As a thank you for being a “founding” member of onlineauction.com, a subscription to WebWholsaler magazine was given to those that do register as founding members by OLA.com. I found this to be a very interesting, and valuable guide to the whole internet sales genre. Here is an excerpt from one article “3 Most Important Web Pages” by Eric Leuenberger:
“To be successful in ecommerce, you need to be proactive, not passive. Continually analyzing, to discover problem points and testing methods that better those points, is essential. You must continually monitor the customer experience your site delivers to your visitors and ensure all website layers are functioning together as a cohesive unit.
You cannot sit back and expect sales to come in, simply becasue you have a website listing products which target a specific market, even if you are getting loads of traffic to that site. If you are not going to be proactive about generating sales, you are not going to see results.
Quite frequently, I meet store owners who do not know where to focus improvement effors or what objectives to target first in an effort to increase conversion. Most say they want conversion increases, yet very few have any real plan of how to get there. They believe that making a few changes will correct all issues and sales will magically develop. In most cases, this couldn’t be further from the truth. As the old saying goes “You must crawl before you walk and walk before you run”. Expecting conversion increases without first targeting the most important areas, often ends up leadng to frustration.
For example, to focus on the checkout process, in an effort to increase sales when your website analytics shows that the majority of your visitors never even make it that far, will yield nothing. Why? Quite simply, if your visitors are not penetrating that deeply into your site, they can’t checkout anyhow. If they don’t interact with the checkout process, then making adjustments to it will not yield additional sales.
So, where should you focus your improvement efforts? To answer that question exactly for every store is difficult. Each business is different, and each situation needs to be analyzed in order to develop an action plan for improvement based on the unique circumstances and objective desired. You should let your website analytics dictate where to begin.
Although the answer to that question is not straightforward, there are at least 3 places you can begin focusing your attention on for seeking website improvement. Despite the fact that each ecommerce site is unique, the pages that visitors encounter on any ecommerce site, and which influence them to purchase, remain fairly consistant. If you are wondering where to focus your improvement efforts, try starting with these pages and sections:
….to be continued!!!
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