With gas prices still hovering at $3.50 a gallon and retail stores jammed with unruly crowds, holiday shoppers are increasingly buying gifts online. This places increased pressure on your eCommerce website to convert all those website visitors into customers. Not an easy task in these days of hyper-competitive eCommerce.
A recent survey on holiday shopping trends by PriceGrabber revealed that 88 percent of shoppers will research their holiday gifts online before committing to a purchase. More than a third expect to spend up to six hours gathering information and price comparing.
Fred Lizza, CEO of Dydacomp, has worked with more than 10,000 small- to medium-sized merchants over the years. He notes that there are things you can do to make your site more buyer friendly. As an online retailer, you need to understand that customers who visit your website, may have already visited many others. He advises a number of strategies to help turn website visitors into customers.
First off, Lizza suggests designing promotions that enhance your brand’s image. You should also continually evaluate the success or failure of past promotions—be they free shipping, rewards programs, or special offers. The goal is to focus on sales incentives that work.
He puts free shipping at the top of the list of incentives that boost online sales. The PriceGrabber survey revealed that over three–fourths of those who responded indicated that free shipping would draw them to a sale. He advises merchants to take part in Free Shipping Day 2012 on December 17th. Remember to link your free shipping offers with a minimum purchase requirement.
Also on Lizza’s short list of incentives are online coupons or partnering with a vendor to provide third-party authentication of your site. He also warns about the perils of shopping cart abandonment. A 2010 Forrester Research report that revealed that 88 percent of online retail customers abandoned their online shopping carts without completing a transaction. So make sure your website is less “noisy” and change your shopping cart model.
Barnie Mills, head of design at Integrated Digital Agency and ecommerce specialist, advises businesses to split checkouts into simple steps that are easily visible from the start. Include “accelerators,” such as postcode lookup and prepopulating the delivery address with the billing address the user has entered. Provide an option to save their shopping cart for later in case buyers are interrupted and have to leave. A Paypal survey revealed that a full third of customers return to saved orders to complete their checkout. Mills also warns against making users sign up to make a purchase. He suggests giving potential buyers the option of creating an account once they have completed the checkout process. (They’ve already filled in all the relevant details, so all they have to do is simply create a password.) And do allow an alternative sign-up method, such as Facebook login.
By offering free shipping, designing targeted promotions, and making your site more buyer friendly, you can turn visitors into buyers this holiday season.
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.com
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