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Website Traffic But No Sales? Here’s How to Diagnose Your Ecommerce Store

website traffic but no sales diagnose

Clicks are a good leading indicator, but they only tell part of the story. To truly understand what’s happening on your website (and why people aren’t buying your products), you have to take a look at where your traffic is coming from, what’s happening once people land on your site, and identify where the disconnect is happening.

Where is your website traffic coming from?

Driving traffic to your online store only matters if it’s the right traffic. Spam clicks, social media referrals, and your own internal visits can easily skew your numbers and give you a false sense of accomplishment. I see this a lot with new ecommerce stores that run Facebook campaigns. The ads generate a lot of clicks, but they don’t convert.

This is where Google Analytics can really come in handy. Click “Acquisition” and then “Overview” and you’ll see a snapshot of your website traffic by source (ex. organic, direct traffic, social, referral). If you see a high number of clicks from a paid ad campaign with no conversions, revisit your ad targeting to make sure you are targeting the right audience.

Are shoppers adding products to their cart?

This is a big one. If you aren’t getting many/any add to carts, revisit your product pages first to identify possible causes. Ideas you might want to consider:

  • Include multiple product photos (at least 3)
  • Change the color of your “Add to Cart” button
  • Tweak your product description so your “Add to Cart” button is higher up on your product page and doesn’t require shoppers to scroll unnecessarily

If you’re getting add to carts but shoppers are bouncing before they make a purchase, there’s a pretty good chance something is happening during the checkout process that’s causing them to bounce. The most common cause I see is due to confusion over shipping charges. If you charge, make sure to communicate shipping costs earlier in the process than later. Also focus on your abandoned cart email strategy to increase your chances to convert those lost sales.  

Is your online store easy to navigate?

Think strategically about what you include in your main navigation and whether your links are easy to understand for first-time visitors. Here you also have a chance to reflect your brand. For example, if you make handmade necklaces, your navigation might include “Jewelry” or “Necklaces” instead of something more general such as “Products” or “Catalog.”

Generally, your primary navigation will include “Shop,” “About Us,” and a “Contact Us” option at a minimum and not exceed 5-7 total items. You can then use your secondary navigation in the footer of your website for links to your shopping and return policies.

If you include product snapshots on your homepage, make sure they are clickable and point back to specific product pages.

Are your product descriptions persuasive?

In my experience, this is the most overlooked area of new ecommerce websites. Product descriptions ARE your website. They not only can influence your visibility in organic search results, but they help set the tone for first-time visitors. You can include information on how your products are made, what makes them different, and why people should get excited about making a purchase.

Create a template outlining the key elements you want to include in every description. Think about the descriptiveness of your product title, what keywords and content you want to include on your product page, and any other information you think might be helpful.

If you are a reseller, don’t just copy the same descriptions from company that makes the products. Tweak them to capture your own spin and reflect your unique brand voice. If not, there’s really nothing that will differentiate your product descriptions from any of the other resellers you’re competing against.

Are your product images professional and clear?

Along with product descriptions, your product photography should establish the perfect one-two punch. Always remember--if you’re an online-only business, shoppers won’t be able to see or touch your products before they make a purchase. That means your images need to immediately and consistently capture the quality of your offerings.

Product photography should also reflect your brand vibe and personality. Are you shooting against a clean white background? Using nature as a backdrop? Models? What’s the best way to make your products and your business stand out visually?

Also spend some time on image sizing. Ecommerce sites like Shopify don’t always automatically resize your product thumbnails. That means your collection pages might look a little disjointed. Be sure to look at your site on a laptop, tablet, and mobile device just to make sure your product photography lines up the way it should.

Does your brand look professional?

From your logo, to your font selection, to your color scheme, your brand can say a lot about your ecommerce business. Although it can be difficult, take a step back and look at your brand through the eyes of a prospective customer. How do you think it makes them feel? What message does it send?

You don’t need to invest heavily into your brand identity—especially when your website is generating any sales—but you still need to think strategically about how you want to position your business and where you might be able to improve.

If you have a few friends you trust, start there. Ask them for honest feedback about your brand, your logo, etc. You’re looking for one new idea or nugget you can use.

What else could be keeping your website from making the sale?  

Understanding where your traffic is coming from and where shoppers are dropping off is a critical first step. You need to be honest with yourself as you assess your website, including the viability of your ecommerce business. Consumers have an infinite number of choices online. From your products, to your product descriptions, and your overall customer experience—standing out and ultimately generating sales will require a truly unique shopping experience.



Easy Shopify Cart Abandonment Email Strategy

easy shopify cart abandonment email strategyIt’s one of the most overlooked aspects for ecommerce retailers. Yet your cart abandonment email recovery strategy can have a major impact on your bottom line. Shopify makes the abandoned cart recovery process super easy, but you still need the right strategy and content.​

Abandoned Cart Email Content

First things first. You’ll see a lot of ecommerce blog posts with examples of amazing abandoned cart emails like this one. Don’t get me wrong. When you have the chance to incorporate some creative content that captures your brand personality, go for it. But in our experience, you don’t need pictures of dogs or even discount codes to entice shoppers to make a purchase after leading items in their shopping cart.

