100 tips to optimize a retail ecommerce website

General:

1. Get your senior management’s support and commitment on your efforts to improve your website.
2. Identify the changes required and build a good operations team.
3. Always remember that your goal is to sell products through your website.
4. Set achievable goals for every webpage.
5. Make sure you have an about us page filled with your company’s information.
6. Set a key performance indicator (KPI) for every online marketing campaign you conduct.
7. Never depend totally on technology.
8. Help users to reach you by different means – email, telephone, physical address, live chat, etc.

Retail ecommerce usability/merchandising tips:

9. Don’t use animation in your home page.
10. Display top-selling and newly launched products on your home page.
11. Make sure every product page is reachable within 2-3 clicks.
12. Recommend product accessories for items that have been added to a shopping cart. For example, if a customer buys a notebook, then recommend laptop accessories like a USB mouse or bags. Just recommend! Don’t add them automatically to the shopping cart.
13. Add a buy button to your recommended list or wherever you show a product.
14. Also show product prices for each product in your recommended product list or anywhere else you display your products.
15. Make sure your content has compelling call to actions – buy now, limited offer, etc.
16. Wow customers by offering surprise gifts, offers, and price discounts.
17. Have good site search functionality within your site.
18. Also include advanced search functionality, such as search by color, size, etc.
19. Add breadcrumb navigation, which helps users understand their depth of their visit to your site.
20. Allow users to modify their shopping cart lists. They should be able to add or remove products and change the quantities that they want to purchase.
21. Avoid hidden cost – imposing additional cost on the total value of the purchase. Allow user to add associated products manually. Don’t ever automate it. Hidden costs lead to shopping cart abandonment.
22. Don’t force users to register, even for adding items into their shopping cart.
23. Glean only necessary information during the sign up process.
24. Display security badges clearly.
25. Give alternate payment options. About 74% of online merchants provide alternate payment options.
26. Offer free shipping for a certain price threshold.
27. Install an analytics program to help you better understand user behavior.
28. Use a visual analytics program to facilitate easy interpretation.
29. Avoid having a long check out process.
30. Provide all necessary information, such as shipping, privacy policy, return policy, delivery date and time, etc.
    

Retail ecommerce design/development/technology tips:

31. Ensure that the site’s html code meets web standards.
32. Minimize graphics like flash, scripts, etc.
33. Graphical links are of no use. Make sure that your links are text based.
34. Ensure that your site loads quickly.
35. Use secure server include (ssi) files.
36. Be creative with your 404 page. You can merchandise it, add site search functionality or link it to another section of your website.

Retail ecommerce SEO tips:

37. Conduct SEO competition analysis.
38. Conduct keyword research.
39. Use about two keywords per page.
40. Focus on long tail keywords (e.g. canon power shot 4x digital camera).
41. Don’t use the manufacturer’s product description. Use your own instead.
42. Use keyword rich titles and meta tags, headings, etc. However, make sure you don’t spam. If you do it right, you get it right.
43. Use keywords in your product descriptions.
44. Get quality back links to your product pages steadily, but not suddenly.
45. Recommend products and accessories on your product page. Smart and sophisticated interlinking helps in SEO (a good example is shopping.com).
46. Ask customers to review products that they have purchased from your site. Unique content helps in SEO.
47. Allow customers to tag the product.
48. Use keywords in interior links.
49. Don’t have more than 100 outgoing links.
50. Optimize images for fast loading and for search engines – 6 steps to optimize images
51. Create a sitemap – it ensures that none of your webpages are orphaned.
52. Create search engine friendly (SEF) URLs that are easy for both users and crawlers. Opt for URL optimization like mod_rewrite to static URLs.
53. Write blog posts about the products you sell.

Ecommerce email marketing tips:

54. Conduct an opt-in email campaign.
55. Invite users to sign up for your newsletter after a sale.
56. Avoid spam words like free in the subject line.
57. Make sure you have an unsubscribe option.
58. Provide a proper mailing address.
59. Include tell-a-friend functionality.
60. Email consistently.
61. Offer exclusive discounts to opt-in customers.
62. Include compelling call to actions in your email message.
63. Make sure your offer is visible above the fold in the email.

Pay per click (PPC) marketing tips:

64. Start by advertising top-selling products.
65. Bid on popular and relevant keywords.
66. Use negative keywords as well.
67. Use keyword options like phrase and exact match.
68. Focus on improving your quality score.
69. Add keywords in the ad copy.
70. Add call to actions in the ad copy.
71. You don’t have to hold the very top position. Find a balance.
72. Make sure you give the right landing page, otherwise you’ll meet with a high bounce rate.
73. Turn off the content network.
74. Test your ad copy.
75. Test your PPC ad campaign.
76. Test your landing pages.

