Category

Conversion

Fewer than 5% of visitors to an ecommerce site typically convert to customers. In this Conversion category, we offer insights to increase that percentage. Our expert contributors address ratings and reviews, social proof, site search, product page enhancements, product descriptions, checkout options, live chat, and much more — anything to help close online sales.

Analytics & Data | Checkout Tactics | Customer Retention | Customer Service | Photography & Video | Product Pages

Checkout Tactics
Secure Checkout Most Important in Attracting New Customers

November 19, 2008 • Armando Roggio

A newly released consumer survey from Harris Interactive, a research firm, and Volusion, a hosted shopping cart company, suggests that payment security is—not surprisingly—a top issue for online shoppers. The survey asked more than 2,400 online shoppers aged 18 or older what factors in...
Conversion
Conversion Review: Coffee Purveyor Needs Clear Purchase Path

November 17, 2008 • Alan Cox

JL Hufford is a gourmet coffee company that started life with a small café in Lafayette, IN. The company went online six years ago and now boasts over 400 different specialty beverage blends as well as a wide range of “coffee lifestyle” products. In this conversion review, I will evalu...
Conversion
Direct Traffic is Better Than Google Traffic

November 14, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Not all web traffic is equal and understanding the value of direct traffic can help online retailers hone their marketing. “Direct traffic” is web traffic you get from people who already know about your website or store. They either click a bookmark to come to your site or type your si...
Conversion
Online Retailers Want More Web Traffic

November 12, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Preliminary results from a new Practical eCommerce survey showed that at least 63 percent of respondents thought traffic generation was a big challenge, and more than 31 percent saw it as their biggest challenge. Practical eCommerce launched the first of a series of reader surveys on N...
Conversion
Automated Chat Captures Prospects After They Leave A Site

November 3, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

UpSellit’s SMARTagent promises to automatically bring shoppers back to your site and close potential sales. It’s part user-engaged action, part automated chat, and part sales-floor closer. UpSellit CTO and president Chris Wampler said that e-retailers who add it to their sites could exp...
Conversion
Interactive Chat Improves Sales, Customer Service

October 30, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Memorysuppliers.com offers more than just electronic-device memory cards. It also offers one-to-one, 24-hour-a-day chat. With four people dedicated to chat and email responses, Memorysuppliers.com is one of thousands of ecommerce companies adding chat to its marketing and customer se...
Conversion
Online Reputation Management: Get Pro-Active

October 22, 2008 • Lisa Wehr

A wise entrepreneur once said that “you can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.” While computers weren’t around when Henry Ford coined the phrase, his words still resonate today. With billions of people online—and probably the same number of bloggers and social media part...
Customer Retention
Use Comparison Shopping Sites To Boost Leads

October 21, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Savvy online retailers can attract thrifty customers this holiday season with a sound comparison shopping strategy, but those merchants must be careful not to create a lot of extra work, damage their reputation, or waste money. Comparison shopping sites like Shopping.com, Bizrate.com, ...
Conversion
Trigger-Based Email Marketing Improves Sales and Customer Experience

October 2, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

Trigger marketing is the next step for the critical ecommerce function of automated email communications. While traditional automated emails follow newsletter sign-ups and orders, trigger marketing sends emails for other events such as particular search patterns, customer birthdays, hol...
Photography & Video
Video Boosts Sales for Online Retailers

October 1, 2008 • Armando Roggio

At brick-and-mortar retailers, shoppers can stroll the isles, handle items, speak to clerks, and receive well placed merchandising messages. It’s not that easy for ecommerce merchants. They must find new and inventive ways to engage and convert customers; using well written and persuasi...
Conversion
Web Widgets Come Of Age For Ecommerce Sites

September 30, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

For executives like Braden Hoeppner, director of web sales for optical store Coastalcontacts.com, today’s web widgets are a fast and easy way to improve customer service and create interest. Thanks to the widget behind Coastalcontacts.com’s “Tell a friend” link, “we got more features t...
Conversion
Christmas Is Coming: Six Quick Online Marketing Tips

September 23, 2008 • Lisa Wehr

Christmas is coming. And now is the time for you to take a hard look at your current search engine marketing campaigns. With billions of dollars up for grabs, your online marketing needs to be well-planned, well-executed, and well-optimized. Be Ready When Shoppers Come Calling Here ar...
Conversion
Landing Pages: Five Pointers to Boost Conversions

September 11, 2008 • Lee Goldberg

Website traffic is up. Your pay-per-click (PPC) ads are receiving traffic, and you’re reaching your monthly budget. Sounds like your paid search campaign is working well, right? Well, not necessarily. If you’re like most Internet advertisers, you’re not investing in a paid search campa...
Conversion
Employing Social Media

September 3, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

This job posting arrived in my email inbox yesterday: “Responsibilities: Create and maintain MySpace, Live Spaces, Facebook, Bebo, MOG, Twitter, Loopt, Wikipedia, and other profiles; gather content for social profiles; and report on the effectiveness of social site placement.” Pay is u...
Conversion
Expert Reviews Usability Of Practicalecommerce.com

