But many online businesses may be making it too difficult for customers to hand over the cash, which is a bad business practice by any account.

Here’s what people (especially men) are used to:

I go into a store. I see something I want to buy. I give money to the salesperson. I leave with the thing I wanted to buy.

But what they’re experiencing in online shopping is often different. It goes more like this:

I see something I want to buy. Salesperson asks if I’m a registered user before I can buy thing I want to buy. I don’t remember if I’m in their special club or not, so I try many usernames, emails, and passwords. None of them work. Did I forget my password? Maybe. I’ll tell them my email address and then I’ll go check my email to see if they sent me the magic words that will let me buy the thing I want to buy. I check my email, but regardless of whether the magic words are there, I’ve now lost interest in (run out of time for, been distracted from, irritated about) buying the thing I had wanted to buy because they made it too much trouble to give them my money and leave with the thing I wanted to buy.

Okay, here are some concrete numbers:

• 75: The percentage of those clicking the “forgot password” button that don’t come back to finish the purchase.
• 23: The percentage of those abandoning the checkout process at the first sign of a registration prompt.
• 45: The percentage of registered customers who have bad memories and register multiple times, some as many as 10 times, meaning sites requiring registration might have inflated data.
• 300 million: The number of lost dollars one major retailer found after taking away the registration button.

Here’s a money quote:

"I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something." – Customer wanting to give money to retailer to buy the thing they wanted to buy.

Best course of action:

Make it easier for people to give you their money by not requiring they register to do so. Give them a choice to register so that it’s easier for them to give you their money more often in the future or to proceed to checkout where they can give you their money immediately without the hassle of becoming your friend.

Don’t believe me? Read these posts and decide for yourself:

The $300 Million Button
Required Registration Lowers Online Conversion Rates
Top 10 Online Retailers
Checkout Inspiration From Top Converting Sites

*Energy, lending, insurance, telecom, and cable businesses excluded.
 

Today the BBC unveiled a new look to the BBC News website.

It’s a refreshing update. I visit very few websites these days and BBC News is one of them (it’s actually the home page in my browser).

I like the new design. I left a comment (#75) on the post at The Editors to say so, including my only critique that the use of two BBC logos so close together clashed visually.

Being the BBC and how so many people have strong opinion about what they do, the announcement post has attracted a lot of comments. As comments are moderated, it’s been interesting seeing the total comment count jump dramatically every 10 or 15 minutes (as I write this, it’s up to 162). Clearly someone at the BBC is working flat out behind the scenes.

Plenty of criticism – you can’t please everybody – with some good suggestions among them. I’m sure the BBC is listening and it will be interesting to see if any of them are acted on.

One I’m certain will be is the large number of complaints about the weather.

Rather, the link to weather forecasts which, with the old design, was prominent and easy to find. With the new design, there is no obvious link other than the customization option you have one click down the screen (and I like this option a lot).

Heh! You know that all is well with the world if the complaints you get about something are all to do with the weather, no matter what else is going on.

In any case, congratulations, BBC, nice job.

Comments

The reader was right. There are other parties involved. For example web designers or marketing people may specify an all Flash site, without any provisions made for giving the search engines anything that they can read to understand about the site. This puts any SEO efforts into a deep, deep hole.

Sometimes you run into clients that obsess about the ranking of a single search term, too. When you focus all your efforts on ranking for one term it becomes a bit like getting all your revenue from one customer. Great while it lasts, but if that customer ever stops working with you your business dissappears. Or, in our example, when you lose position for that one term, you are just as hosed.

In this latter case, you are much better off focusing SEO efforts on growing the relevant traffic to the site from search engines across an array of search terms. This is easily measurable, and provides a solid basis for obtaining a return on your search engine optimization efforts. Not only that, fluctuation on a single term will not dismember your business.

Note that I do not mean to suggest that you shouldn’t have major terms you look to win on with your site. It’s just a mistake to approach one term with a singular focus. There is so much other traffic out there that can be easily obtained. In addition, in my experience, the bigger volume terms are often poorer converting because they tend to the ones used by people who are in an earlier stage of the buying process.

Leaving the designer (and marketing) out of the process is also a mistake. There are broader business and branding goals for many web sites. These deserve careful consideration. Left to themselves, SEO and development might develop an easily maintained web site that is beautifully structured to get traffic from search engines, but, that does not meet the broader objectives of the company (and that may not convert well).

So the marketing people and the designer need to be a part of the process too. The bottom line is that nothing can happen in a vaccuum. There is a lot of interaction between the various disciplines that are involved in the web site. Each of these groups has a duty to educate the others about their concerns, and why various factors are important to them.

Comments

Still, the potentially neat thing about the redesign is its ever-changing nature.  “msnbc.com is able to creatively shift layouts and rich media surrounding news content as it happens,” said the company in a statement.  “Unlike limited templates used by most news sites, msnbc.com’s new platform enables its editors and designers to create new layouts at break-neck speed to surround its compelling stories with a range of high quality video, photography, slide shows, graphics, audio and more.”

Also, people associated with the site appear quite open to suggestions – Wells, along with Editor in Chief Jennifer Sizemore, invited comments following their posts about the redesign.

