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-
Conversion
Great Ideas Roundtable
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
"What customers want is information. What makes them happy during their shopping experience is finding what they want, checking out hassle-free and feeling secure with their online payments when providing their personal information. What makes them unhappy is when they can not complete ...
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Conversion
Need a Stocking Stuffer?
December 1, 2006 • Mat Greenfield
If you're anything like me, your focus dwindles over the holidays. So instead of providing you with tips that you don't have the energy to use, I thought that I'd briefly review some of the books that have shaped how I think about the web. Feel free to copy down this list and use it whe...
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Conversion
Yahoo! Search Marketing Releases New Platform
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Yahoo! Search Marketing may have been a pioneer in the pay-per-click industry, but anyone who has ever used its advertiser's interface would probably agree that it has been light-years behind Google AdWords for quite some time. The interface is cumbersome, slow and just plain difficult ...
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Conversion
Local and Geo-target Searches: How Well Do They Work?
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Refining your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising strategies to include geotargeted searches can help a business owner focus promotion efforts and get more bang for the buck. However, not all search engines are created equally when it comes to managing a localized campaign. Geo-targeting i...
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Checkout Tactics
Lowering Cart Abandonment
December 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
With shopping cart abandonment at a high level, ecommerce owners continue to look for ways to motivate shoppers to complete the checkout process. Research from Shop.org indicates shoppers abandon their cart during checkout more than 75 percent of the time. Imagine 75 percent of the gro...
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Conversion
5 Benefits of Using Feeds
November 20, 2006 • PEC Staff
What's a Feed? Feeds are a way of sharing content. When you make material from your website available for publishing on other sites, you provide them with a feed. Basically, it's a code that lets them post your articles and blogs. There are different kinds of code - XML, RSS, Atom, etc...
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Conversion
Making Liquidation Work For You
November 13, 2006 • PEC Staff
Liquidation is a very scary word for most of us. But the reason we get nervous is just because we really don't understand what liquidation is. One man who is extremely familiar with the process is Bob Nelson, president of Power Retailing, a retail consulting firm. Nelson explains liquid...
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Conversion
Accessibility – The Wheelchair Ramp to Your Website
November 13, 2006 • PEC Staff
The original creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, dreamed of an information space that was open to everyone on the planet. But like many dreams, imagination took over and the vision became layered with roadblocks that effectively brought down the shutters for many users. Acc...
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Conversion
Diversify Traffic + Cultivate Subscribers = Win Big in Ebiz
November 6, 2006 • PEC Staff
The Amazon River starts as a drop of rain falling into a tiny trickle of a stream way up in the mountains of South America. At its end, the Amazon pumps up to 300,000 cubic meters of water into the Atlantic Ocean every second during the rainy season. To build from a trickle to a torrent...
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Conversion
A Win-Win Situation: Why Affiliate Marketing Works
November 6, 2006 • PEC Staff
Affiliate marketing can be a profitable venture for you, as a merchant or affiliate. It presents you with a great opportunity to increase revenue, and build valuable business relationships. Affiliate Benefits and Resources As an affiliate partner, you're capitalizing on traffic you al...
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Conversion
A Closer Look at Microsoft adCenter
November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Microsoft adCenter was officially launched in May 2006 after a nine-month beta period in the U.S. Surprisingly, however, many business owners and advertisers are not aware of its existence, and, among those who are, some are hesitant to try it out. While Google and Yahoo! have had pay...
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Conversion
Usability Report Card: Hummerpartsclub.com
November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
In this Usability Report Card, we’re taking a look at Hummer Parts Club, an ecommerce store selling accessories for the full range of Hummers. I realize Hummers aren’t as innocuous as headsets or vinyl toys, but let’s put the politics aside and concentrate on improving an ecommerce stor...
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Conversion
Six Tips For The Holidays
November 1, 2006 • Mat Greenfield
With the holiday shopping season upon us, the size of the ecommerce pie increases significantly. Here are some tips to make sure you get your fair slice: Create seasonal special offers Applying the concept of “showing visitors what they are looking for” is always important, but perhap...
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Conversion
Sales Tax Initiative Still Initiating
November 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox
Ever since the Supreme Court of the United States put the burden back on the states to come up with a way to collect sales tax on millions of Internet sales, the Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP) has been chipping away at the monumental task of getting 50 states and more than 7,000 t...
