How many times have you been enticed into buying a quirky table lamp online that looked and sounded so good that you simply could not resist yourself from adding it to your shopping cart online?

How many times do you check the product specs when ordering a gadget online?

If you pause to think about it, you will realise that a considerable chunk of your online shopping game is played out through reading the specific and detailed product descriptions of the things that you wish to purchase online.

Leading market surveyors Salsify reported that more than 87% of the online shoppers place a high value on product descriptions as important factors for making a decision regarding a purchase.

The stats are actually tipped in favour of the importance of having well-written product descriptions for your products and services. Here are some quick stats about the importance of product descriptions in the minds of your oh-so-valued customers.

• The young guns or the millennial generation consumers are 40% more likely to be influenced by impressive product descriptions that they see online

• The most desired types of information that consumers seek about the products that they view online are product descriptions (76%), reviews (71%) and images (66%) – in that order.

• 50% of the online shoppers have returned the products they purchased stating the reason that the goods did not match the descriptions

The need for having unambiguous and clearly-worded product descriptions that include the technical details of your products and also factor in the keywords for SEO is thus the need of the day if you wish to rake in more business for your ecommerce enterprise.

Why do you need engaging product descriptions?

Getting creative with your product descriptions is an exercise that you should try out at frequent intervals. If you are wondering why you should be going into all that trouble for composing product descriptions by yourself when you can simply rehash the manufacturer’s catalogue descriptions, you should be revising that strategy right now.

While regurgitating product specifications may seem tempting especially if you are keen to start out your ecommerce business right away, it is usually inadvisable. The two reasons that you should not be lifting off the manufacturer’s catalogue content as your product descriptions are:

(i)  Search engines HATE duplicate content for it confuses them. They cannot decide which page(s) featuring same content should be ranked higher in the SERPs and thus do not provide positive rankings to any of the pages. This results in your rankings falling a few places and affecting your visibility the wrong way, making your online marketing strategies a total dud.

(ii) Manufacturer’s catalogues usually focus on the many specifications of the products and are heavy in technical jargon. When you display a product on your page as an online marketer, you should be focussing on the perks that those product specs bring for your customers, so they are enticed into purchasing your product.

You can cash in on the benefits of having splendid product descriptions by tying it to your overall marketing strategy for better conversion rates. Here is why you should be paying much more importance to your product descriptions for the growth of your business right from today to cash in on the immense potential they have to offer.

They allure your customers

Whether you sell apparel or pet accessories online, you should focus on the factor that you need more customers to visit your website to purchase your product. Attractive and high-resolution images work fine as a part of the product descriptions, but you need rocking content to complement those images as well. Studies show that a large number of consumers read the product descriptions very carefully before making a purchase, so why not pay attention to how you market your products and services to them? You should ideally be aiming for product descriptions that make the customers want to buy your products right there and right then.

They help in brand-building

If you are a small online retail chain slowly working your way up the ecommerce ladder, refurbishing your product descriptions may rake in more revenue for you, and here’s why.

Since product descriptions are a detailed account of what you sell and the exact contents of your products, you will be able to spread brand awareness through them as well.

While stashing in too much product specs is not the way to have ideal product descriptions, you should be aiming for the optimum mix of technical lingo merged with marketing catch phrases and keywords to turn the tables in your favour.

Harp on the many benefits that your products will bring to the lives of your consumers, and you will have created the cornerstone for your brand to stand the test of time.

They work wonders with SEO

Since you get to have the upper hand when it comes to composing product descriptions, you can play around with inviting terms, a refreshed vocabulary and of course, keywords.

While optimising your website for search engines relies heavily on the use of keywords relevant to your domain, you might think that your rankings will suffer in case you do not have a lot of content on your page right now.

This is especially true for the small and medium businesses who somehow fail to make it to the big league due to the lack of content on their web pages.

