Ecommerce Best Practice by Paul Rouke & Stephen Pavlovich at Conversion Conference 2011

The second presentation came from Paul Rouke, Head of Usability, Trainer and Consultant at PRWD

Paul highlighted the main conversion principles for e-commerce:

• Provide Transparency
• Build Trust and Confidence
• Remove Barriers to Entry

In addition to these, make sure you know your value proposition and deliver it clearly - have a key messages bar.

Best practice tips & techniques

Product pages - How to add the product to your shopping bag

• Transparency around the delivery options and returns
• Understand what your users are looking for and provide the detail
• Social proof – customer ratings place in a prominent position
• Use tab navigation to feature important information

Shopping Bag - How to encourage people to checkout

• Provide transparency around delivery cost
• Make the call to action clear (q. cta low down lakeland versus john lewis)
• ASOS allow you to change product specification in the cart
• Make payment options prominent in the shopping bag
• Put security high up on the page
• Feature the word securely on the checkout button

New Customer Checkout

• Put password in at the end – make account creation optional
• Read Paul's article 'Presuasive checkout best practice from ASOS' on Econsultancy

Persuasive design

• Look at naked wines - very good example
• Read Paul's article 'Booking.com: improving conversion with best practice persuasive design' on Econsultancy

Paul has a very useful resources page http://bit.ly/CROresources

Stephen Pavlovich is a Director at the Conversion Factory

Five key take aways for ecommerce optimisation

1. Look at analytics 

• Look at the shopping funnel
• Look at top landing pages
• Look at browser conversion rate (Browsershots / ClickTale) Safari will inclide iOS (low conversion)
• Look at site search – higher conversion from visits with site search (ask for PDF)

2. Don't guess objections

• Talk to both visitors and customers
• Customers – what is the one thing that nearly stopped you buying from us (free text)
• Can you then make some business decisions to make it better

3. Use benefit bars

• Use light box to show quick view of benefits

4. Pimp Your Shopping Basket

• Show saving RRP on shopping cart
• Show stock availability to increase persuation

5. Get reviews for PPC

• One of dooyou / TrustPilot / review center (recommend Trust Pilot)

Other tips 

• Use site search to check that you are using the right labelling in your navigation
• Ticketing websites - work out time between purchase date and event date for each source of traffic and use this for marketing

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