Shirley | DearShirley.com

Reducing Ecommerce Shopping Cart Abandonment

Written on March 31, 2010 by Shirley in ECommerce

I recently presented on a webinar sponsor by TRUSTe and hosted by Practical Ecommerce. You can listen to the webinar by clicking this link http://www.practicalecommerce.com/webinars/26-10-Cost-effective-Ways-to-Market-Your-Business-and-Inspire-Customer-Loyalty – the notes will make more sense after you’ve listen to the webinar.

Here are the notes on my segment of the webinar:

Purchase Delay

Understanding your Customer Shopping Patterns is crucial to reducing purchasing delay.

Structured shopping experience. It should flow naturally, it should be intuitive.

Product Pages should have complete information about the product

Design and Structure

Professional error-free design and description to prevent pause

Sensible & Customer centric site navigation that makes sense

Study your traffic source data and review your websites appearance on the different browser

Site look and Feel is important

Building Site Trust

Quick load time of site

Everything is easy to find

“Unbury” privacy policy

Shipping rates and delivery times

Refund & return policy

Disclose your Sales tax policy

The Biggest Culprits

1. Shipping Rates

Study your Analytics,

Display shipping rates before cart, you can gauge true purchase intent

2. Shopping Cart Flexibility

Making it easy to change out shopping cart information

3. Registration

Requiring registration to shop on your site – not a good thing.

Additional Tips

Remind Shoppers About Coupons on Cart pages

Make Coupon Codes visible or pre-populate them if it make sense

Don’t make them choose free shipping if its FREE

Visible phone number or contact information page.

Evaluate your Cross Sell ROI on Shopping Cart Page

Send Abandon Cart Email

About us page – include business location photo & employees too

Don’t clutter your ecommerce site with Adsense ad’s

Update your site content, keep it fresh – use a product review tool

Create as sense of urgency

Limited quantity or availability and/or have a gift with purchase

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Highlights from Etail West 2010 Palm Springs

Written on February 27, 2010 by Shirley in ECommerce

Had a great conference at Etail 2010 held in Palm Springs last week. Attendance increased compared to last year’s event in Phoenix Arizona. The folks at Etail have done an outstanding job running a first class event. I learned a few things during this trip. Interestingly enough, one thing I discovered is that big retailers have the some of the same challenges small retailers do just magnified to a larger degree, so small retailers don’t lose heart.. Some common issues are:

Limited access to IT developers time

Limited resources to take on new projects
Limited budget to try new tools and programs
Marketing department consist of 1-2 people, even for a company that does multi-million dollars online
Big retailers have the same issues with keeping customers happy, responding to customer’s emails, returning calls in a timely manner and sending shipments to customers in a acceptable time frame.
Employees of the large retailers are being asked to do more with less. They’re working harder than ever and sometimes for less money
If the retailer is a multi-channel player, they have revenue goals that conflicts with their online counterparts. Some feel that the other is cannibalizing their sales potential.

There are a few noteworthy shares that I would like to make.

Under Email Marketing:

Text Emails with no graphic images perform better with engaging the customer than graphic rich email campaigns.
Emails remain the best ROI of any of marketing strategies to date.
Emails remain under utilized. Most small retailers don’t collect emails efficiently, and don’t send enough emails (I can’t tell with the volume of emails in by in-box)
It’s a good strategy to send multiple welcome emails to customer when they first sign up. Emails should include tips and advise not just product promotions.
Most retailers fail to send follow up emails like product review request after each transactions.
Most retailers have a “batch & blast” strategy and don’t segment their email list. They do a one size fits all email strategy which doesn’t work. Think Amazon’s personalized email campaigns, these are very targeted.
Most retailers do not send abandon cart emails.
ISP’s are said to be measuring engagement levels, which may affect your delivery rate and open rate for customers. If the customers are not engaging with your email campaign, your ISP may penalize your account.