A way around this problem is to include the in-demand keywords in your product descriptions, so your SEO strategy works with clockwork precision and results in getting more traffic your way.

Smart online marketers truly understand the potential of product descriptions, and looking at some of the bigwigs’ websites in your industry will give you a fair idea of how true this is.

Product descriptions play a huge role in the decision-making process for the consumers, so you should be looking for ways to make it so appealing that your customers would not want to leave your website without purchasing the goodies that you have to offer.

Parting words

From inviting potential customers to your site to building goodwill and establishing rapport with them, having great product descriptions can take your business a long way towards all-around growth. Include specific and eye-catching product descriptions for your business and watch as the conversion rates soar to the skies.

External sources

10 Stats That Prove the Importance of Product Content for E-commerce. (August 9, 2017). Retrieved from https://www.onespace.com/

Author bio:

Nathan William is a senior programmer at a software agency in Melbourne and Cdr Engineers Australia expert at MyAssignmenthelp.com. He likes to share her IT expertise for computer engineering with students struggling in writing assignments. As an IT expert, she is experienced in creating customised CDRs for Engineers in Australia.

How Web Page Design Can Enhance Your Business Operation

Businesses can underestimate the ability of responsive web design to convert leads, increase user engagement, and ultimately create more sales in their e-commerce stores.

Optimizing your website for ecommerce ultimately makes it easier for your customers to make purchases, and can even inspire brand loyalty.

Ecommerce optimization is an essential aspect of your website marketing plan, but it’s a practice that takes the assistance of a web design company. Here’s what you need to know about improving your business website:

How To Design A Website With Ecommerce In Mind

An ecommerce website must be easy to navigate, help customers find what they’re looking for, and encourage them to make a purchase.

This sounds like a tall order, but utilizing a few actionable tips can help you navigate your customer through their buying journey.

High-quality web design helps customers through the purchasing funnel and ultimately increases your revenue.

1. Allow Customers To Leave Product Reviews

We all like to do our research before making any buying decisions. When was the last time you made a buying decision without reading other people’s experiences, first?

Product reviews help establish trust for your brand, but they also provide valuable information to your user.

Clothing stores especially can benefit from utilizing product review functionality. Buyers can learn more about fit, length, and color before making their buying decision, which ultimately leads to more purchases:

 

2. Give Users Enough White Space

Creating enough white space between your products can make a world of difference on your e-commerce website.

If you provide your users with too many options, spaced closely together, you could overwhelm them and stop the buying process.

Grid views of products, using large images spaced evenly apart, creates visual appeal that helps your users make buying decisions – not detract them from making a purchase.

Notice how the Dollar Shave Club site includes plenty of white space and features large images in their product page, presenting their products without overwhelming the user:

 

 

3. Use High-Quality Photography

In the same vein, make sure your photos are of the highest quality when creating your product pages.

Ecommerce is in the business of enticing customers to make purchases online. Often, the customer does not get to touch or see the product until it arrives on his or her doorstep.

Including quality, high-resolution images (instead of just taking something generic from a free stock images websites) provides the best representation of the product and increases the likelihood that a customer will buy it.

The best product images utilize multiple angles and provide all the information a user needs to make a purchase.

Opt for a product slideshow or tiled thumbnails your user can flip through to get a 360-degree representation of what you’re selling – it’s the closest they can come to seeing it in-person.

Be wary of blurry or pixelated images, which will send users off your site. An ecommerce web designer can help you take high quality photos and arrange them on your site.

 

 

4. Add “Related Products” To Encourage Purchases

After reading about a product’s specification or reviews, a customer may decide that the item they searched for won’t work for them.

Instead of giving them an excuse to navigate away to a competitor, show them other possibilities.

Related product suggestions can serve several purposes: first, it can provide viable alternatives, such as different sizes or dimensions, that will work better for the prospective customer.

Second, it provides suggestions for complementary products, such as a wall mount for a new TV.

