Category

Conversion

Fewer than 5% of visitors to an ecommerce site typically convert to customers. In this Conversion category, we offer insights to increase that percentage. Our expert contributors address ratings and reviews, social proof, site search, product page enhancements, product descriptions, checkout options, live chat, and much more — anything to help close online sales.

Analytics & Data | Checkout Tactics | Customer Retention | Customer Service | Photography & Video | Product Pages

Conversion
Diversify Traffic + Cultivate Subscribers = Win Big in Ebiz

November 6, 2006 • PEC Staff

The Amazon River starts as a drop of rain falling into a tiny trickle of a stream way up in the mountains of South America. At its end, the Amazon pumps up to 300,000 cubic meters of water into the Atlantic Ocean every second during the rainy season. To build from a trickle to a torrent...
Conversion
A Win-Win Situation: Why Affiliate Marketing Works

November 6, 2006 • PEC Staff

Affiliate marketing can be a profitable venture for you, as a merchant or affiliate. It presents you with a great opportunity to increase revenue, and build valuable business relationships. Affiliate Benefits and Resources As an affiliate partner, you're capitalizing on traffic you al...
Conversion
A Closer Look at Microsoft adCenter

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Microsoft adCenter was officially launched in May 2006 after a nine-month beta period in the U.S. Surprisingly, however, many business owners and advertisers are not aware of its existence, and, among those who are, some are hesitant to try it out. While Google and Yahoo! have had pay...
Conversion
Usability Report Card: Hummerpartsclub.com

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

In this Usability Report Card, we’re taking a look at Hummer Parts Club, an ecommerce store selling accessories for the full range of Hummers. I realize Hummers aren’t as innocuous as headsets or vinyl toys, but let’s put the politics aside and concentrate on improving an ecommerce stor...
Conversion
Six Tips For The Holidays

November 1, 2006 • Mat Greenfield

With the holiday shopping season upon us, the size of the ecommerce pie increases significantly. Here are some tips to make sure you get your fair slice: Create seasonal special offers Applying the concept of “showing visitors what they are looking for” is always important, but perhap...
Conversion
Sales Tax Initiative Still Initiating

November 1, 2006 • Michael A. Cox

Ever since the Supreme Court of the United States put the burden back on the states to come up with a way to collect sales tax on millions of Internet sales, the Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP) has been chipping away at the monumental task of getting 50 states and more than 7,000 t...
Conversion
Product Sourcing: Online Consignment Business

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Consignment is a simple concept: taking other people’s products and selling them for a percentage of the sale. According to Skip McGrath, of Skipmcgrath.com, a successful eBay PowerSeller, “[Consignment selling] is the fastest-growing phenomenon on eBay.” The key to successful online co...
Conversion
Multichannel Tools

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Research indicates that multichannel shoppers are more valuable than customers who shop via a single sales channel, but findings by San Francisco-based firm Modalis Research Technologies show that multichannel buyers expect the company to know everything about their transaction history ...
Conversion
Marketplaces: A Great Entry Point

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

If a merchant is wanting to begin selling online or take a small step toward diversifying into new sales channels, one of the public marketplaces, namely eBay and Amazon, is typically a safe environment for rookies. Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, says that, as a general rule, his f...
Conversion
Catalogs Make A Comeback

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Ecommerce is to traditional business methods what a sci-fi cruiser is to a Model T. It’s all about technology, convenience, responsiveness—up-to-date stuff light years away fromthe sepia-toned days ofmail-order catalogs. Or so it would seem. But consider this: the humble catalog is onc...
Conversion
Comparison Shopping Sites

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

With millions of ready-to-buy consumers turning to shopping comparison sites, experts advise retailers to consider participating in one of the Internet's newest sales channels. Shopping comparison sites like Yahoo! Shopping, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, NexTag, Froogle, Jellyfish and other...
Conversion
What Is Multichannel Selling?

November 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Defining multichannel selling has taken a new twist in recent years, but the end result is the same for merchants — getting products to sell in the hands of potential customers. In the old days (about 10 years ago), multichannel selling consisted of two options — brick-and-mortar stores...
Conversion
Why Your Business Should Be Blogging

October 23, 2006 • PEC Staff

Whereas letter writing was the primary method of communicating with friends, family, heads of state, and businesses 150 years ago, today's blogs have become a major means of interpersonal and mass communication. Before there was telephone or TV or Internet, people actually enjoyed lette...
Conversion
Pay-Per-Call: A Smarter Way to Advertise

October 23, 2006 • PEC Staff

Pay-per-call has been one of the trends in online marketing recently. In fact, pay-per-performance advertising, overall, is gaining ground as more and more businesses discover the high value proposition it provides. Different search engines are incorporating this type of marketing, incl...
Conversion
Language Translation Creates New Options

October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

For English, press one. Para español, la prensa dos.” The familiarity of this everyday message shows us how companies are increasingly recognizing the need to alter their business practices to reach new demographics through multilingual communications. No speak English According to t...
Conversion
Use “Human Optimization” for Search Engines

October 1, 2006 • Mat Greenfield

I read with interest this month that Google has filed a patent to allow it to add a human-review element to their search results. This represents the next step in a series of interesting developments that I have watched closely for the past few years. But in order to explain, let me bac...
Conversion
Should You Add SEO To Your Marketing Efforts?

