Ecommerce sites have created some of the greatest success stories in the world wide web. Just think Amazon and eBay, and you’ll start to get an idea of how many dollars are generated through ecommerce and the associated web marketing. It’s actually likely that the cheapness, availability and choice that buying on the internet provides, actually boosts the number of dollars spent worldwide and shores up the world’s biggest economies.

SEO

How healthy is your website's shopping cart?

So how do you get a slice of the pie?! If you have an ecommerce site, today we are looking at 3 big tips to make life easy for your customers, and therefore sell more online.

1. Look at what happens after the click

There aren’t many actions that you should take without first investigating them. When it comes to ecommerce, it is vitally important to see what visitors do after they land on your site.  What is your bounce rate like? What pages do they go to most? What pages do most people exit from? This information forms the building blocks of a successful ecommerce site.

Smart ecommerce sites (and those with a reasonable marketing budget) can also gain plenty of benefit from customized usability testing, eyetracking studies and heat mapping.

2. Add ratings and recommendations … and personalize them

The easiest way to understand this tip is to think of how Amazon interacts with you. If you have an ecommerce site of your own, but no experience with Amazon, go check it out now! While there are some complaints about their site, they generally represent the embodiment of best practices in ecommerce.

Amazon provides personalized recommendations for new products based on what a user has viewed before, and what they have bought before. eBay now does the same.

You can also provide ratings from other users based on a person’s behavior on your site – don’t wait for them to click through to a product page to find out that other people love a product.

3. Add a Live Help function

Most of the problems that people encounter with ecommerce sites can be overcome, or at least mitigated, by offering a Live Help service. When something happens that a consumer isn’t expecting, they don’t have to go searching for their product all over again at a different site. That is actually a lot of work – though it is possible. Live Help keeps customers on-site, even if:

  • There isn’t enough product information on a description page
  • An error occurs during checkouot
  • Return policy is not clearlt stated
  • People need to enquire about shipping
  • The product is expensive
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