Amazon does a good job at presenting customers with options for both related and complementary products:

 

 

Here, customers have a place to compare different TV sizes, specs, and price points.

They also have the option of adding a swivel mount to their cart, which increases the sale for the business. It’s convenient for the user, and drives sales.

5. Make Your Website Easy To Navigate

High-quality web design starts with intuition in mind.

Your website must be simple for customers to navigate and connect with your full array of products and services.

For your ecommerce store, this means organizing your products into top navigation with drop-down menus and fly-out menus.

Drop-down menus present categories vertically, and fly-out menus present more options within the category horizontally.

 

 

Your top level navigation menu should include general product categories such as baby, shoes, or hardware.

Your fly-out menus can become more specific: for example, “diapers and wipes,” “nursery furniture,” or “feeding.” Creating easy to navigate menus requires professional web development help, but it’s well worth the effort.

 

6. Keep Your Branding Consistent

Finally, make sure that your e-commerce website’s color scheme and branding fits your brand, and use it to evoke certain emotions and even to influence buying decisions.

Your color scheme can say a lot about you and influences your buyers on a subconscious level. Health brands, for example, benefit from a green color scheme, which communicates good health, wealth, and happiness:

 

 

Blue color schemes evoke feelings of dependability and loyalty, while purple and pink can communicate optimism and social consciousness.

Yellow and orange hues create a sense of warmth. Keep this color scheme consistent as you create your search functions and product pages; it will help customers identify you with the feelings you’re trying to create, no matter where they are on your website.

 

Conclusion

Ecommerce optimization can help customers find your products and make purchasing decisions. By adding product suggestions, using high-quality photos, and making your site easy to navigate, you could notice a significant difference in revenue.

About The Author: Nicola Yap lives in Phoenix, Arizona with her two cats Marcie and Lambert. When she isn’t writing blog posts, she’s probably playing video games or doing something as equally unproductive. She works as an organic marketing strategist for Eminent SEO, a full-service digital marketing agency that creates custom websites and innovative marketing solutions for small to medium-sized businesses that are looking for impactful results.

Landing pages are not a new phenomenon. In essence, a billboard is a landing page. It is designed to bring new clients to a specific business. But the online billboards are much smarter since they have interaction. Any page where visitors land on your site is a landing page!

If you want to increase traffic to your site and convert it to clients, you need to create a landing page that works. It should be recognized as useful by search engines and help visitors make contact with you.

The doorway to your business

While it is advisable to put effort into the first page of your site, the home page, you need to put even more thought into the pages that actually catch the traffic. It can be one or more pages that work as the doorway to your site since they pop up in search results or are linked directly from other places online.

You can also use landing pages that are not located on your main site. Regardless of the address of your landing page, it needs to have a structure and design that leads to action. Here are some very important points to consider when you want to build a landing page to catch new clients and form new connections online.

Why should you use a landing page?

To begin with, you might not be completely aware of the actual use of a landing page. Isn’t a killer webpage with modern and attractive design enough? Well, if that killer webpage kills off most of the visitors and pushes them on to other sites, it isn’t doing much for you or your business.

The landing page function is simple – it is there to bring you more business. Whether you want to sell a book, get people to attend your classes, or offer plumbing services is not important. The idea of this page is that it will create a sale or form a connection between you and a potential client.

Your home page could certainly do this beautifully, then it is indeed a great landing page. You could also use platforms like Facebook and other social media to build a landing page where you catch traffic heading for the products and services that you offer.

The landing page is clear-cut, it focuses on the target, and if it is well designed, it gets the job done!

Create a landing page

Now that you understand that you must have a landing page to fuel your business online, you want to know how to make one. You can always use services like Fiverr to get the page built for a reasonable price. If you’d like to work on the design yourself, there are plenty of great landing page creators for beginners and pros alike.

Using a landing page creator, you can drag and drop elements and shape the page to look just right. If you work with WordPress, you will also find the tools you need to help you create a great doorway to your business.