Comparison shopping engine (CSE) marketing tips:

77. Choose the comparison engines for your campaign and start slow and steady.
78. Choose your top performing products to start with.
79. Prepare feeds according to the shopping engine’s requirements.
80. Use common product names or street names in the feeds.
81. Don’t forget to use recommended data feed fields.
82. Try to use optional data feed fields as well.
83. Make sure your feeds are placed in the right taxonomy of each shopping engine.
84. Use the exact MPN or SKU..
85. Update your data feeds daily, weekly or monthly (daily is highly recommended).
86. Send feeds to Google base.
87. Don’t advertise out of stock products.
88. Provide the appropriate landing page.
89. Remove poor performing products.
90. Conduct CSE competition analysis with other merchants in context with title, price and other promotional offers within each CSE.
91. Track your rankings in the CSE.
92. Track clicks and sales at the product level.

Ecommerce customer support service tips:

93. Provide exceptional service to repeat customers.
94. Provide good customer service to first time customers as well.
95. Make sure you respond to customers in a timely manner.
96. Get a toll free number.
97. Train customer representatives properly. For example, offer product and sales training.
98. Make sure your contact info is available in all your pages.
99. Thank the customer either by calling or sending an email about the purchase they have placed.
100. IM is very effective for servicing frustrated customers.

What do you think about these tips? Please feel free to add more. Start from 101

Get Ready for Google Trifecta

Google is conducting free online seminar on how to use Google webmaster tool, Google analytics and website optimizer tool.

This sounds very exciting. I am sure this event will definitely help internet marketers, webmasters and other like minded professionals to optimize their website.

I am happy i got registered :-). For more info

12 Ways to Win Over Your Online Shopper!

Informative Content
Content is the monarch! Informative and comprehensive content rules the roost when it comes to buying decisions. The content should have correct facts, simple language, and a good flow. It should not be too long or too brief. Content is the key to unlock the treasure of conversion. Understand your audience and write the content for them.

Best Product Price
Every shopper wants more bangs for their buck. Buyers look for sites that offer the best deal for their pocket. Be aware of the competitor’s pricing and price your products accordingly so that you have an edge over your rival.

Free Offers and promotions
Everything comes at a price! But what if you get something for free? Free offers and promotion draw customers to a website like a moth is drawn to the fire.

Easy Website Navigation
No one wants to enter a web site and get lost like ‘Alice in Wonderland’, caught in a labyrinth of pages with no clue. The web site navigation must be user-friendly, clear, structured and intuitive.

Quick Checkout Process
The check out process must be quick and secure. Delay the check out process at your own risk. According to figures from Marketing Sherpa, about 48% of potential customers bail out at the checkout stage due to convoluted check out process.

Alternate Payment Method
Seventy-four percent of online shoppers have used alternative payment methods like PayPal, Bill Me Later, or Google Checkout during recent Web shopping experiences. By offering alternative payment methods at checkout, other than credit cards, online retailers can attract new customer segments like non-credit card holders.

Customer Reviews
Customer reviews can be an asset to a site. If it is a positive review on a product, it might lead to some conversion. But even if it is a negative or critical review that dissuades customer from purchasing the product, you’ve provided a great service to the shopper and that’s good for building trust.

Product Image
Seeing is Believing! Shoppers want to see what they are purchasing. A basic 3D product tour with rotate and zoom will be instrumental in attracting your buyer. Show them some great shots of the product on sale; in turn they will show you their willingness to buy.

Website Design
Dynamic designs draw deals. Design a great web site replete with your web site name, logo, good search functionality, hypertexts, product images and more. Look at other websites, cash on their mistakes to improve your own.

Customer privacy
Let the customer enjoy some anonymity. Only glean information from them that is necessary and protect that information from being misused.

Free Shipping
Don’t break promises. You either provide free shipping or don’t provide. If you provide only within selected location say “Free Shipping Only within XYZ area”

Give recommendations
When a shopper adds an item to the shopping cart, there is nothing wrong if you recommend (cross sell) related products. But do not show unrelated ads in the checkout page as this might result in the customer abandoning the cart.

Conform to these rules and your customer base will grow like Topsy!!

