What Is Your Ecommerce Strategy?

An article by Christian Holst.

Running an ecommerce business can be a daunting task. Endless competitors, varying profit margins, rising advertising costs, not enough search engine traffic, which is why having a good ecommerce strategy is just about the single most important thing you can do for your business.

The 2 most important aspects of ecommerce strategy will be covered on this site: Conversion Rate Optimization and Search Engine Optimization. Each topic will have a number of practical tips you can go ahead and implement directly, plus some links to other pages where you can learn more in depth about each topic.

Ecommerce conversion rate optimization strategy

Conversion rate is the ratio between the amount of visitors you get to your ecommerce website and the amount of people who actually buy from you. In other words how many of your visitors who converts into buyers.

Considering how important conversion rate optimization is, it is a wonder that most ecommerce owners don't spend more time on it. Think about it; without spending a single dollar extra on Google AdWords, without launching a new marketing campaign, without sending any extra e-mail newsletters, or getting a better ranking in Google, you can more than double your ecommerce sales by doing conversion rate optimization.

7 tips for increasing your conversion rate:

1. Simplify your checkout process. Most ecommerce sites have a shopping cart abandon rate of 40-80%. Just think about that. 40-80% of your visitors have decided they want a product, added the product to their shopping cart and are now ready to purchase - but somewhere along your checkout process they get so scared, confused, or annoyed, that they stop the purchase and leave your site. The top 5 things you should be aware of when you redesign your checkout process are:

• Do you lead their attention away from the checkout process by showing offers, newsletter sign-up or navigation? Don't. When your visitor has decided they want to buy then "do not disturb!", or you will loose the sale.
• Do you show the shipping charge early on or do your customers really have to type in all their personal information before you let them know the real cost of their purchase (shipping, handling and credit cards charges)
• Do your customers need to create an account before they can make a purchase from you? This is one of the worst conversion killers in the checkout process - if you really want this feature at least move the account creation part to after they have successfully completed the purchase
• Do you create a sense of trust? Does the checkout pages look secure? Can the customers see your physical address, your phone number and email? Those elements create a great sense of trust for your shoppers as they know they can get in contact with you, and they are less likely to think you are a some scammer trying to rip them off
• Don't ask for any personal information that isn't strictly necessary. For every text field you have in your checkout process the chance of a potential customer will abandon their checkout increase. Partly because they don't trust you with that information (e.g. a password), partly because they can't see why you need that information (e.g. their phone number), and partly because they can't fill out the text field correctly.

2. Use quality product images. Some ecommerce sites don't have images at all. Some only have small gritty ones. Other shows you a small one, with the option of zooming. Before you go with any of these options stop and try to think of the last time you went to a physical store and bought a product without seeing it first? You probably haven't. Now think again: do you really think that random visitors to your ecommerce site that don't know you and have bought from you before will be satisfied by a small gritty image of a product they can't even hold in their hands before paying for it? No. Use large professional product images on your ecommerce pages, showing the product from multiple angles, and in different contexts. You can read more about product images impact on conversion here and here.

3. Test different copy. Use a/b split tests or multivariate tests to try out different copy. You can test different headlines e.g. "The most crisp picture quality you've ever seen!" vs. "Impress every all your friends with this TV". You can test on using different value prepositions like "Order today. Get it tomorrow" vs. "30-days money back guarantee". Test if short or long copy works best (hint: on newletter, account and software sign-up short tends to work best, with physical products and digital content long copy tends to be best). The important thing here is that you test on what actually sells best, instead of just going with what you think sounds best. You can use Google Website Optimizer for running your tests.

4. Only use graphics that improve conversions. A recent study by Marketing Sherpa have shown that a visitor decides wether or not to stay on your site within only 8 seconds from entering your site. This means you've only got 8 seconds at max. to show your visitors whatever you have that is most likely to make them stay (or convert). Therefore you should be very careful that you don't add clutter to your site, that can distract visitors from achieving your goal.

5. Have a goal on every page. Every single page on you website should have a goal. The goal can be to make a visitor buy, to sign-up for a newsletter, write you an e-mail, ask for an inquiry, etc. It is vital that all your pages have their goal clearly marked in a Call-To-Action (CTA) button or link, yet you see countless of ecommerce sites that forget to think about each page goal, or have too many goals on the same page. An example of how important it is to have a goal on every page is described on this page: How I Increased Newsletter Sign-Up Rate 274%.

6. Speed up you site. Website loadtimes can have a huge impact on your conversion rate. In fact, it is proven that speeding up you site can lift conversion rate 16,5% and order value of 5,5% (link in the last paragraph). Just think about when you go to a physical store, do you want to wait in line for 15 minutes? No. And on the web visitors are a lot more impatient because your competitors website is just a click away. Read more about loadtimes and conversion here.

7. Design for converison. You might want your ecommerce site to look fancy but remember: it's a sales platform - its business purpose is to generate sales, not look pretty. This is probably one of the most common mistakes made by ecommerce owners - converting visitors into buyers must be prioritized over a pretty website - and often this means simplifying the look of your site a great deal. This process is called "conversion design" and you can read a more in-depth description of it here: Conversion design.

Ecommerce SEO strategy

Getting traffic from search engines is probably one of the most discussed topics of ecommerce strategy. The reason is simple: a) the traffic is free, b) the visitors can be very relevant (which means they're more likely turn into paying customers), and c) if you don't get the traffic it's probably because your competitors are getting it all.

There is an endless discussion and number of small optimizations you can do, but below is the 4 most important steps of your ecommerce SEO strategy:

1. Research on the keywords you want to rank on. Choose the keyword you want your page to rank on carefully. About 50% of all clicks on a keyword goes to the first search result, and 98% of them to the results on the first page. So while you would probably like to have your new "outdoor equipment" ecommerce site rank no.1 on the keyword "outdoor equipment" it's not realistic that you would even be on the first search result page. Instead choose a keyword that has less traffic, but where it's more realistic you can get the no.1 position (and hence get 50% of the traffic for that keyword), e.g. it could be "trekking outdoor equipment".

You can find a good guide on doing keyword competition research here and you can use the Google AdWords Tool to find traffic volumes for keywords and get suggested synonyms.

2. Choose your (page's) title tag wisely. Right now the most simple - but also one of the most important - things to get right regarding ecommerce SEO is your title tag (the page title that is shown in the top of the browser). Each of your pages must have its own unique title, so don't just use your ecommerce name as the title for all of your pages. Preferably it should be only the keywords (see step #1) you want that specific page to rank on in the search engines, e.g. your product category ("cell phones") or a specific product name ("Nokia 6600 classic").

3. Have lots of relevant content. Most search engines (especially Google) loves content rich pages. Roughly put: the more relevant text you have on your page, the more likely it is that it will rank well. But remember "relevant" means the text must be related to the keyword you want the page to rank on. So no more product pages with only 3 lines of text if you want those pages to rank well. You can read more on page contents influence on search engine rankings here.

4. Build links. One of most important influencers on your site rankings are how many other sites that link directly to your site. This is how most search engines defines how authoritative your site is. E.g Wikipedia has millions of links, and as such they are considered more authoritative than your site. The key here is to build as many high quality links from sites with a topic related to your keyword(s). It can obviously be very difficult to get other websites to link to you, so here is a guide with 100 ideas on how to get links to your site.

In general I recommend that you to read some of the great blogs and news-sites on SEO like the SeoBook blog and Search Engine Watch as it is an ever changing skill that requires constant updates.