The tools available are also made to create mobile friendly websites that look great on smaller screens. You get a page that will look great on small and big screens alike.

Building the page right

Once you have a landing page creator or other tool, you need to know how to build the page to work for you as effectively as possible. Here are the main things you need to consider:

Picture and headline

If your potential clients are from an English speaking country, they read from left to right. It means that their eyes will fall in the top left corner as they surf into your site. Your landing page should have an attractive picture or logo in the upper left corner, and then a headline right next to it, or slightly below, that catches attention.

 

Pictures are very important, especially at the top of a landing page where you don’t want to stuff the area with too much text. People aren’t always looking to read all the nitty gritty details of your service or product. If they are, they will scroll down below the fold to learn more.

Since only about 90% of your visitors will scroll down to read more, you need the top half of your landing page to make it clear why they should make contact or order!

Opt-in

The landing page should have an opt-in placed at the top right of the page. This is where the visitor can share personal details to get more information or order your product. The opt-in needs to stand out and have colors that attract. Use a color wheel and pick the color that is the opposite of the main color on the page to get the best effect.

Make sure to put an opt-in below the fold if you are planning to fill it with more text. If you don’t, people might forget about contacting you even if the content they read creates interest.

Use a few bullet points to catch your audience

The top part of the landing page can also have some powerful bullet points. These are meant to stimulate the visitor to buy or ask for more information through the opt-in. The bullet points can shortly describe the advantages and benefits of your product or service.

Below the fold

While you want to keep the top part of your landing page as clear as possible, you can get more detailed below the fold. Anything that demands scrolling down on the page to be seen is below the fold.

Text is very important since it shows Google and other search engines that the page has something important to offer. In fact, there is the famous SEO saying that “content is king.” In the text below the fold, you can expand on your product, give examples of how it works, show more pictures, and embed some useful videos.

You should also use this part of the landing page to include important keywords in order to get more traffic from search engines. Make sure to use many sub-headings and to keep the paragraphs short. A lot of text in big blocks makes it hard to read, especially for mobile surfers.

A mobile friendly landing page

This is a must! The global mobile population is constantly growing and today people use their smartphones to browse and buy online. There is a greater need for mobile friendly websites than ever before. If it is hard to see what your page is about on a smaller screen, it will convert poorly on phones.

Make sure to use a theme that is meant to work just as well on mobile units as on a regular computer screen. You might want to use a very simple opt-in where there is only space for the visitor’s name and email and then a button to make contact.

A better conversion rate from the page

A better conversion rate means that more people that come to your landing page take action. They should fill in your opt-in form, order something, or contact you by email or phone. To make this happen, you need to have:

• Great content
• Easy navigation
• Clear graphics
• A page that radiates trust

If you are not a writer, hire one! The content must be attractive, correct, and clear. Easy navigation usually comes as a result of the measures described above where you keep the top part of the page clear and use many sub-headings under the fold. Graphics need to be clear and this will enforce the trust your landing page should convey by making it clear who you are and how to get in touch with you.

Use campaigns, offers and events to make more visitors take action. If they get a benefit from filling in your form, like a discount or useful information, they are more likely to do so.

Maintain your landing page

The best landing pages can work for years without any changes. Regardless, you might want to maintain your page with updates such as new campaigns and other things that can attract new clients. You should also learn more about SEO and how to promote the page so that it will show up in the search results for relevant keywords and phrases.

Don’t be afraid to try new things! Change colors and update the copy and see how this affects your conversion rate. You’d be surprised to see how a little change can lead to greater results in a short time.

If you follow the guidelines above and make sure to use well written content, you have the ingredients for a page that can make the difference for your business online. By adding your own experience and trials to this, you should arrive at the best possible landing page.

Logic, discounted prices, good quality at cheap rates are some tricks that you often use to sell your product. It might help to an extent, but it is doomed to backfire as such tricks do not yield long-term customer loyalty.