I get traffic, but NO conversion

Most online retailers and internet marketing professionals invest time and money on driving traffic to their website but all strategies end right here. They never think of encouraging a shopper to navigate from one page to another. In other words, online retailers drive traffic to the home page or product page with least or no site/page objective and finally end up in increasing the bounce rate. Due to this negligence, all traffic generating internet marketing campaigns like PPC, shopping engine campaign, email, and search engine optimization will fall flat. The investment and effort you put together to increase your traffic will go down the drain if there are no or very few conversions.So what makes or breaks the online sales conversion? Definitely, it is the landing page.Optimizing landing pages with surefire marketing techniques is one of the best ways to persuade visitors to become prospective buyers. There are few proven techniques by which an online retailer can improve his landing page …

Harmonize the message: The contents of the landing page (especially the page headline) should relate exactly with the advertisement. The aim of this technique is to ensure the user that he is visiting the right page.

Avoid Content Plagiarism: Plagiarizing content from online/offline market place will not add much value to the online shopper and the search engines. Add a persuasive marketing message along with unique product description, features, and images. Insert the relevant SEO keywords into the content. This will help search engines to crawl and index pages giving your site top ranking in SERP. The user can make his buying decision much quicker. Provide separate product usage guide so that the user can download to get information about the product’s functionality. (Mobius provides unique product description along with SEO keywords plugged in, Buying Guides and other content creation activities. Go ahead for Free Consultation)

Play with Price: Pricing is one of the ways to bolster a brand. When the user lands to the product page he usually scans the page to find the price along with the other important information like product name, features, etc. Be informed of the price quotes offered by other merchants in various online market places and decide your price.

User Opinion Matters: User reviews and opinions help customers to learn about the performance of the product. It is equal to taking a word of mouth suggestion about buying the product. This tempts the customer to proceed in actually buying the product. Make sure to include the user-review functionality in the site and also request your visitors to write a few words about their experience with the product. This is one of the best ways to increase the conversion rates and to improve the credibility of the site.

Product Usage Guide: Providing a product usage guide makes a shopper understand how far the product meets his requirements. But make sure you use good navigation that gets him back to the product page.

Freebies: Including offers like free delivery, free gifts, and coupons are definite ways to woo the customers, which increases the conversion rate.

Delivery time estimation: Shoppers surely would like to know how quickly the product will reach them after ordering. Online retailers like Amazon do it very efficiently.

Trust and Security: Provide icons, images, symbols that would give a tremendous positive impact of trust and security. Even large online retailers are influenced by these symbols and logos. The icons/images of VeriSign and eTrust logo are two examples.

Get money through different means: Don’t just stick to credit card or debit card payment. Not everyone likes the idea of credit card or debit cards. Provide payment options like Paypal, BillMeNext, and Google Checkout.

Avoid distractions: Avoid using high graphic pictures, flash and other fancy features which require latest applications. The user’s system may not be installed with the software supporting those files. Don’t use too many tricks to woo the shopper which usually ends up with the shopper leaving your website due to frustration without bothering to know what is so special in your product.

I think you had a good time reading these techniques… revise these changes in your website and realize the impact… but wait this is not an end list there are few more techniques left. Before I come up with more techniques in part II, I leave it open to the readers to suggest me few more reliable techniques they use in their website.

6 Quick Tips to Improve Online Retail Sales

Online buyers just don't buy products through the internet they perform extensive online research on the products, prices, promotional offers, trusted retail sites etc.

Most of the online buyers often visit Industry websites, Manufacturer websites, Search Engines (both organic and sponsored links), Comparison shopping engines, Retailer websites, Product review websites, Merchant review websites etc. to know more about the products and its related information.

6 quick tips to improve Online Retail Sales...

Offer Competitive Pricing: Effective Marketing promotions and advertisements are not the only key factors to improve online sales. Offering competitive prices will have a quick impact in online sales through various channels like Search Engines, Comparison shopping Engines, Emails, Social media Websites, word-of-mouth etc. Analyze various online marketplaces to understand the prices quoted for your products and make adjustment accordingly. NEED HELP TO ANALYZE PRICE FROM ONLINE MARKET PLACES? Get Price Intelligence Service Free Trial

Offer Quality content: Quality Content is Still a king. The information provided in e-commerce website about products should have quality Product title, Product description (provide as many information possible), Quality picture etc. Do not fail to include shipping price, product availability information and 3D view of the product image. For effective and high end merchandise always have a quality content which would encourage users to make buying decision.

Optimize for Organic Search Engines: Search Engines deliver quality traffic. Optimize retail sites for organic search engines like Google, Yahoo, Msn, Aol etc. Do not over optimize by stuffing too many keywords, getting paid links (Google hate paid links).

