Build an Optimized Shopping Cart
If you’re selling your product primarily online you know that cost per acquisition or CPA plays a major role in your profit margins. Basically, in one way or another you’re paying for every customer you have. The challenge is that for every one customer that actually commits and purchases your product there are probably many more that you pay to get to your site and evaluate but there’s not enough umph to get them to click purchase. This has a nasty effect on your CPA and can creep into your businesses earnings if not analyzed and performance checked often.
So how do you minimize the CPA and improve your eCommerce shopping cart”s efficiency?
First you need to understand what your conversion rate is. Are you running any type of analytic software on your store front site? If so then you should be able to customize that to report on your conversion rates. If you are paying for any type of PPC marketing whether adwords, banner ads, or some other type of marketing you need to track how many of those customers follow on through the process and act on a purchase.
Next thing you need to take into consideration is if your site is optimized to get customers in the momentum you desire. That should momentum to quickly select the product you want them to purchase and rush through the checkout page. E-Commerce is about money not beautiful sites with lavish designs. Way too many eCommerce web designers spend too much time building fancy sites that look nice but are not optimized for high conversion rates. When you visit your site what do you do? What are your customers doing? If they are spending time browsing or bouncing then you don’t have what you need. There are tools that can check hot spots on your site and you should be using them. Not only that but using a multivariate test to compare different versions of your pages. Focus on the checkout page with highest priority. The most attrition is in the form of shopping cart abandonment. Do you know what your abandonment rate is? Are you doing anything to improve this number? Does your shopping cart include tools to measure these analytic information? If not then it’s seriously time to start looking abroad.
Some other things to otimize your hosted eCommerce solution are making sure that your site is SEO friendly. Sure there are carts that claim to be SEO shopping carts or SEO optimized e-commerce platforms but things to look for are the ability to add good keyword content in Google’s preferred ways to all of your catalog pages. Making sure the templates are easily editable to ensure great results on the SERPs. Make sure that you can customize your checkout page for efficiency and that it supports cross selling and upselling of products.
I’ll have more time to write about this in the future but I want to make sure that all e-tailers are thinking about conversion optimization and SEO friendly e-commerce platforms. You can’t just throw your product on a webpage, stick a price to it, and sell. You’ll throw your money away too quickly to even learn what you need to be doing. Take your time, do the research on solutions, talk to an e-commerce consultant and choose the right developer to make sure your site, checkout page, and entire shopping cart is optimized for the one thing it’s built for, Selling!
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