Is Your Site Ready for the Holidays?
The holiday season is usually when businesses finally go into the black. Are you prepared to get that paper?
When was the last time you looked at your analytics? Do you know your shopping cart abandonment rate? How many people bounce just before completing a purchase? If you’re of the set it and forget it mindset then you might have a crummy Christmas this year.
Check out Luke’s excellent introduction to Analytics from last week to get caught up.
Shopping Cart Analytics
Most people have analytics installed, but they don’t usually set up a conversion funnel. The conversion funnel will track each step of the sales process and let you know who decides to leave before checking out and at what step of the process that happened. This data can be invaluable to finding and addressing issues that are keeping users from happily giving you all of their money.
Usability
Usability testing is so important. Your site may technically work, but if it’s confusing to your users then it’s not going to do you much good.
Sites like Amazon may not be the prettiest, but they’ve set the standard of what consumers expect from shopping sites. If you’re placing your “add to cart” button below the fold or not letting people check out as a guest then you’re doing it wrong.
You can get your mom to do usability testing for you, but she’ll probably say that your site is perfect and that she’s so proud of you. Invest in some real usability testing. I’ve personally seen sales double just from changing the wording on a button. Doesn’t that sound nice?
Shopping Cart Abandonment
We’ve featured the shopping cart abandonment infographic before, but in case you missed it here it is.
In a nutshell you need to follow the KISS principle and make it as easy as possible for people to convert so everyone can have a wonderful holiday season.
BONUS CONTENT
Rich Snippet Markup
Rich snippets look like this
Doesn’t that look enticing? The addition of the ratings, reviews & price (among other things) can be achieved with most structured data markup like Schema, RDFa, Microdata, etc. If you can get your listing to explode like this you’re doing 2 things:
- Taking up more of the SERP real estate
- Making your listing more appealing to the user
Don’t worry if it’s confusing, your website developer should be aware of what this is and how to implement it. If they’re not then give us a call, we do it all the time.