Research backs this as well. It suggests that marketing that stands on the pillars of logic and reason misses the substantial ingredient of emotions. Consequently, it does not seal a secure future deal for the business.

Emotions are elements that motivate decision making. These also help in forging a strong connection with your audience. Research by Pringle & Field reveals that emotional campaigns outsail most of the other metrics. These include share gain, revenue, and profit.

More studies also indicate that emotions play a powerful and persuasive role in influencing decision making.

All this translates into the significance of tapping into the sentiments of your target market.

Brands are also increasingly utilizing emotional targeting for marketing their products. Examples of these include Yves Saint Laurent and Garnier that are smooth sailing into the water of emotional targeting.

Emotional targeting is steadily gaining traction. At the same time, it poses several benefits that outnumber a logic-based online marketing strategy. Both these factors allow greater penetration of this approach as the new face of online marketing in 2018.

Here is an in-depth look at pointers that contribute to such a position of emotional targeting:

Neuroscience Supports Emotional Targeting 

Emotions assist one in calling the shots, which means these are also helpful in allowing a person to click the ‘order’ button. A study conducted by a neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio proves this. It demonstrates that emotions play a substantial role in helping make decisions.

In his research work, the neuroscientist studied participants who had brain damage, which prevented them from harboring emotions. All the subjects behaved normally in all the ways except one: they couldn’t make decisions. The participants were able to logically explain what they should do. However, they still couldn’t make a single simple decision such as choosing between a sandwich or pasta.

This highlights the role of emotions in decision-making, providing a strong scientific base for emotional targeting. So, when businesses make use of logic as their chief marketing tool, they miss the golden opportunity of binging on emotions. Because the customer will make an emotional call at the end of the day.

Creates Memorable Experiences 

Marketing tools and A/B Testing are good for business growth, but emotional targeting is equally important. Targeting emotions is an efficient way to weave your brand’s shopping experience with the customers’ memorable life events.

Scott Button, CEO of Unruly points out, “In today’s frenetic, cluttered media landscape, brands that want success on social media and memorability at the point of purchase need to create and distribute contagious content that makes a deep emotional connection with their audience.”

A case in point is Hershey’s #HelloHappy campaign. Chocolate is linked with joy, which is how Hershey’s used it in their campaign:

In this regard, the senior brand manager at Hershey’s, Stacie Stauffer revealed to AdWeek that Hershey’s aimed to tap into the emotional reserves of its target audience. In doing so, it was attempting to make Hershey’s synonymous with happiness.

As Stauffer outlined:

“The second you say ‘Hershey,’ the most amazing thing happens. This giant flood of emotions and memories happens—when I made s’mores camping, or stirred up chocolate milk with my mom. That solidified that we should be speaking more as [one] brand, and from a much more emotional place.”

This shows that emotional targeting can sow seeds of permanent loyalty for your business by creating memories.

It’s a Productive Strategy 

Emotional targeting helps boost sales, increases customers’ purchase intent, grabs more attention to the business, and gets more media coverage.

Emotional targeting nurtures psychological triggers that encourage purchase. It enables marketers to capture the customer in the most appropriate mood, delivering the appropriate message with an emotional context. Therefore, emotional targeting can optimize ROI and brand recall.

In this regard, Neil Patel tells:

“When your content drives people to a state of happiness or joy, they will automatically respond to your offers, feel obliged to share your content, and will stop at nothing to tell others about you.”

This elucidates that content generation like that at Setalks is not restricted to merely the churning of words.

An emotional approach to marketing also enhances the purchase intent. When Coca-Cola switched its tagline to “Taste the feeling” from “Open Happiness,” it continued focusing on happy images of engaging with others. This is evident in the post by Coca-Cola below that captures happy faces having the soft drink with friends.

