Make Prices readily available and easy to find
Many people are using the web for price comparison and research. This means that, unless you have a single unique product, your customers are going to judge you as much on price as anything else at your store. In today’s world people hit a web page and make a decision on where and what to click next within 4-15 seconds. Do you want the conversion?
Case in point: The worse usability idea ever was seen during the Christmas shopping season last year. The day after Thanksgiving (the single busiest shopping day in the US) Circuit City decided to force all visitors to add items to their shopping cart prior to seeing the “deal” price. This meant you had to register before you could find out how much an XBOX costs. It took almost 5-8 clicks to actually see a price. By the time you completed this asinine process you were to tired to buy.
Read MoreOnline Sales - Simple things sell Better
An article in “Practical Web Design” magazine from December of 2006 talks about the “Appropriateness of the product to the medium”.
A graphic from that article has been recreated and placed here for reference.
In general, the higher the cost of the purchase relative to the complexity of the checkout process will make your product much more difficult to sell online. Higher priced products with a more complex purchase process will enjoy its best conversion rates through a face-to-face sell (Real Estate and Automobiles) while lower priced products with an easy purchase process are much more successful online (Books, Software and Music).
Read MoreConversion Matters - Remove Barriers
Make it quick and easy for people to purchase your product. Don’t make them fill out more information than is absolutely necessary to process the order. Don’t force them to opt-in to your newsletter. Don’t make them provide shipping details for software download. Most online credit card processing companies can determine the type of credit card (i.e. Visa, Mastercard) from the number. Don’t force your customer to select a credit card type. It an unnecessary step. If you sell software online, take a tip from these guys.
Read MoreRetail Business Online - Only take credit cards
Save yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and only accept online credit card orders. You may loose 10% in overall revenue (potential profit) from those who may purchase in another way, but you also loose 40% in customer service and time costs (expense) dealing with those who “don’t get it”. That’s a 30% revenue increase.
Read More