October 13, 2009
Op Ed By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
With the holiday shopping season approaching, you want to make sure your ecommerce site is ready to capture all the traffic and capitalize on it by turning visitors into paying customers. One of the simplest yet often overlooked ways to help improve traffic and conversions at an ecommerce storefront is to ensure you have a very speedy website. With many things int he code of ecommerce sites like advertising code, products and analytics code, you need to make sure everything loads right away so visitors do not abandon the site. Fast load times also help crawlers scan your site to make sure they know where to rank it in search results.
Another great way to help improve your conversion rate and site traffic is to study and tweak the bounce rate by entry page. This may take some time, but it is easy money you are missing out on as their might be quick things you can do that, over time, will help people stay on your site and ultimately convert. You may be getting traffic to a page for a certain keyword and not have the right layout or product selection to lure in the visitor to shop. Having a visitor stay and browse on your site is great, but you want to drive them to purchase. To do this, consider implementing a recommendation engine so it can help suggest the right product to customers. This is also a perfect way to help your customers up-sell themselves by staying on your site longer and browsing more recommendations.
The last tip is very important and something you can never stop as there is always room for improvement. Ecommerce store owners need to continually test landing pages to make sure they are converting as many visitors as possible into paying customers. This is useful for organic traffic as well as paid traffic and should be performed slowly to make sure you do not ruin any of your existing conversions rates. With paid traffic, you can quickly see the results of your efforts as your conversion rates will show you if your tweaks were successful.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
