Canadian Retailer - Summer 2013 - 24

MYSTORE retailer's Guide vOL. 9.3: e-COMMeRCe

And be sure to either train someone in your organization to be proficient in its use or hire a
consultant who can help you manage what can
sometimes be a complex bit of software.
It’s also helpful to make a clear distinction between a tip (a singular change) and strategy (a
means by which to achieve results). A tip would
be changing a single element on your website
like increasing the size of the product images.
The strategy to determine whether the size
change affects the conversion rate is A-B Testing.
Red Eye, a UK-based web-optimization company, released an excellent report in 2012 that
provides great insight into strategies to increase conversion rates (www.redeye.com/thefive-best-ways-to-improve-website-conversion). In the report, Red Eye describes five ways
to improve your website’s conversion rates. The
recommendations are an excellent summary of
some of the best practices that can be applied to
your e-commerce strategy.

developing a successful
e-commerce website is a long
journey and it should be treated
as a process with a budget that
will allow for strategy, benchmarks
and testing. the most successful
e-commerce retailers are those who
are extremely organized and set out
quarterly goals and budgets…
1. Responsibility 

It’s important to have a champion within the
company that will be in charge of activity related to increasing your website’s conversion rate.
Operating an e-commerce site is similar to operating a bricks and mortar store. It needs to be
managed and staffed by trained professionals.
Those who perform best are the ones who
have dedicated the necessary resources (both
staff and finances) to ensuring that their website
is continually improving. It’s generally recommended to allocate double the development cost
of the website into staff and marketing. So, be
prepared to budget appropriately for the proper
maintenance of your website once development
has ended. When you’re ready to improve your
e-commerce site, you can find a comprehensive
checklist of activities and responsibilities here:
www.idealever.com/internet-marketing/resources/white-papers.htm.
24 |

canadian retailer | summer 2013 | www.retailcouncil.org/cdnretailer

2. a Structured approach 

Developing a successful e-commerce website is a long journey and it should be treated
as a process with a budget that will allow for
strategy, benchmarks and testing. The most
successful e-commerce retailers are those who
are extremely organized and set out quarterly
goals and budgets that are managed by a dedicated e-commerce team. And, they often have
a list of improvements, tests and features that
are developed, just as often resulting in impressive incremental returns.
3. Testing 

According to the Red Eye report, companies
that had improved their conversion results in
the previous 12 months did 24 per cent more
testing than those who showed no improvement in conversion. And those who had large
increases in sales did nearly twice as many
tests as the average companies.
A relatively easy test to conduct is related to
determining the best placement of the checkout
button on your website. First, settle on the design and location of the button on the variable
page, and then set up the parameters of the test
in Google’s Website Optimizer feature in Google Analytics. Over a short period of time (perhaps two weeks), Google will randomly serve
the existing design and placement of the checkout button to approximately half the visitors and
the test design to the other 50 per cent. It’s often
found that by prominently placing the checkout
button in the header next to the “View Basket”
link, retailers are able to increase the conversion
rate by more than 25 per cent . *see infographic
on the following page for a selection of industry
conversion-rate benchmarks.
4. Usability Testing 

This testing involves a constant refinement
of the user experience as it relates to getting
the visitor to complete the purchase. This kind
of testing is best performed one-on-one by analyzing how your site design is performing and
by studying how users actually navigate your
website. In this type of testing it is important to
compare the user behavior with analytics data.
For example, your analytics data can show
that your site visitors are abandoning the
shopping cart in step 2, but it cannot show the
reason they are leaving. By watching a person
navigate the shopping cart live, you observe
that he or she is trying to go back to see the
contents of the shopping cart, but can’t find an
easy way to do that, so the user leaves. These

http://(www.redeye.com/thefive-best-ways-to-improve-website-conversion http://www.idealever.com/internet-marketing/resources/white-papers.htm http://www.retailcouncil.org/cdnretailer

Canadian Retailer - Summer 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Canadian Retailer - Summer 2013