The E-Commerce Blog

The average conversion rate for e-commerce websites is 2%, which means that the vast majority of customers don’t make a purchase.As many as 10-20% of your unique visitors will place an item in their shopping cart, but leave before closing the deal.

Below are the main reasons people abandon shopping carts:

• Unexpected or high shipping costs
• Total cost of purchase more than expected
• Comparison shopping
• Product was out of stock or didn’t want to wait
• Checkout process was too complicated

You can take steps to improve your checkout process and convert many more of these visitors. By simplifying checkout and shipping options, you could see your conversion rate increase by 50% or more.

Below are a few quick tips to reduce your shopping cart abandonment rates:

• Offer free or flat-rate shipping
• Post your guarantee or return policy clearly on your website
• Post your toll-free phone number on your website and shopping cart pages
• Consolidate the checkout process to as few screens as possible
• Use real-time inventory and show quantity on hand on product information pages

It’s also a good idea to do usability testing on your website. There are a lot of inexpensive tools available that will record users’ responses and even where they looked on your pages. They can provide a lot of insight into why visitors are leaving.

Today is Election Day in the United States. This is probably the biggest election of all time, and voter turnout is amazing. With all the people at the polls, who has time to shop online? A lot of people, apparently.

By 8 o’clock this morning I had already received 3 emails from online merchants. I don’t just subscribe for research, we buy almost everything online so I love a sale like anybody else.

I never would have thought an “Election Day Sale” would be a great idea, but after receiving several newsletters this morning, we hussled together one of our own and got it out the door around 8:30 AM.

The response has been amazing. Sales have skyrocketed and all from a simple text-only email newsletter. The email we sent is below:

It may just be the most important election in our country’s
history. If you haven’t already voted early, please find your
polling place and go vote today.

To say thanks for voting, TAKE 15% OFF ANY ONE PRODUCT

Use coupon code ELECTION2008 at checkout.

http://www.2bigfeet.com

If you’re not up to speed on the issues, checkout Glass Booth:
http://www.glassbooth.org

It’s a very good tool to determine where you truly stand on the
issues. You don’t have to vote like us, but be an informed
citizen and vote based on what you believe not what you see in
the media.

Also, please encourage your family and friends to do the same.

Sincerely,

Your friends at 2BigFeet.com

It’s probably too late to get an email out for Election Day, but take a look at the calendar and see how many holidays and national events occur throughout the year. These events are excellent chances to connect with your customers. Even if they don’t buy anything, it shows you’re human and care about what’s happening in the world.

StoneEdge, makers of the popular Order Manager software, have their own bailout plan. For a limited time, get 20% off StoneEdge Order Manager when you use the coupon code “BAILOUT.”

Order Manager is a backend order and customer management software that integrates with dozens of popular shopping cart and e-commerce systems. It features inventory management, customer management, order management, pick/pack/shipping and reporting functionality.

We have been using Order Manager for years to manage our e-commerce businesses. It streamlines the order processing and customer service and lets you focus on more important issues with running your business.

GrokDotCom’s latest conversion rate report is out and Office Depot leads the pack with 26.9%. Checkout July’s Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate.

These numbers are incredibly amazing, but are these conversion rates realistic for small e-commerce merchants? I have personally seen small e-commerce retailers with conversion rates between 8-10%. Compared to the national average of 2%, I’d say that’s pretty substantial.

These large companies spend millions of dollars on branding and marketing, which must be considered when looking at their conversion rates. Their customer acquisition cost is likely much higher than small merchants selling the same type of products. They may even lose money on the initial sale, knowing they’ll make it back over the lifetime of the customer.

What does all this mean to small e-commerce merchants?

Strive for somewhere in the middle. Don’t settle for 2%, but don’t go crazy trying to get your conversion rate to 25%. Always keep making changes, testing, and making more changes to continuously increase your conversion rate.

Don’t let people tell you that 8% or 10% conversion rates are unattainable though. They are very attainable. Though conversion rates will vary from industry to industry, 10% conversion rates are fairly common among small to medium sized merchants.

Other factors to consider…

Other factors can greatly affect your conversion rates. A website’s conversion rates will vary greatly depending on the source of the visitor. Visitors from organic search, PPC advertisements, referral links and direct type-in traffic will all have distinctly different conversion rates.

Marketing promotions can have a big impact on conversion rates. Specials and coupons have a big impact on conversions, though they may decrease the average profit per order.

TrackThePack has just released a commercial version of their popular website mashup that allows e-commerce store owners (really any website publisher) to add a tracking tool to their website. The service will track packages from UPS, FedEx, DHL and USPS shipping carriers and integrates with Google Maps to give you a visual representation of the package’s route.

TrackThePack is very simple to integrate and just requires a short JavaScript snippet be added to one of your pages with the tracking number inserted. Most people will want to use some kind of form, so I’ve put together a simple script that will let you create links to send to customers in emails, but will also allow a user to copy/paste a tracking number into a form field. I’ve posted some sample PHP code at the end of the post.
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Zip Code Guy provides detailed zip code maps for every county in the U.S. You can choose by state or individual county, or buy maps for the entire country. They are also offering a special free U.S. zip code database.

