to others, and there’s more at stake. Customers may be more interested in customer reviews when buying for someone of the opposite gender or a different age group. Or, they might be on tight budgets and are more persuaded by your sales promotions than at other times. You really can’t rely on headline and offer tests you did in May.

You can also take advantage of the high traffic volume which means shorter test durations.

We discussed a lot more in the 35 minute interview, please check it out if you haven’t had the chance. There are a few other ecommerce episodes you can listen to, and watch out for more ecommerce tips from Shawna and her ecommerce expert guests.

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• The Importance of Site Performance
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Original post by Linda Bustos

Site Performance: The Need for Speed

In a 2006 study on site abandonment (.pdf) conducted by Jupiter Research on behalf of Akamai, 28% of online shoppers claimed they would not wait longer than 4 seconds for a page to load before leaving a site. This equated to 33% of broadband customers and 19% of dialup. Though broadband customers had higher expectations for page load speed, even 45% of dialup users were unwilling to wait more than 6 seconds for a page to load.

Online power shoppers who spend more than $1500 online are more likely to demand fast loading pages (55% vs. 40% of shoppers who spend under $1500 per year).

Speed’s Impact on Loyalty – Online and Offline

Faster sites attract more repeat visitors and customers. 64% of dissatisfied online shoppers said they were less likely to visit a slow retailer again, and 62% were less likely to purchase from the site again. 48% would purchase from a competitor, 28% would hold a negative perception of the company, 27% would tell a friend about the bad experience and 16% reported they would be less likely to visit a retailer’s offline store after a bad online experience.

For all these reasons, Jupiter and Akamai concluded you should shoot for a 4 second or less page load.

It’s 2009 – What’s Changed?

Akamai teamed up with Forrester Research earlier this year for a follow up study and found online shoppers have even higher expectation for web performance — and poor performance has an even bigger impact on customer loyalty. For example, nearly half of consumers do not want to wait longer than 2 seconds for a page to load.

Margaret Rivera of Akamai will be joining us live tomorrow (November 4, 2009) 9am PST/12pm EST to share the results of this research along with tips on how to improve performance. You can sign up to attend the webinar, and all registrants who attend the live session will receive a complementary copy of the research.

How Do Online Retailers Currently Stack Up?

In 2008, Internet Retailer conducted a retailer survey and found:

• 68% of retailers’ home pages load in under 3 seconds
• 43% load in less than 2 seconds
• 81.8% load in 30 seconds or less for dialup users, with 50.6% under 15 seconds
• 43.3% say the use of video, animation and AJAX has hurt site performance

Do Online Retailers Monitor Performance?

• 77.3% monitor site responsiveness
• 9.1% engage in load balancing testing and content validity
• 4.5% measure application behavior

What Do Online Retailers Measure?

• 73% measure site performance’s impact in terms of lost revenue
• 59% measure lost traffic
• 43% measure the increase in call center and email traffic
• 27% measure the increase in negative customer reviews
• 21% measure the impact on customer satisfaction ratings
• 40% benchmark their performance against competitors

What Do Retailers Test?

• 37% test home and product pages consistently using real-time reporting tools (26% test daily, 19% test weekly or monthly)
• 84% test various screen resolutions
• 83% test across different browsers and operating systems
• 16% test performance from different geographic locations or different times of day
• 16% record and replay specific user transactions
• 13% test performance of mobile applications
• 53% conduct testing before the holiday season

The Internet Retailer article also suggest retailers retailers should test the performance of new page treatments (including A/B testing) and custom applications they add to their ecommerce platform or web hosting service before full roll out. It reminds us that the features and functions may work fine in the environment in which they were built (design and development firms having top of the line systems), but differently when installed on the retailer’s platform.

How Do You Measure Up and How Can You Improve?

Please join us for tomorrow’s webinar and learn how you can ensure a fast and consistent user experience. Bring your questions!

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Original post by Linda Bustos

Unless you can afford free overnight shipping to holiday shoppers, you need a plan for merchandising your e-store for that period between the shipping cutoff date and Christmas Day. Consider applying the following ideas to your website and email campaigns to keep the register ringing like sleigh bells:

Promote Electronic Gift Cards

• Remind customers it’s never too late to send an electronic gift card prominently on the home page, horizontal navigation, email campaigns, product page cross-sells etc
• In 2007, Musician’s Friend provided a cash-back incentive for purchasing an e-gift certificate with a “$20 ComeBack Cash in the New Year” offer. Buy a gift certificate of $100 or more and receive a $20 gift card to use before February 15, 2008.

Switch Gears to Clearance

Last year we saw post-Christmas sales begin before Santa had a chance to round up his reindeer. Customers may be anticipating retailers to do the same this year, so consider the timing of your post-holiday markdowns and the deadlines for your banner/home page design creative.

Show Off What’s New

Some retailers opt to forget the holidays and focus on new (regular priced) arrivals:

Ring In the New Year

If you sell relevant products, why not switch gears to the New Year? (Think party supplies, outfits and New Year resolutions.)

