aeCartReviews Forums: Key Factors in Sales Conversion - eCartReviews Forums

What do you find are the key factors that impact your store's sales conversion rate?

Shipping charges?
Site design?
Product images and information?
Checkout process?

Can you think of any others? What have you done to improve you conversion rate?

How about:
Perceived size of company?
Customer Service?
Easily visible Contact Information?
Quick Ease of finding Correct Product?

I think the best thing you can do to increase your conversion is to surf your site as if you were a customer. What would you improve to make your shopping experience easier and more memorable. Send out surveys to your current customers and ask them how you can be better.
Don't always just go for the sale, providing helpful or meaningful information on your site can make your customers very happy and loyal.

Good Luck

I think some store owners put too much emphasis on the importance of one-page checkout. If you offer flat-rate shipping a one-page checkout is a great time-saver, but when you use live rates, it can be overly confusing to customers. I have yet to see a one-page checkout using live shipping rates that is not confusing to some customers. I'm sure we lose sales because of it, and I wish we could get rid of it and go to a two- or three-page checkout.

We've found that putting as much information as we can in the product description has increased our sales. It's also cut down on the number of phone calls we receive from customers. We also receive a lot of compliments from customers on our product descriptions.

A few years ago we had about 50 products on our site that did not have images. These products were older, mark-down items and I didn't worry too much about selling them. They were mostly products that we had only one copy, and I was thinking of just trashing them. One day I had some extra time so I decided to get together some pictures of them. Immediately after adding the images, we sold out of about half of them - many on the same day I put up the images. After that I went through the site and picked out a bunch of slow-selling items and noticed most of them had some pretty icky images. I redid those, and they started selling. I never thought that images of our products were that important, but I guess I was wrong on that!

I also agree with all the points that Strappy brought up. Depending on what you sell, the perceived size of your company can be very important to your target customer base. Some customers would prefer to do business with smaller companies, others want to believe they are dealing with a large company. Know what your customers want, and either play up the size of your company or downplay it. We are a small company, but our customers somehow have the idea that we're huuuuge. Since most of them would prefer to deal with a larger company, we don't mention anything about our company size on our site.

Great points! Gems from two e-commerce veterans! Thanks guys.

I should add site search to the list. Make certain to think out and add site search keywords for all your products.

Trust
Professional Design/Images/Product Descriptions
Intuitive Navigation and Easy to find checkout button

With so much credit card and identity theft consumers are very weary of web sites. If they feel the slightest bit uneasy they will move on to another site.

What we have done to gain the trust of our on-line customers.

Professional looking web site.

Joined the BBB and displayed their logo

Contact and policies easily found (Privacy, Return, Shipping) information is easily found

About Us page

Customer reviews

Epinion, BizRate reviews (We stopped using these services - to costly for us)

When a potential customer calls we also tell them to call the manufacture and ask about our company. (This is where is can come in handy to send a holiday gift to the Vendor)

Do you believe that a Hacker Safe emblem or Control Scan emblem, help with conversions? Is either one better than the other?

I don't believe that either would really help personally. Either the customer doesn't know what they mean in the first place, they don't know to look for them, or they are just interested in buying and don't care. Also, any user that is advanced/knowledgeable will know what it means to go into secure mode and what that implies.

Besides all that, why pay for a service and logo that checks the systems of which you have no control over. i.e. MC, 3DC, Volusion. You can't fix, edit, configure, change, or modify any of their servers setups, network security, or programming. So, the question comes down to... is the benefit of someone seeing the seal and knowing what it does increase your sales enough to justify the cost?

I don't believe the small benefit outweighs the cost of having the seals and being part of their "program".
You never know though, they wouldn't be in business if it didn't work for some people.

Or they just have an aggressive sales force that scares their customers into buying. And for the big players it's pocket change. I did some research into it, and I believe there are other more important areas to show a customer they should buy from you.

Testimonials are always useful. www.newegg.com even put them on their front page.

We sell to some hefty companies ourselves and have listed some of them on the front of our site, I know for sure that this has lead to some sales. If people see that someone else has bought from you that they trust then they are likely to trust you.
Testimonials are good, but only if they don't look generic. And I think only 2-3 testimonials are appropriate.
I think the decision as to what you need to have to gain a customer can easily change from market to market, and even business to business. You really have to experiment (trials) and decide what you like and feel will work best for your company.
I receive so many compliments about our site, mostly from ease of navigation. If a customer can find exactly what they want and can purchase it easily and quickly then they really don't need anything else and will be happy (although shipping cost does weigh on their mind before finishing the order).
No one has that full proof formula, you have to find your own ingredients, make up your own cooking recipe, and implement it so that it comes out tasty!

Quick Summary of everyone's post and Peter Drucker's 3 Questions

1. Figure out who is your customer.
2. What is of value to them.
3. What can you supply that is of value to them.

On the value part, as strapworks mentioned it could be a list of companies to build credibility. Another one as seen in the Wall Street Journal. Testimonials (which have a huge belief factor, but buyer psychology is another topic). Content that interests them (like good pictures of a product as Patti mentioned). On my site I do multiple pictures. Amazon has the ability to actually read pages out of a book plus the amazing amount of reviews they get). Some customers care about price, others about brand because it's a luxury product.

Bingo, every industries customers are different, find out what your customers want and cater to it.

Chiming in late on this, but I tried ScanAlert before I made the decision to close. It did NOT help with conversions.