As per the Unruly ShareRank data, a video centered around intense emotions culminated in the favorable odds of 70% of viewers buying the product. In such a case, the video elicited an emotional response from more than 30% viewers and an overall uplift of nearly 144%.

Moreover, marketing tactics that tickle the emotional centers of the target audience also get increased attention.

Research confirms that emotional ads are 84% more effective than informative or rational ones. A report by Fractl campaigns also paints a similar picture. It found that campaigns that secured 100 plus placements tended to showcase 3 times powerful emotional engagement. This was relative to campaigns that achieved little.

The report also highlighted that such emotion-based blueprints earned more media coverage. Campaigns that got 20,000 social shares were 8 times more likely to have a strong emotional bait than campaigns that got 1000 shares. The report ended up marking emotions as the differentiating key for lucrative campaigns.

Dr. Karen Nelson-Field, of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science, also holds the same view. She outlines that videos which evoke genuine emotions pose two times the increased odds of getting social media shares than those that excite a weak emotional response.

A case in point is Dove that has been gaining online momentum on account of its emotional campaigns.

Evidence for the success comes from statistics that show that the video by the brand as part of its #wearebeautiful campaign was viewed 27 million times in about ten days of its release.

Likewise, New Balance made use of emotional targeting to enhance brand awareness in Japan. It created a video that exhibited emotional receptivity signals. The results showed a 135% increase in awareness; speaking volumes of the effectiveness of this marketing technique.

Key Takeaway 

In short, studies point out that channeling the target audience’s emotions brushes up the conversion rate.

More research concludes that a fruitful business strategy orbits around crafting emotional connections. Emotional targeting improves brand recall, sales, purchase intent, and ROI among other things. Additionally, businesses that are adopting an emotional tone in their marketing skillset are all exhibiting bright outcomes.

Therefore, owing to the success it yields, the productivity it provides, and the extensive research that backs it, it can be confirmed that emotional targeting is indeed the new face of online marketing.

About the Author:

Alma Causey is a Freelance writer by day and sports fan by night. She writes about tech education and health related issues. Live simply, give generously, watch football and a technology lover.

 

Maximizing the number of sales you make is a fundamental part of running a store. This applies to online businesses just as much as brick and mortar ones. If you have an eCommerce website, boosting a website’s eCommerce conversion rate is something that’s definitely in your best interest.

What conversion rate should I aim for?

Don’t burn up too much concern over “average” conversion rates or what rates are reported in your niche. You can always take aim at improving your conversion rate and making it better than it is now.

Frankly, there are so many variables in play that it’s not really fair to try and make an “apples to apples” comparison between any two eCommerce sites. The quality of inbound traffic – something that can vary hugely according to lots of different factors – plays a major role.

In the very roughest terms, conversion rates are typically around one to two percent.

Good images matter

If you forced me to choose the absolute most important factor contributing to online product sales, I’d probably go with image quality.

An eCommerce site that worked solely with images, including no product descriptions whatsoever, could probably work – albeit not as well as a combined site. The reverse isn’t true: an all-text online store simply wouldn’t make sales.

Every consumer has a fundamental, deep-rooted desire to see what she’s buying before she makes a spending decision. Quality photos of your products are absolute necessities for making sales. Don’t try to make a single photo do all your selling work, either! Offer multiple angles, in-context shots, and high-detail close-ups.

Use compelling words

Not to undercut the previous point, but you need to pay attention to your product descriptions too. Product copy plays a vital role in the sales decision; prospective customers need to have information before they commit to purchasing. Clarity is better than persuasive deception here. You don’t need hype if you have full information. Let the facts speak for themselves.

Do you want short or long product descriptions? Frankly, you need both. The long, complete description is there for the on-the-fence customer, giving her enough facts to talk herself into buying. Your shorter version should concentrate on the essentials: Who needs the product, what they can expect it to do, and what makes it notably good.