Belated Gift Notifications

CompUSA and Omaha Steaks have offered to send e-gift announcements to gift recipients to let them know they were not forgotten, their gift is on the way but will arrive after Christmas.

Keep Your Shipping Cutoff Dates Up

Finally, don’t remove your shipping cutoff dates even after the deadline has passed. Your customers are not psychic and will want to find this information before deciding to continue shopping with you. Make it easy. You may lose the gifting sale but you may keep the customer on your site or drive them in-store.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Last-Minute Holiday Marketing Tactics for Online Retailers
• Tips for Showing Holiday Shipping Deadlines
• $8 Billion in Unredeemed Gift Cards a Win-Win for Retailers?
• In-Store Pickup Tips for Multichannel Retailers
• Optimizing Your E-Store for Last Minute Shoppers

Original post by Linda Bustos

One of the “quick wins” I recommend to retailers in improving their conversion rates by reducing cart abandonment is to explain what the credit card security code is, why it’s asked for and where to find it. We take it for granted that many people don’t know the “security code” or CV͞ (card verification value) asked for in the checkout process can be found on the backside of their credit cards. CVV2 is used to reduce fraud for card-not-present transactions. (Not all online retailers require the CVV2 so this tip only applies to retailers who do).

Often the checkout form looks like this, with no explanation of what the security code is, where to find it and why it is asked for:

I usually suggest using a link that says “What is this?” with more information in a mouseover. I recently spotted AT&T doing one better — showing exactly where to find the number using an image:

Remember that different cards have different CVV2 locations, so mention that.

This tactic could easily be saving AT&T millions in sales each year. Why don’t you try it?

Another reason customers may hesitate to provide the CVV2 code is the erroneous belief that they are actually risking their personal information more by providing the super-secret code. They feel like you’re not just asking for an email address but a password too!

Of course, the fact you’re asking for the CVV2 code is proof you value their security – you’re preventing anyone who’s stolen their card number from making a fraudulent purchase. But customers don’t see it that way. Reassure them that the CVV2 code is NOT stored in a database and is only used in card-not-present transactions for preventing fraud.

These 2 point-of-action assurances (showing the CV͞ visually and reassuring CV͞ is not stored in a database) should have a positive influence on your conversion rate if you are required to ask this information from customers.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Losing Customers At The Register: 12 Checkout Blunders
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• Conversion Optimization: When & Where to Address Customer Anxiety
• Dodging Dishonest Customer Chargebacks
• Required Registration: Top Etailers’ Favorite Usability Mistake

Original post by Linda Bustos

I came across a website (that will remain nameless) while searching for a good tasting Swiss-water decaf coffee. (Does one exist? Please advise in the comments!) I noticed on the product page that it had perhaps the world’s tiniest Buy button.

They Say Bigger Is Better

Many conversion optimization cheerleaders who suggest larger buttons convert better, and some tests show even different colors can perform better. Marketing Sherpa credits cart button design as one of 7 tweaks that helped Newegg.com boost online sales by 30%.

#7. Bigger, flashier cart button

“It used to be just a cart with a little arrow. It wasn’t big enough. People’s eyes weren’t going there, so we made it big, bold and very exciting to look at,” said Stuart (Wallock, Marketing Director of NewEgg.com). The team a/b tested several different cart icons before picking the winner, so go check it out.

This is the evolution of NewEgg’s cart icon design:

Wallock mentions several different cart buttons were A/B tested in the last redesign – we’re not sure if they were different colors and different sizes, but the “winning” icon is not a relatively large button compared to other retailers’:

(From our collection of shopping cart buttons)

Testing Different Designs

Back to our decaf coffee product page. I mocked up some alternative pages which hypothetically could be used in split testing.

Here the buttons are bigger – easier to read. But the Continue Shopping button is larger than the Add to Cart. Probably not the best design.

Here’s an alternate version with the button text “Buy.” This would make a good split test to determine which button text converts higher (with the same button design).

Personally I prefer a design like this – a large, easy to read and well-positioned Buy or Add to Cart button, with a less prominent text link back to shopping.

But maybe the white button doesn’t stand out enough? We’ll throw in a sweet jelly bean red button, because some swear that red “stands out more.” Check out a couple lively discussions from people who have actually tested this at Grokdotcom here and here.

Split-Testing Resources

Google Website Optimizer makes it easy for anyone with an AdWords account to run simple split tests. GrokDotCom has compiled Google Website Optimizer – 7 Free Resources To Get Started including a downloadable guide and white paper, podcast and webinar archive on the subject of A/B split testing with Google Website Optimizer. They even developed a WordPress Plug-In for it.

Google also has its own training video
“>here.

This post was originally published in February 2008 and was selected as part of our current “Best Of” series.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Call To Action Buttons – Does Size Matter?
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Original post by Linda Bustos

A couple weeks ago, Internet Retailer announced that manufacturers selling direct to consumer is the fastest growing online retail category in its Top 500 Guide. Gearing up for our next webinar about direct to consumer retailing with Sally McKenzie, we mentioned some benefits and drawbacks of manufacturers selling direct-to-consumer online. Today I want to focus on how manufacturers can overcome the challenges of competing with retail partners online, and leverage the strengths of a branded site.

