eCartStore Blog

Yesterday I got an email from Brad Fallon about focusing on increasing traffic and improving sales conversion rates to increase your total website sales. I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly as I have been focused on the same two issues recently (see my prior posts on sales conversion rates and viral marketing). But Brad’s email left me wondering, what else can we do?

Fact is, the total sales from as website is due to three factors, not two. Yes traffic and sales conversion are highly important but let’s not overlook the third factor which is average sales value. This may be the easiest sales driver to manipulate. On TheGolfCollection.com, we have been concentrating on adding more expensive products (cuz it takes a whole lot of golf slipper sales to make meaningful monthly sales totals) and upselling during the checkout process.

The results can be signficant. Our average sales value has risen from $35.48 in the January - February timeframe to an average of $101.21 in March. Now some of that increase may be seasonal but most of it is due to the introduction of some higher priced products.

Now I’m a keen believer in the benefit of the cumulative impact of very small incremental advances BUT if you can get a significant sales boost by increasing your average sales value, go for it. You’ll be glad you did!

Awhile ago I wrote of working on TheGolfCollection.com to improve sales copy. I was basing what I changed on the product detail pages on guidance from the book Call to Action. So what has happened so far?

First, there was a disturbing drop in sales conversion. This lasted for about a week. I’m not sure if the revised pages were jarring to those who had visited the site earlier or some other factor was at play. The drop in sales conversion hit most products except the first fiew I had changed. But then after a week, the sales conversion rate started to climb back and now we are running between 2% - 3% most days. Last Friday we converted at nearly 4% which is unusually high for us this time of year.

On specific product pages I worked on first, the sales conversion rates are fairly high. On one, almost 20% of all people who visited the page purchased. On that same product 100% of the people who found the page by typing in a relevant phrase purchased. So if they were looking for the product specifically, they purchased. If they were browsing through the site from another phrase (e.g. golf gifts) they had about a 12% conversion rate. Combined gets me to the near 20% quoted earlier.

The pattern I used was as follows:

Pricing, ordering and order specific information (options and where we ship to) are provided above the sales copy in a ‘just let them pee’ set up suggested by the book.

In addition to the product detail page work, changes are being made to department or category pages to improve skimming. And finally, changes were made to make the satisfaction guarantee more meaningful and easy to understand and great care was taken to ensure all references to our guarantee was made consistent in wording.

Seems to be a good approach.

In reviewing my web analytics I noticed that MSN was once again out-pulling Yahoo in sending traffic to our site. We hadn’t lost any significant Yahoo positions so I started doing a little back-tracking on the phrases that our Yahoo customers were typing in. While the phrases alone told me nothing it was looking at the Yahoo results that made my jar drop.

If you type in a low volume phrase you tend to get what I deem low quality returns. For example, on the little used phrase ‘golf toys’, Yahoo returned only 3 golf related sites and the rest were Amazon, Shopzilla, Nexttag and the like. My favorite return was it’s own listing for ecommerce solutions which has nothing to do with golf toys. If I type in a search phrase with a little more volume like ‘golf figurines’, the percentage of sites that were not of the Amazon or Shopping.com ilk rose to 60%. But that still leaves 40% of the returns of low quality.

Don’t shoppers want more than price comparison websites and Amazon (just call them the WalMart of the Internet)? I think they do and I think they are leaving Yahoo which may be why MSN traffic on our website is up. Google traffic used to be nearly 2x that of Yahoo to our site and now it’s more than 3x.

Maybe Yahoo better wake up.

During our Christmas rush, I was taken aback by how many transactions resulted in failures. The chief cause appeared to be AVS (address verification system) declines when the customer went to submit. Often the customer would retry and eventually complete the order but sometimes we lost what should have been a valid order and a happy customer.

I have heard other merchants complain about the AVS system causing failed transactions and some that I know have considered disabling it. The issue with that is you open the door to fraudulent transactions. And, with enough fraudulent transactions, your processor may drop you. That’s not good.

It took a combination of some of the points raised in the book I’ve been reading “Call to Action” and some recollection on the advice given by the late, great Ken Giddens about making the action you want your customer to take obvious to your customer to finally turn on my mental lightbulb. So if I wasn’t getting the actions I wanted often enough, what needed to change?

To understand what needed to change, I needed to see exactly why they were getting declined. The overwhelming reason was that many customers just didn’t understand that the ‘Billing Address’ needed to match what was on their credit card statment, not their current home address. So a short note to that effect was added to the ‘Billing Address’ headline verbiage. Immediately failures declined. Yeah!

Now I was able to see the next stumbling block - many folks didn’t know what their CVV2 code was or didn’t want to fill it in. Our system is set up to require the CVV2 code so leaving it empty also produced declined transactions and order failures. So when looking a the final page of check out I noticed that although the required fields had the traditional red asterick displayed next to them, apparently not everyone paid attention. So a quick addition of the traditional ‘fields marked with a * are required’ was added. Also, since many people still struggle with what the CVV2 code is and don’t understand that the question mark icon is meant to provide more information, we added a note to that effect next to the field. The net of all this is our order failure rate is almost nil now.

I love to analyze numbers. It’s a large part of what I did when I worked the Corporate gig. So it’s no surprise to find out that I’ve been spending time analyzing a whole new level of website information once we installed a new web analytics package. Here’s some of the more interesting statistics I’m seeing on TheGolfCollection.com

What does this tell me? While our top keyword positions are important and I sure don’t want to see slippage, my efforts need to be also focused on improving interior page positioning on lesser phrases. Also I’ve known for some time that we need to continue to work on our interior pages for a better call to action. I can tell we are relevant due to the interest level of our visitors based on time spent on site and number of pages viewed. But my product pages have the highest bounce rate so this is where I’m focusing my efforts.

I’ve been reading ‘Call to Action’ by the Eisenbergs and I’m working page by page to improve the call to action and ’scent trails’ on my product pages. I’m also trying to better think like my customers and provide them the information they want, when they want it. One product page I worked on early in my efforts has produced a noticable uptic in that product’s sales. I also noticed that a recent change on our checkout registration page more than tripled the percentage of customers who opted to create a log-in (versus checking out annonymously). While I find this encouraging, I need more data to tell what changes are most effective.

The goal is to bring our 2%+ conversion rate up to over 3% in 90 days or less. I’ll keep you posted.