In your longer description, make it your goal to provide answers to every question a buyer might possibly ask. Remember that a customer who’s convinced will just skip past the rest of your copy and head to checkout; a customer who has questions or doubts left is going to leave your store.

If your products come to you from outside manufacturers, do not simply regurgitate the product descriptions the makers hand you. Personalize your descriptions and make sure your customers know why you, specifically, recommend the product in questions.

Making use of videos

Images are good, but in the future video is increasingly going to supplant them as the selling tool of choice.

Producing product videos can be expensive and it’s impossible to tell for sure whether they’re going to help make more sales. Start off small by creating videos for a few of your products and see if they make an impact on the bottom line.

Customization equals ownership

Customizing a product is a fun process, and it has a surprisingly powerful effect on sales. Specifying the details of a product makes it feel like your own even before you click that “buy” button.

I learned the true power of customization when I bought a new laptop from Dell in 2008. It took me the better part of an hour to customize my ideal laptop using their website’s powerful options. The computer I wound up buying cost significantly more than any of Dell’s ready-made configurations. I got a powerful computer and a powerful lesson.

If it’s within your power to offer customization of your products, strive to do so. Customization translates into more sales!

Free shipping boosts conversions

Free shipping is becoming the rule rather than the exception in online commerce. Some retailers put conditions on free shipping, requiring customers to jump through certain hoops to “earn” it. Others simply give it away for free to all their customers, like Nordstrom. Online customers have certainly noticed.

According to research conducted by E-tailing Group, fully 73 percent of online customers consider free shipping to be a “critical” decision-making factor for online purchases. 93 percent of those surveyed said that free shipping encouraged them to buy more.

To go into further detail, high shipping loomed large as the most frequently given reason for an unsatisfactory online shopping experience. Shipping costs (i.e. the lack of them) are the biggest advantage that brick and mortar retailers have over their online competitors.

On average, orders that qualify for free shipping have an overall value 30 percent higher than their cost-incurring equivalents. The site 2BigFeet enjoyed a clear connection between free shipping and conversions: Dropshipping charges for orders over $100 boosted their conversion rate by an astounding 50 percent.

“Free” versus “cheap”

Chris Anderson, author of the book “Free,” offers some insight into the dramatic difference this distinction makes. Amazon has a global reach, and the company has seen sales boom in every country where they extend the offer of free shipping. France is a particularly important example. The company was initially unable to offer completely free shipping to French customers, charging a token 20-cent charge instead. In this case, “cheap” utterly failed to create the same sales-boosting magic as “free.” Sales remained largely stagnant until Amazon finally offered the people of France truly free shipping – and then they came up.

If you must charge for shipping…

Your business model might make it impossible to completely waive shipping fees. If you have to charge for shipping, make sure you mention it up front. Flat-fee shipping is also preferable to more complex calculations; customers love simplicity.

The real killer to your conversion rate is the surprise shipping fee that inflates the price of your products right at the end of the transaction. Based on the survey mentioned above, nearly half (47 percent) of customers will abandon a purchase if they only learn about additional shipping charges at checkout.

Abandoned shopping cart

A lot of online customers get close to completing a purchase before getting cold feet. The result is an abandoned shopping cart. The number of carts abandoned in online stores is constantly rising.

According to Forrester data, nearly every online shopper (89 percent) has abandoned a cart at least once. This is really a measure of growing consumer sophistication; more and more customers are comparison-shopping and abandoning deals when they find better ones.

Following up

A simple follow-up email is a great way to reduce your abandonment rates. An effective anti-abandonment campaign can pay for itself many times over; SmileyCookie discovered that a decent campaign enabled them to recapture 29 percent of the carts their customers abandoned.

The great news is that many integrated eCommerce web development platforms (e.g. 3DCart, Volusion, and Magento) have built-in abandonment tools. Even if your preferred platform doesn’t offer this functionality, it’s likely that reliable add-on software can add it.