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Reaching Your Audience Through Online Video
Internet video is continuing to grow by leaps and bounds. -
Yahoo Reveals SEM of Re-Brand
Near the end of September, Yahoo began a new branding campaign in an... -
Search + Social = Better ROI
Are you utilizing search and social media together? According to Lee...
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10 Comments
major issue for consumer
this is a major issue, consumer buying online, is not easy they dont like to put their personal info they are afraid by fraud.
Miscalculation
I agree with the person who says that 3% conversion rate does not mean that 97% prefer to buy offline, because of these 97%, there are many (unknown percent) who will not buy neither online or offline.
Convince Shoppers
Higher conversions
Thats very interesting that conversions have not increased, you would think that the general increase in acceptance of the Internet as a place to purchase items would have changed those numbers.
Stats dont match up
Actually, the conversion numbers make sense, but I don't follow how if only 3% convert on any given site, then that means that 97% shop offline.
What is not taken into account is of course that many of thsoe dont pursue the product at all - online or offline. Of the 97% that do not purchase the product on the site, or navigate to a competitor site, maybe only 20% go on to purchase the product offline, where the other 77% simply found the product itself did not offer what they wanted, or was too expensive. More and more this is the case where consumers find products online as opposed to seeing them on tv or in malls which used to be the case...
Value added services help
Another component to help shoppers buy online is to add value added services to the package. Adding free ebooks, items, memberships to hrder to find information and services often tips the scales in favor of a purchase.
Services Conversion
I just would like to link this article not only to retail but also to services. It is very applicable. In addition, if services offered in a local market conversion is significantly higher then 2-3%, conversion rate in my experience is above 15%. More and more I can see indications that local online marketing is only going to grow. Also, lower conversion rate in retail can be explained by higher competition and over saturation of some product categories (jewelry is a best example). For example, jewelry is the fastest growing category at Amazon, eBay and other online retailers. Jewelry sales increased in past 3 years from 1 to 4 billion a year, at the same time conversion rate stayed the same for majority of merchants and number of jewelry online merchants increased dramatically.
Armen
http://www.exactlead.com
Good article and I tend to
Good article and I tend to agree with everything you say; although, I thought it was funny that your example of the company with the highest conversion rate (ProFlowers) actually has a 7 step purchase process.
"9. Don't make it complicated to buy from you. More than four steps to make a purchase? Forget it, just because your site's a pain in the butt."
Sometimes best practices aren't necessarily best ;)
nice catch
good call, Dave V. guess that's an exception to the rule...and i would find that extremely annoying still.
i would still say it's risky to complicate your buying process...that's my story and i'm sticking to it
Agree
> i would still say it's
> risky to complicate your buying
> process...that's my story
> and i'm sticking to it
As a rule of thumb I definitely agree, but I think the lesson here is that not every technique works for ever site.
I recently added a step in our signup process (from 2 to 3 steps) and saw our conversions rates increase. I think if you add value for the user an extra step in the signup process can be beneficial.
There's also the issue of breaking up a long signup form with multiple steps, but that's a whole other article ;)
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