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Conversion
Product Sourcing: Online Consignment Business
November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Consignment is a simple concept: taking other people’s products and selling them for a percentage of the sale. According to Skip McGrath, of Skipmcgrath.com, a successful eBay PowerSeller, “[Consignment selling] is the fastest-growing phenomenon on eBay.” The key to successful online co...
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Conversion
Multichannel Tools
November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Research indicates that multichannel shoppers are more valuable than customers who shop via a single sales channel, but findings by San Francisco-based firm Modalis Research Technologies show that multichannel buyers expect the company to know everything about their transaction history ...
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Conversion
Marketplaces: A Great Entry Point
November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
If a merchant is wanting to begin selling online or take a small step toward diversifying into new sales channels, one of the public marketplaces, namely eBay and Amazon, is typically a safe environment for rookies. Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, says that, as a general rule, his f...
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Conversion
Catalogs Make A Comeback
November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Ecommerce is to traditional business methods what a sci-fi cruiser is to a Model T. It’s all about technology, convenience, responsiveness—up-to-date stuff light years away fromthe sepia-toned days ofmail-order catalogs. Or so it would seem. But consider this: the humble catalog is onc...
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Conversion
Comparison Shopping Sites
November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
With millions of ready-to-buy consumers turning to shopping comparison sites, experts advise retailers to consider participating in one of the Internet's newest sales channels. Shopping comparison sites like Yahoo! Shopping, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, NexTag, Froogle, Jellyfish and other...
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Conversion
What Is Multichannel Selling?
November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Defining multichannel selling has taken a new twist in recent years, but the end result is the same for merchants — getting products to sell in the hands of potential customers. In the old days (about 10 years ago), multichannel selling consisted of two options — brick-and-mortar stores...
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Conversion
Why Your Business Should Be Blogging
October 23, 2006 • PEC Staff
Whereas letter writing was the primary method of communicating with friends, family, heads of state, and businesses 150 years ago, today's blogs have become a major means of interpersonal and mass communication. Before there was telephone or TV or Internet, people actually enjoyed lette...
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Conversion
Pay-Per-Call: A Smarter Way to Advertise
October 23, 2006 • PEC Staff
Pay-per-call has been one of the trends in online marketing recently. In fact, pay-per-performance advertising, overall, is gaining ground as more and more businesses discover the high value proposition it provides. Different search engines are incorporating this type of marketing, incl...
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Conversion
Language Translation Creates New Options
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
For English, press one. Para español, la prensa dos.” The familiarity of this everyday message shows us how companies are increasingly recognizing the need to alter their business practices to reach new demographics through multilingual communications. No speak English According to t...
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Conversion
Use “Human Optimization” for Search Engines
October 1, 2006 • Mat Greenfield
I read with interest this month that Google has filed a patent to allow it to add a human-review element to their search results. This represents the next step in a series of interesting developments that I have watched closely for the past few years. But in order to explain, let me bac...
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Conversion
Should You Add SEO To Your Marketing Efforts?
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Pay-per-click advertising is, no doubt, one of the most effective ways of getting new leads and prospects to come to your website. Within a period of 24 hours, any business—large or small—can appear at the top positions for any keyword that’s applicable to their business. However, it d...
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Conversion
Tradeshows The Right Way
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
For online retailers, tradeshows are an incredible opportunity to source goods, connect with wholesalers and manufacturers, and expand their product lines. There is a right way and a wrong way to attend tradeshows. To get the most out of your experience, you need to prepare. Your first...
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Conversion
Tuning Up Your Checkout Process
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
One of the most important factors to optimizing conversion is fine tuning the shopping cart and checkout process. Sales are won or lost within this crucial component of your site, and it is critical to examine the data that will unlock the mysteries of visitor behavior within this proce...
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Conversion
Usability Report Card: Headsets.com
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Earlier this year, Headsets.com was calling the checkout button "save to cart." We commented on this horrid usability, and the company let us know it made a change when they redesigned the site. Headsets.com is selling mostly to small to medium businesses, so the site must appeal more t...
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Conversion
Email as a Mini-sale
October 1, 2006 • Kerry Murdock
Sales professionals have a notion of “mini-sales.” A mini-sale occurs when a prospect agrees to learn more about you or your product, but has not yet agreed to a purchase. Say, for example, that you sell cleaning supplies to restaurants. You may call a restaurant owner and ask him to p...
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Conversion
Forums Offer Interactivity
October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
If you're looking for an easy way to make your business’ website more interactive, consider adding a bulletin board or a forum. They’re different names for the same thing, an application you can add to your site allowing visitors to leave messages and interact with each other. You can e...