Increasing Shopping Cart Conversions
The percentage of Web users that shop online has increased year
after year. As online merchants and Web sellers learn how to
refine their shopping cart pages for increased conversions,
we're able to identify several key components in this process to
the benefit of online enterprises bottom lines - the money you
end up bringing in from your marketing and advertising
efforts.
1) Educate and Inform: If you are selling product online,
then you have an obligation to your audience to educate,
enlighten and inform them as well. The most serious and
potentially damaging aspect to improving shopping cart
conversion is the presence, or lack thereof, of helpful
information on the products or services you are selling. The
Riggs-Meyer Paradigm - an independent study of Web traffic which
reveals that 70% of website visitors were researching
information and only 30% were actually ready to buy - suggests
that online merchants have an obligation to share not only
critical information about their products and services (such as
usage instructions) but also background information and general
educational materials for experts and newbies alike.
2) Simplify Site Use: Developing a goal to improve
conversion is essential. Online merchants notice when they
design or redesign websites, strange things happen to their
conversion rates - some go up and some conversion rates go down,
way down. Even if a site looks professionally designed, problems
always exist which can be corrected. Lower shopping cart
abandonment rates means more money in your pocket at the end of
the day, conduct research via polls or surveys, focus groups or
interviews to determine where navigation was problematic, if
graphics were poorly placed or not relevant to the mission of
completing the sale, if search functions were hard to find or if
they were helpful, and to what degree your shopping cart pages'
call to action made a positive or negative impact.
3) Express Trustworthiness: One of the most effective
ways to build trust among your visitors is to provide an
effective way to address visitors' fears about the security of
shopping online by revealing information about your company such
as email and postal address as well as toll-free and local phone
numbers, or the location of customers support forms and privacy
policies. Services such as Thawte or ValidatedSite enable
website owners to convey their trustworthiness of their online
presence (the availability of SSL -secure socket layer - pages)
and the corporation and people behind the website.