“A product should only be listed in the best-applicable category instead of being listed in 30 different locations.” Matt Cutts

Make use of Comparison Shopping Engine: Prepare clean and optimized shopping data feeds to get most out of the shopping engine. List popular products defined by Comparison engines or do homework by analyzing log files to know top selling products .Understand the complexities and requirement formats of each CSE and prepare it accordingly. The following are some of the important fields for most of the comparison engine…

Manufacturer Name
MPN
Product Name
Product Description (Keyword rich)
Product URL (Product Page not to the home page of your website)
Image URL (Include Keyword in ALT tag)
Selling Price (Conduct Competition Price Analysis for better pricing strategy)
Product Availability
Shipping Rates
Right Category to map in CSE taxonomy

Offer Unique Benefits: Offer unique benefits to an online buyer to grab his attention. Do not just offer the benefits in pricing also include offers like discounts, coupons, free gifts etc. This will entice online buyer to shop more.

Quick Checkout Process: Do not capture too many information from an online buyer. Reduce checkout process steps to avoid shopping cart abandonment.

7 deadly sins of an apparel ecommerce retailer

A recent research conducted by Digital Solutions Agency outlined some of the key issues for apparel ecommerce retailers. Issues like how customers interact with retail sites, easy usage search, checkout etc… are dealt. Retail website(s) lacking in these areas will fail in quality and effectiveness.

As part of the site review, the study has taken various parameters of a typical online shopping experience into consideration, which has actually driven these retailers to think from online shopper’s point of view. Assessing what an user actually expects from a good apparel website, online retailers arrived at few parameters such as checkouts, number of pages it takes to the purchase stage, average task completion times, accessibility etc.


Few findings from the Research are as follows:

1. Complex Registration Process - 70 percent of participants in the study said that they were bothered by registration before buying and many felt they were being constricted for marketing information.

2. Poor Accessibility – Small text size on most of the sites resulted in poor readability and missing of information and consequently increased the error rates.

3. Poor Shop Ability – The process of searching and adding the expected product by shoppers in to a shopping cart leads to difficulties in making their buying decision.

4. Inappropriate Product Placement – Most of the product pages did not meet shopper’s expectation, as those pages were unstructured and cluttered with misplaced items.

5. Lack of Good Free Search Text Tools – explained the relative high average task completion times when participants were asked to search for information.

6. Poor Buy Ability – starts right away from the moment when an online shopper selects or picks up the products and puts them into their basket.

7. Poor Checkout Process – depends upon various factors like long-winded and un-optimized text and complicated password requirements.

Website analytics - What metrics to measure?

The website analytics association defines website analytics as “the objective, tracking, collection, measurement, reporting, and analysis of quantitative data of internet to optimize websites”.

“The e-tailing group 2007” report says online merchants convert only 2-3% of their website traffic to buyers. It also emphasis that website analytics is the better way to resolve the issue. (For more details on this see “Few Convert at E-tail sites”).

You might have some sort of website analytics software to measure the effectiveness of your website. But…

How often do you use it?

Have you ever taken any decisions after completing the analysis?

Have you ever measured to check the impact on the bottom-line?

What are the metrics that you measure?

Most of the ecommerce websites fail to use even the basics of analytics. Here is the process you need to follow for website analytics measurement. Before jumping into the process see what are the most important factors to measure?

Any ecommerce website would have the following parameters

Increase in online sales and decrease in marketing expenditure, Cost per visitor, Sales per visitor, Conversion rate, RFM analysis (Recency, Frequency, Monetary), Trend reporting, predictive analytics etc.

The following are the Metrics to measure...

• Measure reach
• Retention
  
• Conversion

Measuring reach:

Overall site traffic, no. of visits, no. of new visitors, top entry pages, top exit pages, top contents, percentage of new visitor over returning visitors, impression served, top slip pages, visitor geographic data etc.

Measuring retention:

Measure number of recurring visitors, Frequency of visit, Recency of visit, Overall retention rate,

Measuring conversion:

Overall conversion rate, New visitor’s conversion rate, Recurring visitor’ conversion rate, cost per sale, cost per visitor, cost per new visitor, specific campaign conversion rate, etc.

14 Common Retail eCommerce Website Mistakes

Today's customers are more sophisticated and judicious. If they don’t find what they need from you, they’ll simply knock the door of your competitor. Make sure your e-commerce site meets online shopper’s expectation.

Deviating from your objective
Inartistic website design
Poor site navigation
Poor product information
Ignoring website testing
Undefined product placement
Unmatched competitive price fixing
Poor checkout page
Poor website marketing
Ignoring website optimization
Keeping the same content
Untimely product delivery
Poor customer service
Website unreliability

These mistakes will for sure trash your eCommerce retail business in short span of time