5 Easy Ways to Improve Your ECommerce Site

There are 173 days till Christmas & the holidays. What have you done to fix nagging problems with your eCommerce website?

Many of the problems your eCommerce site has are longer term projects that may take major projects to fix. But making incremental but substantial improvements to your site, that will increase conversions and reduce cart abandonment may take little effort.

Here are 4 relatively easy to fix problems that can be addressed without writing detailed specs for your IT group.

1. Make sure you have a SSL, security certificate in plain sight for visitors to see. Better yet, use an EV SSL, which turns the visitors address bar green with a lock indicating a trusted site. Verisign has a study stating an average increase in conversions of greater than 17% for sites using an EV SSL. There are of course many other trusted names in online security including Comodo, GeoTrust to name a few.

2. Upgrade Your Product Descriptions. Do your product descriptions follow common sense usability guidelines? Your headlines and copy should immediately let the visitor know they are on the right page! Your product descriptions should:

  • Have a headline that says they’ve found what they are looking for
  • Be easy to scan
  • Be increasingly more informative as you go do the page
  • Reflect answers to the most common concerns about a product category
  • Have the best photography you can afford
  • Have an easy way to get more information via Chat, Email, Forum or Reviews

3. Get Rid of Rabbit Holes. Rabbit hole refers to reaching the end of a product page description and giving the visitor nowhere to go next. Most eCommerce software or services give you the ability to put “like products” or “more in category” links or images at the bottom of the product description page. If yours does not, add them manually to the description. It may not be the easiest thing to do, but it will help keep visitors engaged and on the site, increasing your chance of a sale.

4.  Text Size. Don’t make your text so difficult to read that visitors give up and leave your site. Too many web sites use text that is too small to read or has inadequate contrast, medium gray text on a light gray background. Don’t give visitors a reason to find your product, or your competitors on another site.

5.  Social Media integration. Reviews are great to have on your site, but may take a long time to integrate and can be costly to manage. Integration of Social Media is inexpensive and relativley easier to manage. If you are a B2C site use the Facebook Like button. If your site is B2B use the LinkedIn share button. These add an incredible amount of trust to your site that will increase online sales, and decrease abandonment.

There are of course other changes you can make. What you do depends on your overall  The key is to identify the low-hanging, high impact items and check them off your list before the holidiay arrive.

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