In fact, we've been able to increase abandoned cart recovery from under 3% to 14% (double the 7% figure Shopify lists as the average for their stores) using the same standard copy Shopify includes in their email template.  The only real change was to the subject line which was “Complete your purchase” which we think sounds kind of harsh to “You left items in your cart.” We also added a few words to personalize the emails mentioning the brand. That’s it.

And you know what? That abandoned cart recovery email with no dog pictures actually outperformed any other version we tried. Short content, funny content, customer-service content, contact us with questions content. Nothing fancy.

How to Time Abandoned Cart Emails

Along with the content, we also spent quite a bit of time experimenting with timing. When you’re using an ecommerce platform like Shopify, you’ll often see recommendations on the best times to send an email (ex. 1 hour, 6 hours, 10 hours). They base those times on tons of data which is a good thing. But that doesn’t mean the data applies directly to your business, your products, or your customers. 

Similar to the cart abandonment email content, although Shopify might recommend sending your email 10 hours after a shopper abandons a cart, we found 1 hour had a much higher conversion rate. The key takeaway? Always experiment to find the best strategy for your business. You’ll know within 1-2 weeks whether you’re recovering more abandoned shopping carts or you aren’t. If the change doesn’t help, you can always roll it back.

Improving Your Shopify Cart Abandonment Recovery Strategy

Your emails don’t have to be flashy. Start with the standard text Shopify provides and then make a few small changes you think will resonate with your shoppers. Gather some data to see if your changes are working. Then experiment with timing. Even though you might want to make sweeping changes right out of the gate, the more you can change one variable at a time—the better you’ll be able to pinpoint the tweaks you want to keep. Luckily Shopify does a great job of including your average cart abandonment recovery rate on the admin dashboard and that’s something that prompts us to take a look if the recovery percentage drops (or if we think we can do better).

What best practices have you found to be most effective? Share them in the comments below.



The Strategy Behind Warby Parker’s New Augmented Reality Ecommerce Tool

warby parker augmented reality online shoppingConvincing shoppers to buy a product online can be a challenge for any ecommerce business operating in a competitive market—especially when the product you’re selling relies almost exclusively only on personal preferences and your ability to see and try the physical product before you buy.

Changing the Way People Shop for Glasses

Warby Parker has already done it once with their “Home Try-On” model for prescription eyeglasses where shoppers can select 5 frames to test out for 5 days at home with free shipping both ways. Now they’re hoping to transform the way people shop for glasses yet again using Augmented Reality.

The Motivation Behind Augmented Reality

It’s likely the move is designed to 1) control expenses by limiting what has to be massive amounts of money spent on free shipping and handling shipping and returns 2) give shoppers yet another easy and convenient way to shop for glasses as well as 3) continue to be on the leading edge of technology and hipper than their competitors who offer a similar experience and product at a lower price such as Zenni Optical or David Kind.

The Potential Challenge

Warby Parker has built a business and a brand around shipping glasses to your home free-of-charge, giving you a chance to try them on and only pay for what you keep. By doing so, they eliminated the biggest hurdle to buying eyeglasses online—having a chance to actually see what they look like on your face.

The idea is a smart one. Reach today’s connected consumer with some really cool technology. However, trying to persuade current and prospective customers to try something that’s potentially counter to what Warby Parker’s brand was built on, could be difficult. To be successful, you also have to ask your customers to download yet another app.

I don’t wear glasses (at least not yet) so I reached out to people in my social network to see if any Warby Parker buyers were already using the app. Their initial feedback echoed what you’d expect. The technology sounds cool and might be something they would check out, but many still preferred to try on the glasses before making a purchase.

Augmented Reality & The Future of Ecommerce

Will Warby Parker’s virtual try-on tool ultimately replace their home try-on program? Only time will tell. Persuading consumers to change the way they shop for a product (especially when they’ve already grown to like your current model), will likely require a few carrots along the way.

One thing is for certain. As technology continues to get better, shopping online for highly personalized products and experiential products such as clothes, shoes, and eyeglasses, will only get better. Kudos to innovative companies like Warby Parker for trying to figure it out.

Have You Tried Warby Parker's AR Try-On Tool?

Leave a comment below. I'd love to hear how you think it compares. Happy shopping!



BigCommerce for Wordpress Ecommerce Plugin Review

BigCommerce for wordpress plugin review Looking for an easy and affordable way to add ecommerce shopping cart functionality to your WordPress website? With the BigCommerce WordPress plugin, you can do just that---and a whole lot more.

If you’re like many small businesses, you started out with a WordPress website to get your business online. As you continue to grow, you’re now at a point where you want to add products to your website but you don’t want to have to start completely from scratch or invest thousands of dollars to hire a backend developer.