For those of you who are wondering “Why in the world would I want information on zip codes?”, targeting marketing campaigns by specific areas based on demographics is highly effective. For instance, you may be marketing a specific high-end service in a metropolitan area, so targeting to only the high-income zip codes will save you a lot of money and time.

There are multiple uses for zip code information. E-Commerce store owners can use the information to research potential credit card fraud issues, or match postal zip codes to cities.

Your e-commerce store’s conversion rate is the ratio of visitors to customers. It’s the percentage of visitors that actually complete a sale online. Simple example:

20 sales / 1000 unique visitors = 0.02 = 2% conversion rate

Your store’s conversion rate is critical to your success. The average conversion rate for retail B2B e-commerce is 2-4%. I think this metric is actual skewed however, because many of the largest e-commerce businesses have conversion rates of over 10%.

I’d estimate the average e-commerce store with revenues under $1,000,000 has a conversion rate of less than 1%. And I’d bet that most of the owners don’t even know their conversion rate is that low because they either don’t understand what a conversion rate is or they don’t check it often and do anything about it.

Knowing your conversion rate is necessary if you plan on improving it. There are website analytics tools such as Google Analytics that can be configured to show your store’s conversion rate very easily. Use a tool and monitor your store’s conversion rate at least monthly, and especially whenever you make changes to your store’s layout or design.

Worldwide Brands has released a video series on e-commerce. If you’re not familiar with the company, WorldWide Brands is a product sourcing company for e-commerce and retail businesses. They are on of the only reputable sourcing companies I’ve found for sourcing product for your e-commerce store.

Worldwide Brands has one of the largest directories of bulk wholesalers, light bulk wholesalers and drop shippers. They verify the information of all their suppliers rigorously. Unlike many “drop shipper” directories you can find in Google, Worldwide Brands is a legitimate company. They have been around for years (I have been a member for at least 3 years) and is the only product directory I recommend.

They have released a new video series on e-commerce and the current “recession” in the United States. Only two videos have been released so far, but there is some good content and will get you thinking and planning your e-commerce store. I’m sure this video series will be an excellent source of information and inspiration for new e-commerce store owners (or those thinking about starting one).

The video series won’t be up forever, so make sure to sign up and watch it. It’s totally free, and there’s no catch. If you like the information and want to start an e-commerce business (or another one) I highly recommend Worldwide Brands as a way of finding reputable companies to purchase product from.

I am not affiliated with Worldwide Brands in any way. I’m just a satisfied customer.

It’s the end of the busiest shopping season of the year, and a lot of retailers are probably thinking they could have done more to spark growth in holiday sales. Did y ou do everything you could to increase sales this season?

Probably not. None of us did… there are hundreds — thousands — of ideas for increasing sales, and it’s almost impossible to implement them all in time for the holiday season, even for large companies. We had a list broken down by priority, and as fast as I could check items off the list, another 2 ideas would be added.

We had a great holiday shopping season, but now that it’s almost over, I realize that I should have started much, much earlier. With more time, some more of my ideas could have materialized.

So, my advice as this holiday season comes to an end — Start planning for Holiday Season 2008 now. Make a timeline and start working towards it now… so when October/November rolls around next year, you’ll be ready!

Are you ready for the holiday shopping season? Thanksgiving and Christmas will be here soon, and you better have your site ready now because people are out in force shopping online so they don’t have to get stuck in traffic jams and hectic malls getting last-minute gifts.

Here are a few tips to help you get ready:

• Make sure your website is error-free.
  There’s nothing worse than getting halfway into the busiest season of the year only to find out that you have an error on your shopping cart pages. Test your entire site for errors, misspellings and inaccuracies.

• Make sure your website is error-free
  There’s nothing worse than getting halfway into the busiest season of the year only to find out that you have an error on your shopping cart pages. Test your entire site for errors, misspellings and inaccuracies.

• Review your Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
  Check your Pay-Per-Click campaigns to make sure that you are bidding on all the appropriate terms, and make sure you have conversion tracking setup to test your campaign’s effectiveness.

• Dust off your email list
  If you haven’t seen an email newsletter lately, now is the time. Make sure you have an opt-im list and start promoting your seasonal specials to your customers and newsletter subscribers.

• Check your search engine rankings
  Check your ranking in the major search engines. It’s a little late to get a large improvement before the holiday season, but you can make small changes that will have an impact. Even moving up one position can make a big difference in overall sales.

• Check with your suppliers
  Make sure your suppliers have ample inventory for the holiday season, and place orders to fill in any inventory you are low on now. As December comes closer, many suppliers will begin having shortages and will be shipping slow because of the volume.

• Update your return and shipping policies
  Let your customers know about your holiday return policy and shipping policy. When is the last day they can order and still have their items for Christmas? What if they need to return after the new year?

• Update your home page
  Make seasonal changes to your website and home page layouts to show off new colors and specials. Show your customers your holiday spirit.