August 21, 2008 • Alan Cox

Practical eCommerce is a website with the purpose of providing down-to-earth advice to help smaller businesses succeed online. Advice comes in the form of easy to follow articles, podcasts and regular newsletters as well as blogs that allow readers to communicate with each other. The b...
Conversion
Conversion: Seven Variables That Affect Sales

August 18, 2008 • Lisa Wehr

Most online merchants want to increase sales, grow their business and increase profits, but few know the secrets to doing so. For many merchants, the dollar amount of a sale is the only metric they track. But successful merchants track many more variables than just sales. Here are seven...
Conversion
Offer Multiple Currencies To Facilitate International Sales

August 8, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

To cater to an international clientele, multi-currency processing is the way to go. “In addition to Internet usage growing much faster outside the U.S., countries that have the strongest purchasing power are also outside the U.S. – like those in the European Union,” says Melissa Jones...
Conversion
Decline In Dollar Creates Opportunities For U.S. Merchants

August 6, 2008 • Jennifer D. Meacham

With the U.S. dollar’s decline, buying American-based products online just got a lot cheaper for the rest of the world’s slew of Internet shoppers. Internet users outside the U.S. now account for 80 percent of the world’s online population, with rapidly developing countries experiencin...
Conversion
Do You Knol What I Knol?

July 30, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

There are many niggling questions that keep me up at night. How many different kinds of acne are there? What’s the tastiest flavor of freezie in the LA Times’ basement? Thanks to Google Knol, I can rest easy knowing that there’s an expert out there waiting to inform. I can sleep k...
Conversion
Tools To Detect Slow Load Times

July 24, 2008 • Greg Laptevsky

Don’t you hate when it takes, seemingly, forever for a website to load? Here’s why the load time of your site matters Slow load times constitute poor user experience. People are paying upwards of $50 a month for their high-speed Internet because they don’t like to wait. If you ma...
Conversion
Overcome The Disconnect With Persona Marketing

July 22, 2008 • Lisa Wehr

A major challenge for businesses today is a lack of understanding of their customers. You may know only what your online tracking reports or store receipts tell you about your customers, and not the customers themselves. You need a way to overcome this disconnect. Remember, you’re not m...
Conversion
Conversion Report Card: Weddingthings.com

July 15, 2008 • Alan Cox

WeddingThings is an established ecommerce company that sells the unique gifts wedding guests traditionally take home, as well as other wedding essentials for the perfect wedding such as invitations and bridal-party gifts. Eugene Mar, vice president of WeddingThings, wants some insigh...
Conversion
Improving Your Website’s Yahoo! Quality Index Score

July 15, 2008 • PEC Staff

Most pay-per-click advertisers are familiar by now with concept of the PPC Quality Score. Advertisers running on the major search engines may think that the variables that Google looks at are the same as those at Yahoo!. Both Google’s Quality Score and Yahoo!’s Quality Index aim to prov...
Conversion
Lessons Learned: Practicalsports.com Owner Byron Tabor

July 11, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

“Lessons Learned” is an occasional series where we ask seasoned ecommerce professionals about their mistakes and successes. For this installment, we’ve asked Byron Tabor, owner of Rooms Delivered, a company that sells sporting goods and camping equipment on its sites Practicalsports.com...
Conversion
Improving Your Yahoo! Quality Index Score

July 11, 2008 • Lee Goldberg

Most pay-per-click advertisers are familiar by now with concept of the PPC Quality Score. Advertisers running on the major search engines may think that the variables that Google looks at are the same as those at Yahoo!. Both Google’s Quality Score and Yahoo!’s Quality Index aim to prov...
Conversion
Facebook Widgets: Consider Sproutbuilder.com

July 11, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

Last year I wrote about the potential of applications – or widgets – on the Facebook platform. At the time Facebook was one of the only social media entities that had an open platform for anyone to build and share applications. Widgets are popular because users can customize their pages...
Conversion
Pay-Per-Click Bid Management Strategies

July 11, 2008 • Pamela Nelson

My philosophy on pay-per-click bid management has always been to manage each keyword’s performance in each engine individually. Knowing a keyword’s impact makes it easier to determine the next steps to take in improving the account’s overall performance. I start by looking at a current ...
Conversion
Local Search Pays Off, Naturally

June 25, 2008 • Lisa Wehr

When your customers are right around the corner, you don’t need your pay-per-click ads seen half-way around the world. For example, when you’re a Boston-based florist offering online ordering, it’s not necessary to have a top position in search results every time someone searches for “o...
Conversion
Conversion Report Card: Musicforte.com

June 23, 2008 • Alan Cox

Musicforte.com offers songbooks, sheet music and music reference materials to artists and music fans. It relies heavily on search engine optimization for sheet music sales and hosts a social network of over 40,000 musicians. Unfortunately, the site is suffering from poor conversion rat...
Conversion
Niche Marketplace Sites Are Worth Considering

June 23, 2008 • Brendan Gibbons

Ecommerce merchants looking for additional sales channels might want to consider niche auction and marketplace sites. There are many niche auction sites owing to the fact that most anyone can create one, just like most anyone can open an eBay account or start an ecommerce store. In fac...

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