November 17, 2009
By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
You can spend a lot of money buying traffic for your website and countless hours working on your SEO strategy to gain more visitors, but it will not matter if they do not have a good user experience. It is critical to the success of an ecommerce store to have a great conversion funnel that makes it easy for people to find what they want, add it to their shopping cart, and quickly check out. Consumers shopping online can easily become impatient and abandon your site because it is not easy for them use. Think of it like a normal retail store that needs to stay clean and organized so people will be able to find what they want and make their purchase. If you have a cluttered website then it is going to be very distracting to someone who just wants to shop for a particular product. Below are some simple and cost effective options you can use to improve the usability of your ecommerce store so you can increase sales during the upcoming holiday shopping season.
Not only is this a free tool, which is a price you cannot beat, but it is also quite amazing in that you can make a few site variations and let it do its magic to determine which is most effective. You can see which promotions or banners are converting best and it is tied into Google Analytics.
This is a great and cost effective way to get visual and written feedback on your ecommerce site. For only $29 you can submit your site to UserTesting.com and in a couple hours you will have a video of someone using the site and giving feedback along the way in addition to written notes. Well worth the money if you can just increase conversion rates by a fraction of a percent.
Crazy Egg
If you enjoy seeing heat maps of your site to get a sense of where users eyes are focused when on your site, then Crazy Egg is the perfect choice for you. Enter one line of JavaScript to your site and for $19 – $99 per month (depending on your traffic) you can get a deep understanding of how people use your site. As you improve usability you will see how the trends change each month.
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.