Keep in mind, there are 4 types of manufacturers who sell direct to consumers online, those with:

1. No retail stores, sell only through retail partners (e.g. Bose)
2. Retail stores and retail partners (e.g. Sony Store)
3. Retail stores, no retail partners (e.g. American Apparel)
4. No retail stores or retail partners, only available online/phone (like Dell used to)

This post focuses on the first 2 — manufacturers who compete with retail partners (who may also be restricted in what/how they can sell online due to channel conflict).

Why do manufacturers lose consumer sales to retail partners?

Manufacturers that sell through retail partners may lose sales to retail partners because of any of the following:

• Customer unaware the brand has an online store
• Customer experience with the branded store has been poor, even if the site is much improved today
• Customer experience with manufacturer sites in general has been poor, customer goes directly to retailer e-store
• Retailer e-store has better features and functionality such as comparison tools, product images or simpler checkout
• Customer wants to pick up in-store, whether to physically experience the product before purchase, to save time or shipping costs, for lower price/store promotion, to use a store coupon or to earn store loyalty points

How can the manufacturer overcome these challenges?

Awareness: Spread the word

Before you say “thank you, Captain Obvious,” hear me out. Awareness of your online store is important. Don’t be afraid to bid on your own branded terms in paid search. Put your URL on packaging (although this may upset some retail partners). Put your store URL on all catalogs, direct mail, TV and print advertising. For manufacturers who run their stores as separate URLs, subdomains or subfolders, choose a URL that clearly communicates the site is transactional, and redirect to your existing store if necessary.

Awareness: Drive new traffic through an affiliate program

Many manufacturers will not compete on price with retail partners, and will sell at full MSRP (manufacturer suggested retail price). While this may reduce your competitiveness, your margins will not suffer. Fatter margins can be passed off to affiliate partners who will promote your products on their popular product review blogs, shopping portals, newsletters or other web sites.

Awareness: SEO your content, and SEO some more

Branded sites have the search engine ranking advantage of a keyword-relevant domain name, but often rank lower than retail partners when attention isn’t paid to title tags, keyword-rich product descriptions, SEO friendly customer review content or worse, the site is built in full Flash without SEO.

I always tell retailers to write their own product descriptions and not use the stock manufacturer description. I would suggest to manufacturers to also write custom content for their web stores, and not use the same as is distributed to other retailers and affiliates.

Customer experience: Content

Though some customers prefer to buy from a retailer (whether online or offline), many will check out your site for more detailed product information to research before purchase. It helps to have better content than your retail partners to meet their initial expectation of good information on your site such as product videos, 360 degree imaging, downloadable manuals and in-depth product descriptions can attract customers.

Persuasion: Value propositions and assurances

If the content on your site “sells” the customer on the product, you win even if the purchase happens through a retail partner. But converting that customer on the branded site has several advantages such as higher margin, the collection of customer data and the ability to re-market to that customer. The secrets to converting the customer lie in your value proposition(s) and point-of-action assurances.

Consider Apple.com. You can buy an iPod from any electronics retailer, but only Apple throws in free engraving:

Plus it beats or at least matches any other retailer’s shipping offer - ships free, within 24 hours.

Point-of-action assurances include size charts, shipping arrival calculators, pre-checkout shipping and tax calculators, links to return policies, guarantees, security seals and so on.

Added value: Personalized products

Speaking of personalization, manufacturers have the unique ability to offer value-added services like build your custom product that retailers don’t. Some brands already doing this include Sigg water bottles (though Cafepress), Flip video recorders, Etnies shoes and Timbuk2 bags.

Retailers like Etnies already allow customers to share their custom creations with friends via email, but how much better to share with your social network in this Web 2.0 times by posting the image of the custom product to Twitpic, Facebook or a personal blog?

For example, Shutterfly allows its customers to create custom photography books and embed it on any website:

Customer service: Help them find the product in-store

Sometimes product is out of stock on your site, or you may only sell that SKU through retail partners. Patagonia has the ability to check its partners’ store inventory and redirect the customer to the retailer for purchase which is win-win-win for customer, manufacturer and retail partner.

While you don’t claim the sale yourself, you’re still putting money in your pocket and providing a good customer experience.

If you’re interested in ecommerce for the manufacturing industry, you don’t want to miss our webinar next week From Manufacturer to Retailer: Expanding Your Brand through Ecommerce. We’ll be covering:

• Blending brand form and function: making the transition to interactive, direct marketing
• Striking the balance between direct selling and promoting retail partners
• Assorting and pricing for ecommerce
• Making solid ecommerce technology and infrastructure choices
• Resource and organizational planning for success

It happens Tuesday, August 25, 2009 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT. Sign up today!

You may also like these similar posts:

• Manufacturers: Fastest Growing Merchant Category on I𔉄
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• Circuit City Plugs Into Cross-Channel Retailing

Original post by Linda Bustos