October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Pay-per-click advertising is, no doubt, one of the most effective ways of getting new leads and prospects to come to your website. Within a period of 24 hours, any business—large or small—can appear at the top positions for any keyword that’s applicable to their business. However, it d...
Conversion
Tradeshows The Right Way

October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

For online retailers, tradeshows are an incredible opportunity to source goods, connect with wholesalers and manufacturers, and expand their product lines. There is a right way and a wrong way to attend tradeshows. To get the most out of your experience, you need to prepare. Your first...
Conversion
Tuning Up Your Checkout Process

October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

One of the most important factors to optimizing conversion is fine tuning the shopping cart and checkout process. Sales are won or lost within this crucial component of your site, and it is critical to examine the data that will unlock the mysteries of visitor behavior within this proce...
Conversion
Usability Report Card: Headsets.com

October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Earlier this year, Headsets.com was calling the checkout button "save to cart." We commented on this horrid usability, and the company let us know it made a change when they redesigned the site. Headsets.com is selling mostly to small to medium businesses, so the site must appeal more t...
Conversion
Email as a Mini-sale

October 1, 2006 • Kerry Murdock

Sales professionals have a notion of “mini-sales.” A mini-sale occurs when a prospect agrees to learn more about you or your product, but has not yet agreed to a purchase. Say, for example, that you sell cleaning supplies to restaurants. You may call a restaurant owner and ask him to p...
Conversion
Forums Offer Interactivity

October 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

If you're looking for an easy way to make your business’ website more interactive, consider adding a bulletin board or a forum. They’re different names for the same thing, an application you can add to your site allowing visitors to leave messages and interact with each other. You can e...
Conversion
Gaining Insight Into Live Chat

October 1, 2006 • Kevin Gold

The irony of “live chat” is that there most likely isn't any “chat” at all. Live chat is usually a text-based communication that happens online between a customer and a merchant. It's akin to the instant messaging youmight do with a friend through Apple's iChat or AOL's InstantMessenger...
Conversion
Ten Ways to Grow Your Online Store Sales, Part 3

September 18, 2006 • PEC Staff

We covered the importance of keywords and content in our first installment and we covered customer testimonials, offering multiple payment options, diversifying sales channels and conducting pay-per-click campaigns in our last installment. In this, our final installment, we'll look at a...
Conversion
Ten Ways to Grow Your Online Store Sales, Part 2

September 11, 2006 • PEC Staff

We covered the importance of keywords and content in last week's installment. Today, let's take a look at four more important ways to grow your online sales: customer testimonials, offering multiple payment options, diversifying sales channels and conducting pay-per-click campaigns. Cu...
Customer Service
Who Runs Your Business?

September 1, 2006 • Pamela Hazelton

I love to cook. It’s something my husband knows well, and new friends learn quickly. Those visiting my home think I’m going out of my way, but to cook a savory meal, regardless of the time it takes, is how I relax. I’ve been known to make specialty pies I don’t even eat only to call the...
Conversion
A One-Second Review

September 1, 2006 • Mat Greenfield

I was recently reading a study published earlier this year by Carleton University in Ottawa. They suggest that web visitors make an instant assessment of the overall “quality” of a website in less than a second. This contradicts conventional wisdom that suggests you have 6-8 seconds to ...
Conversion
Customer Conversion: Testing Brings Science To Marketing

September 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

There are two things every ecommerce business should strive to achieve. The first is increasing conversion, turning a higher percentage of browsers into buyers. The second is optimizing marketing spend, driving higher rates of return from existing advertising dollars being spent. The m...
Conversion
Email Marketing: Open-Rates and Click-Throughs

September 1, 2006 • Kerry Murdock

The "FROM:" line in an email is the most important factor to getting it opened. “Email marketers should use a consistent ‘From:’ address, and it must be recognizable to their customers,” says Gail Goodman, chief executive officer of Constant Contact, a self-service email-marketing firm...
Conversion
Usability Report Card: FugitiveToys.com

September 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Josh Pigford was confident enough to put his site, Fugitivetoys.com up for the inaugural “Usability Report Card.” While a lot of attention is paid to search engine optimization and online advertising, usability is sometimes given the cold shoulder by small ecommerce businesses. However,...

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