Introduction

E-commerce has become a big part in today’s Internet. Because the start-up cost is relatively lower, more and more people are leaving their daily jobs to run online stores in search of higher incomes than their 9-to-5 jobs. While starting an online shop is easy, earning money from it doesn’t seem so. It turns out that a lot of work is needed in order to turn an online store into a money-making machine. In this article, I’ll share four tried-and-true techniques of e-commerce store optimization that my web design company has applied on the online store of one of our clients – Chi Chi Principle Malaysia Online Boutique. These techniques are very simple to implement, they are either built-in in any matured shopping cart software, or can be implemented as a plugin without too much effort!

Technique 1: Upselling & Cross-selling – Give One More Reason for Your Customers to Buy

Many first-time e-commerce store owners don’t know the power of upselling and cross-selling, and let their customers check out without recommending more products to the customers. This can mean the store is losing a lot of potential opportunities of getting more sales, just by asking one or two simple questions. In short, upselling means you try to upgrade or upsize the same product your customer is going to buy; while cross-selling means you sell them any complementary products related to the original products they are buying.

In fact, upselling and cross-selling have been put into practice by almost all brick-and-mortar retailers. Imagine yourself buying a can of soft drink from a convenient store and the cashier asks if you want to also buy, let say, some snacks to go with your drink. Familiar? And guess what? Many customers will actually just grab a packet or two of those snacks. Even if they don’t, it doesn’t affect their initial decision of buying what they originally want to buy. And this is the beauty of upselling and cross-selling: you get more sales if you ask, but you never get less if customers don’t accept the offer! So why not start asking away?

One trick I have implemented for my online boutique client is that I recommend them to choose a reasonable price that will entitle the customers to free shipping (my client eventually chose 50 bucks as the bottom line for getting free shipping). Then I created a plugin for them, and that plugin will trigger a recommendation page to ask the customer to buy more to save on shipping (see Figure 1).

Notice how the plugin will automatically choose items that’ll make the cart equal to or more than 50 bucks, and adding any of the items will make the customer enjoy free shipping. I’ve also played with words so that they feel sorry if they don’t make it to 50 bucks (look at the button that read “I don’t want to save RM8).

Having said that, if your store is currently providing free shipping on any amount, don’t be shy to implement this technique. Remember, if they are interested, they’ll buy more; otherwise, you don’t actually lose anything!

INSIGHT: With the free shipping recommendation in place, the client found that about 95% of their orders are now more than RM50, a very encouraging number that the tweak is well worth the effort!

Technique 2: Landing Page – Ask for Customer Actions

Most likely you’ve used Pay per Click (PPC) or other types of online advertisement to drive paid traffic to your store; and I bet most of you just let the traffic land on the home page. The main problem of having your customer land on the home page is that the home page is usually cluttered with different types of banner, products and other texts that’ll blur your prospect’s focus.

Enter Landing Page. A landing page is a page specially designed to do just two things – to welcome your customers and to let them know immediately what you have to offer them. A landing page is usually designed to be a very focused page detailing points that you want your customers to pay attention to, usually with a strong ‘Call to Action’. Sometimes, landing page also includes a sign up form that allows the visitors to quickly sign up for any promotion. Below is the top portion of one of the variations the landing page we are using during a Chinese New Year Promotion campaign. Unbounce has a list of nicely optimized landing pages for your inspiration.

There are also cases where you are running campaigns not on generic promotions, but on a series of targeted PPC keywords, for example “Nikon dslr camera” or “red night gown”, make sure you land your customer on the category page of the type of product you are advertising. In the case of ‘Nikon dslr camera’, don’t land the customer on your home page, and let them navigate through your site to actually find a Nikon camera. Instead, land them directly on the Nikon DSLR category page. You can read this article for more information the best practice of landing your customer when doing PPC campaigns.

INSIGHT: After implementing landing pages, the sign up rate has increased by about 10% as pointed out by the client. Sign up rate is an important KPI for the client, because this allows them to send e-mail newsletter to members, which in turn is a key way for them to engage with customers and convert them into buyers.

Technique 3: Optimized Checkout – Provide Seamless Buying Experience

More often than not, e-commerce stores requires the customers to check out using a confusing multi-step checkout form to buy items. I am a fan of online shopping, and the checkout part is always the part that I hated most. The case is even worse for some slow-loading checkout forms full of errors, where customers spent 10 minutes waiting for the checkout steps to transit from one to another, only to find that the last step of the form is malfunctioned.

When asked by my client to optimize their cart, I’ve spend a lot of time going through the checkout process. As expected, I wasn’t impressed with the whole buying experience: the checkout steps are complicated, I am sure first time online shoppers will lose their way during checkout. While I could have implemented a better multi-step checkout, I go further by implementing a more integrated checkout solution: a one-step checkout form. As shown in Figure 3, users enter the information until completion, all in a single page.

INSIGHT: By implementing the express checkout solution, the whole buying experience is improved and the whole process becomes faster and simpler. Interestingly, my client also gets much less e-mails asking how to buy from the store! While there is no number confirming the impact of the express checkout solution, the client believes the overall experience is now much better, and their customers are now less confused about the checkout process.

Technique 4: Abandoned Carts Recovery – Remind Customers of Their Cart

If your online shop is running on any capable shopping cart software, you should be able to view the current items in any customer’s cart. Try analyzing on this perspective, you’ll be surprised how many of them have actually added items to their carts, but eventually leave your store without checking out. Just try to do some math to see how much more you’ll earn if 10% of them actually end up buying from your store. You’ll be surprised by the number.

So what should you do? Remind them! That’s when e-mail marketing comes in! I actually come across this idea when GoDaddy regularly e-mails me to remind me about the current items I am holding in my cart. Most of the time, GoDaddy even gives discount to encourage me buying from them!

Drawing from this inspiration, I quickly implemented a plugin for my client that loops through all registered customers who has added items in their shopping cart during the past week, and send each of the customers e-mail reminder. Some customers are randomly chosen to be given a small amount of discount if they check out (some kind of A/B testing here). Regardless of whether they get discount or not, the reminder actually works, and it works nicely!

INSIGHT: Of all the selected customers who are provided discount, about 15% of them actually check out, which is proven to be a pretty encouraging number!

Conclusion

I hope you find these 4 little techniques useful in optimizing your (or your clients’) online store. All of these are very easy to implement, but they brings very good results! Remember, e-commerce optimization requires constant analysis, regular testing and sometimes some inspiration! Now, stop reading and start implementing these techniques on your store! (Ok, you can take a few minutes to write some comments below, appreciated!)

Bonus

If you are using Magento as your shopping cart system, check out these plugins for similar optimizations:

• One Step Checkout - An equivalent of the Express Checkout mentioned above
• Abandoned Carts Alerts Pro - Abandoned carts reminder