Social Media

Empowering your employees to become active in social media, think @Zappos
Unless you can have consistent fresh content and be able to provide immediate response don’t’ play in the social media playground. Think @VirginAir
Be sure to differentiate your social media strategy to that of your competitor, a me-too strategy will not work.
Social media is about having a conversation and building a relationship and not just about selling.
Some large brands have a difficult time with social media because they’re so use to *pushing* out their message instead of having a 2 way conversation. It can be scary to let the customer drive.
Go where your customers go.
Be aggressive in recruiting a Facebook fan base.
Be authentic in everything you do in social media, or the customers will see right through the façade. If you’re not comfortable in this medium, don’t do it.
Companies have to be willing to be vulnerable, open themselves up to public criticism and managing these criticism properly.

Other Tidbits:

Customers reviews drive higher conversions.
Flat rate shipping helps conversions because it reduces shopping cart abandonment
Being right isn’t as important as being relevant (Jim Hilt with Sears)
Mobile Commerce its coming whether we like it or not so be prepared
Its not just driving traffic anymore, its all about the conversions
#1 Goal of retailers big or small should be making it easier for e-commerce consumers to shop.
Most retailers don’t use personalize search on their website or have re-targeting campaigns.
Target sends 1 personalized emails per week to over 16 million customers

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6 Traits your Business NEEDS to have in order to GROW

Written on November 14, 2009 by Shirley in ECommerce, Operations/Fulfillment

Over the years, from being educated by the school of hard knocks, I’ve come to realized that there are 6 crucial traits that a business needs in order for it to grow. I share them with you today so that you can hopefully add a few years of quality life back into your own, and can look forward to growing the business that you worked so hard for.

1) Your business needs influx of new customers in order to grow your business and for you to have enough funds to re-invest in your business. You will be able to re-invest in your business and grow it if you have new customers. Mind you, your customers’ needs comes first. That goes without saying, you can’t have cash flow if your customers are unhappy with your product or service.

2) You need to keep your existing customers. As the old saying goes, it’s easier to keep an existing customer happy than to find new ones. This is very true–not only will your existing customers keep doing business with you, they will refer new customers to you. You need to grow with your existing customers or they will leave you for greener pastures (even when it’s not actually greener on the other side, but only perceives to be). Communication is key, and you must, must keep an open dialouge and don’t’ be afraid to ask: “What can I do to help make life easier for you?” (or some version of that … because in the end, that’s what your customers want–to solve a problem or make it easier for them to do business with you). Don’t take them for granted, because by the time you start asking questions, it might be too late.

3) Your product or service has to be needed in the marketplace. Without demand for your goods or services, it doesn’t matter how pretty it is or how wonderful it makes you feel. Your goods/services have to fill a purpose; a need that cannot be gotten elsewhere. And not only that, it also has to make your customers feel that they cannot get it anywhere else (a sort of, “you had them at hello”, so to speak).

4) You need to work with your vendors and other strategic partnerships that are in your up-line and down-line. This means collaborating with any other businesses that are in the similar category as yours so that you can help each other find and keep customers by serving their needs as well yours. Your up-line or down-line are not your competitors–they are businesses that complement yours.

5) You need to have a plan: a plan to grow your business, step by step. As the old saying goes, if you don’t plan, then you plan to fail. I cannot stress to you enough how many businesses falter at with this trait due to being too busy working in their business. Now, don’t roll your eyes at me, I know you’re doing it, because I did that once too, and we suffered for it. It doesn’t have to be complex or even pretty, but you need one that you can refer to. Your plan is your map that will guide you and your company to your goals, especially during tough times.

6) Be Flexible . Okay, so I said you have to have a plan, and it sounds like I just contradicted myself by telling you to be flexible. The most flexible person always wins. You need to have enough flexibility to see which aspect of your plan needs tweaking and refining. It does not mean, that you change your plan, weekly, monthly or even annually. The goal is to be able to ride the roller coaster that comes along with any business so that you don’t snap because your plan is too rigid.