None of this is enough to draw me away from the BBC.  Still, it’s nice to see the hard work and innovation that went into MSNBC.com, and the redesign is sure to earn it some new followers.

The three percent conversion average is also consistent across studies by different organizations, according to e-Marketer. That means that 97 percent of shoppers still prefer to buy offline.

Still, there are a few that convert 15-25 percent of the time. Proflowers.com is on top, with a 24.5 percent conversion rate. Following Proflowers is, mainly, apparel sites with a peppering of bookstores and online variety (read: cheap) shops.

Big and Tall or Plus-sized apparel shops are huge online, and sites offering higher sizes make up four out of the top ten converting web stores. That makes sense given the embarrassment overweight people face shopping offline.

There are things we can deduce about the average online shopper from this information (and they’re things that should make intuitive sense to you, as you are also a consumer). The average online shopper seeks: low risk (how much risk is in flowers?); trusted sources; reliability; ease of shopping; information; free or cheap shipping.

I’m not shy about telling you that I fall into the 97 percent reluctant to buy anything beyond flowers, clothing, books, or items of comparable expense. I am looking to buy an HDTV, but you’d have to have a heck a sales pitch to get me to slap down my credit card number and have it shipped to my house without actually looking at the picture quality.

That’s right. No cars, no TVs, no boats, no houses. And yet, and yet, to quote my hero Jorge Borges, I may be persuaded to buy a watch, a set of tires even, perhaps a new Christmas tree, or maybe even that TV I didn’t want to trust you about, if the seller accomplishes certain things.

How to Convince Me (the consumer) to Buy Online Instead of Off:

1.    Website must look professional. The art of seduction always begins with presentation. Sloppy never gets the girls.

2.    Don’t make me look a hundred different places for information. Give me product details until you’ve made me sick with them. Link to product reviews.

3.    Don’t try to be slick by overselling an inferior product. Be honest about why it’s not as good as the higher-priced item. The consumer (that’s me and you) appreciates being able to balance value and affordability. 

4.    Make all serious considerations clear. It builds trust. For example, if the TV’s refurbished or needs an external tuner, let us know up front.

5.    Shipping cost matters. It matters a lot. If I can get the same product at Target for the SAME or lower, I will buy it there. Don’t try to trick me with giant discounts offset with huge shipping costs – it makes me think you’re tying to pull a fast one.

6.    Ease my mind more about the shipping. I worry when kids, wives, mothers, siblings, and products are in transit. I need to know returning the product won’t be a hassle, that I can track it in case something seems lost in the shuffle, and that the seller won’t ship-and-stick me with something I didn’t order.

7.    There needs to be positive user ratings about you and your product easily found. Link me to where people say nice things about you. Link me to where people say nice things about your product.

8.    If you have a sale price, don’t just mark through the original price and make me click to find the new one. That’s annoying and wastes my time – and forms a (small) negative impression.

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.

10.    Under-promise, over-deliver, and then deliver, deliver, deliver some more. As an online retailer, you online reputation is the most valuable web property you have. If you get customers gushing about you, other customers will come.     

Drost is the owner of iSiteBuild.com, and his article is available through the Web Host Directory. His first suggestion is to “create search engine friendly pages.” “Each web page should contain your targeted keyword phrases” in order to accomplish this and win higher search engine rankings, he writes.

Moving down the list to number three, Drost recommends that you “redirect non www pages to www pages.” This is a good idea, he explains, because “search engines will view your site as having duplicate pages if this is not done.” And search engines tend not to like duplicate content.

The ninth tip might be obvious, but it still needs to be followed. “Check for broken links,” Drost writes. “Search engine spiders will have a difficult time indexing all pages on your web site if it finds broken links.” They might frustrate your site’s visitors, as well.

As his eleventh and sixteenth suggestions, Drost says that use of flash and images, respectively, should be limited. They “are not search engine friendly” because the “primary food” of search engines’ spiders is content. Flash, as well as a large picture or many smaller ones, can also slow down a site too much for visitors with dial-up.

For a more in-depth discussion of these points, and to see the rest of Drost’s suggestions, you can check out his article. Happy site-designing.

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

The site itself is, of course, a key component in all of this. A good site will result in more hits and more customers.

Search engines have made fairly clear (in some cases, anyway) what they don’t want in a site. Avoid duplicate content, keyword stuffing, link spamming, and the like.

Reams have been written about how to get a high ranking; read these, and consider the advice with an objective mind.

Once an individual comes to your site, you need to make sure it is accessible to them. A home page with a 20-second load time will only discourage first-time visitors.

Try to keep things simple, while still maintaining an attractive layout. And please, please, please, avoid errors in spelling and grammar.

Earning the consumer’s trust is another component. Allowing customers to post reviews and recommendations is a common way to showcase a business’s honesty.

You should also clearly present any security certifications, warranties, or guarantees that your site can offer.

At the same time, don’t get too personal. Many people don’t like to register with sites in order to make a purchase.

On that note – ask the opinion of individuals who are not necessarily experts in your field or familiar with the technology. Their fresh eyes can pick up things that you never thought twice about.

A useful (and much longer) list of suggestions can be found here.

In the words of Red Green, “Keep your stick on the ice.”

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.