E-Commerce

Or, how to double your online sales

A substantial increase in sales can be achieved with the right strategies, tools, and effort. Here’s an example.

E-Commerce 101

The math of e-commerce is simple arithmetic.

Visitors × Conversion Rate × Average Sale = Revenue

Let’s illustrate this with some examples for an average month.

The means we can increase sales by

1. Getting more people to your website
2. Convincing more of them to buy something
3. Getting buyers to buy more

Getting more people to your website

There a many ways to increase traffic to your site. Some of these include

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Increasing inbound links (helps SEO as well)
• Send-to-a-friend tools
• RSS feed for new products
• Traditional or Pay-per-click ads (like Google AdWords)
• Social networking (Forums, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

For our example, let’s assume you put time and effort into all 6 areas, and each one increases your traffic by only 2% for a total increase of 12%.

Convincing visitors to buy something

Once visitors are on your site, you need to make it easier for them to find what they are looking for, encourage them to buy, and remove roadblocks that may keep them from buying. Some strategies for this include

• Improved site design to build confidence and credibility
• Grid-based product lists to move more items “above the fold”
• Search, guided navigation, and tagging to help visitors find what they want
• Simplified checkout process to reduce cart abandonment
• Enhanced product detail pages to give visitors the information they need to buy
• Visitor comments on products to reinforce their decisions

Let’s say you implement some of these strategies and convince one more person in two hundred to buy, increasing your conversion rate from 1% to 1.5%. We’ve seen this kind of increase from improved product search and guided navigation enhancements by themselves.

Getting buyers to buy more

If they’re going to buy, we would like them to buy more. This can often be accomplished with cross-selling, up-selling, and other promotions. And if you’ve made the site easier to navigate and made your products more appealing, visitors will want to buy more.

For our example, let’s say we were able to increase the average sale by six dollars or 20%.

So where does that put us…

The way to double online sales is by making minor improvements to many different areas of the store.

If you would like to learn how Quinn Interactive can help you improve your online store, give us a call at (415) 296-9000. Or fill out our Free Consultation form and we’ll contact you right away.