marketing & sales

If you sell products online, whether it’s a single product or tens of thousands, there are many things that you can change on your website that will increase your sales, even if you maintain the same amount of website traffic.  This process is called Conversion Rate Optimization and is a highly measurable area of internet marketing that you can spend a lot of time focusing on.

Here are 21 key things you need to consider to sell products online…

1. Make sure every product has its own page.
2. Feature a unique description of each product you sell- do not cut and paste the manufacturers copy.
   1. User reviews will not only give you more unique content for this product but will help to push other people over the buying tipping point.
   2. Use a simple shopping cart system. The more pages and clicks between clicking “add to cart” and completing payment, the more opportunities people will have to abandon their cart.
   3. Three weeks after the transaction – email your customer and ask them to leave a review of the product they just bought (feedback loop, see above).
   4. Give an incentive to your clients to leave reviews of products on your website with a giveaway e.g. Win a $200 voucher for the best review this month.
   1. Use Crazy Egg analytics to monitor how people consume your sales pages: how far do they scroll down, what are they clicking on, etc.
   2. Produce product tour or product review videos – these will help drive up the conversion rate as they allow people to really see the product.
   3. If you are out of stock – offer to take customer details and call them back when you have stock available.
   4. Make sure your website is fast.  For every second it takes your page to load – you have just lost an impatient customer (aim for 3 seconds – 6 or more seconds is too slow).  You can monitor your site speed through Google Analytics.
   5. Monitor what people are searching for on your website – you might find demand for products you don’t (yet) carry or you may find that people are misspelling certain product names.
   6. Make sure you have a blog where you talk about your product range, discounts and offers and exciting new products that you will be stocking soon.
   7. If you only take PayPal as a payment, ensure that you test the design of your checkout page, do you look trustworthy?