Four Boring Ways To Increase Your Web Sales
Friday, 04 December 2009 01:00
Chris Barling offers tips for implementing easy changes that are neither sexy nor difficult, but can have a significant impact on web sales.
Over the years I’ve arranged a few conferences and my number one rule has always been not to bore the delegates. While this is a critical success factor for running a good conference, boring things in business are often the key to success. In fact, sometimes clever ideas cause more mundane items to be ignored and can turn into a business negative.
As in general business, this can also be true in ecommerce. Some of the simple things can be very easy to implement, and can lead to a significant upturn in sales.
Don’t economise on hosting
According to research by Google a 30% increase in page load speed results in a 30% increase in business. It has also categorically stated for the first time that a speedy site will rank better.
It’s not clear whether the 30% increase is because Google ranks the site higher or customers react better to fast sites. It’s probably a combination of the two.
In our experience, moving our customers to faster hosting packages has shown traffic to the sites grow up to 50%. Adobe also agrees and has recently said that “improving speed can reduce abandonment rates by up to 41%” when selling online.
So if you have a decent online business the message is incredibly simple – don’t skimp on hosting costs. It’s a false economy.
Go easy with customer registration
Many people, including myself, find it irritating to have to remember lots of passwords and find the forced creation of another account very annoying. I won’t buy from a store that takes this tack, and I’m not alone. Unless people have decided to buy regularly from you before they complete their first order (which they won’t have), forced account creation could lose you sales.
Use postcode lookup
Your checkout will look more professional and be simpler and quicker if you ask your buyers to input their postcode and use postcode lookup software that fills in their address automatically. Plus you may get a small proportion of additional orders because checking out is simpler and quicker and it helps to reduce cart abandonment. You will certainly reduce costs because delivery addresses will be more accurate and there will be less failed deliveries.
And for print mail shots the accurate address capture means the communication should make it through. If you add up the cost of failed deliveries in terms of the time taken on the phone, additional cost to redeliver, and damage to reputation, it is a significant number. Postcode lookup from a company like Postcode Anywhere costs pennies and will minimise all of this.
Experiment
There is a documented case where sales doubled simply by removing the discount code field from checkout. Presumably in that particular market, buyers without discount codes felt ripped off if they didn’t have a code. There is also a case where sign ups were increased by 200% after the link saying “Free trial” was changed to “See plans and pricing.”
Experimenting with your checkout and measuring the results may be dull, but it is worthwhile. These two examples illustrate that massive and unexpected gains can result from small changes.
Finally
These suggestions aren’t particularly exciting, and may even sound dull. But most, if not all, will increase your orders. The big benefit is that they are easy to implement, particularly if you use a packaged ecommerce product with these features built in. What’s holding you back?
Chris Barling is CEO of ecommerce supplier, Actinic. Originally published on BusinessZone.