The BigCommerce for WordPress plugin blends seamlessly with existing WordPress themes although BigCommerce does recommend a cross-browser compatible theme so the theme options sync up better with online store requirements.

To help you save time, we’ve highlighted some of the plugin’s most powerful features based on what we hear working with small business owners every day. Product reviews are conducted independently, but we sometimes make money from link clicks.

Intuitive Ecommerce Dashboard

One of the biggest benefits to the BigCommerce for WordPress plugin is its intuitive dashboard—making it super easy to upload and sync product uploads, manage checkout settings, and more—all from within WordPress.  

bigcommerce wordpress plugin dashboard

 

Customize Product Listings to Match Your Brand

With Customizer, you can quickly change button and text colors to blend with your brand colors—creating a seamless experience for your current and prospective customers.

bigcommerce product description customizer

 

Showcase Product Reviews & Related Products

If there’s one thing Amazon has taught us, it’s that product reviews and social proof are a crucial component to every online shopping experience. Working with small business owners across a number of industries, I’m still surprised by how many still struggle to integrate basic product review and related products functionality into their existing WordPress websites—a huge missed opportunity to capture more conversions and increase average online order value.

BigCommerce product review examples

 

Fast Load Speeds & Gutenberg Ready

Starting in July 2018, Google started using mobile page speed as a ranking factor in their mobile search results. With the BigCommerce plugin, your online store can boast the fastest load speeds currently possible with AMP for WordPress enabled on your site.

The plugin was also built to support the class WordPress editor and Gutenberg—a new editing experience built for media rich pages and posts.

Sell Across Multiple Marketplaces

Instead of wasting time uploading your products to various online marketplaces, you can quickly and easily sell across eBay, Amazon, Instagram, Google Shopping, and more. BigCommerce for WordPress plugin features include bulk listing, automatic inventory synching, and fulfillment management.

Adding Ecommerce Software to WordPress

If you’re thinking about adding ecommerce functionality to your WordPress website, the BigCommerce for Wordpress plugin is definitely worth a look. You can experiment with features and get your products online without having to completely redesign your entire website or spend months working with a backend developer to build something custom. Plus, BigCommerce checkouts are PCI compliant—which can limit a huge amount of liability and risk.

Ready to get started? Learn more and try BigCommerce for WordPress

[Image: BigCommerce]



3 Ways to Increase Average Order Value of Online Stores

3 ways to increase average online order value

Congratulations! You’ve successfully launched your new ecommerce store and orders are starting to come in every month.

You feel like you’re finally at a point where want to grow revenue but you’re not sure where to start. That’s when you notice your average order value (the average amount of money each customer spends per transaction with your store) is fairly consistent over time. What’s the best way to entice customers to spend more?

Minimum Order Discounts

For many ecommerce retailers, increasing average order value often starts with offering minimum order discounts. For example, Pump Peelz, makers of personalized insulin pump covers and diabetes accessories, offers free shipping on orders over $30. 

Before you offer any minimum order discounts, make sure you look at any available data to get a sense of average order values over time so you can pinpoint a realistic price target. In other words, if your average order value over the last six months is right around $50, it might be hard to jump to $75 and expect customers to make that big of a jump. This is especially true if you the majority of your items are at lower price points which would require customers to buy multiple products to make up the difference. 

I also spoke with an online store owner this week who is using the Sumo app to increase average order value by engaging customers with strategically-placed incentives. It’s still early, but initial results seem promising. 

Related Products

How many times have you been shopping for one product on a website only to be taken down a rabbit hole by another product you didn’t even know existed? Ecommerce platforms make basic product recommendations fairly simple to incorporate on your product pages and checkout page like this example from Mapamundi Kids--an independent kids lifestyle store based in San Francisco, California.

Once you add related products to your website, click around and make sure the items that are showing up make sense either based on the featured product and/or your business goals. Depending on your ecommerce platform or the app you’re using, you can control the number and types of images that get displayed. Think strategically.

Product Bundles

By packaging multiple products together (often at a slightly discounted price) in a bundle, you’re increase real or perceived value--increasing the likelihood that shoppers will buy more than if the products were only listed separately on your site. 

If your ecommerce platform offers website cart analysis, I highly recommend looking at which products are frequently added together for ideas of which products to bundle. You can also look for complimentary items to add to create a “one-stop shop” for anyone buying a specific product (ex. Audio Advice bundling bookshelf speakers with a turntable).

Next Steps

Once you’re able to establish a clear baseline for your average order value, you can start to experiment with different strategies and tactics to see how far you can move the needle and increase revenue. Even small increases per transaction can add up over the course of the year. 

Make sure you give yourself enough time to identify what’s working and what isn’t. It can be tempting to pull the plug after only a few days, but you want to wait at least two weeks before making another change.

Finally, keep testing. Try different minimum order amounts for free shipping at $50, $60, and $75 and the same with discounts. 

Do you have other strategies you’d add to the list? Leave a comment below!



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