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E-commerce Optimization - Get the Most Out of Your Online Store

Do you have an e-commerce site that is underperforming? Or perhaps you’re in the planning phase now for a new e-commerce site, and you want to know how to plan it right from the start. Either way you’ll benefit from this case study. This is basically the story of an online apparel/sleepwear retailer, and how I was able to increase the sales volume by 400%, without any increase in traffic.

Just so we’re clear, this article is not about how to get more traffic. Nor is it about search engine optimization. This is definitely not about building links. Keep in mind that for this site, these steps were already done. The were done so well in fact, that the site maintains search engine ranking positions (SERPs) between 1-3 for their particular niche of Victorian nightgowns and related searches. The site already attracted thousands of visitors per month, yet the conversion rates were staggeringly low for such targeted traffic, around 0.3%.

Homepage Optimization
Of course, one look at site showed why sales were so low. Here’s how it looked:

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It was both ugly and confusing. If I was here looking to shop the collection of victorian nightgowns, where was I supposed to click? The funny thing is, even the owner of the business was confused by the homepage! Another issue was that a link to a partner site was actually larger than the link to the products section!

A quick glance at the web statistics confirmed my suspicions, showing that over 50% of visitors were abandoning the site upon arriving at the home page. So something had to be done to make it less confusing.

Here’s the new look/template I designed:

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So this new template was much more organized, clean, intuitive, and professional. If I were one to buy nightgowns (for my wife), I would definitely be more likely to buy them from a site that looks like this rather than the former.

Product Page Design/Optimization
So now it was on to the product page. It was just plain sloppy. There were colors everywhere, and they clashed with each other. There were multiple font faces and sizes. The options to customize the product were all over the place. Here’s how it was:

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So I reorganized it. I made the fonts consistent, the options aligned, took out the colorful boxes, and made sure all product images were consistently oval shaped. The result was much cleaner:

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Category Optimization
Then I looked at the page that displayed all the products, the ‘category’ page. Sadly, it was just a bunch of images. There were no titles, descriptions, really no enticement whatsoever, and no calls-to-action. Here’s how it looked:

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Again, I reorganized it. I ordered the items by popularity, so that the attention would be first drawn to the item most likely to be purchased. I also included a brief description of each product, which was really just an excerpt of the main description. Finally, I included a call-to-action for each, a link that invited clicks by saying ‘choose size & style’.

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Web Site Structure
Now it was time to do some general site cleanup. There was a ‘closeouts’ page for discontinued products. The ironic thing was that there had never been any closeouts! So you’d better believe that page was removed.

Also the pages for links, privacy statement, and contact information were seldom visited, but of course still important. But why waste valuable navigation space on unpopular links? So links to these pages were moved to the footer.

Testimonials
The testimonials page on the other hand is different. It is extremely important. The best marketing is viral marketing, the recommendations you receive for a friend, the referral with the human touch. That’s the point of the testimonial page, to attempt to provide that human recommendation. So there were excerpts from testimonials placed on every main page, and a link to the testimonials page placed in the main navigation. Even if people don’t click on it, the prominence of the link suggests that we have happy customers, and they’re happy enough to share their experiences, therefore you’ll be happy too!

Shopping Cart Optimization
Next step: the shopping cart. Where was it? There were just buttons and links randomly placed throughout the site labeled ‘view order’. It was quite confusing, it didn’t mention anything about placing the order! So I simply renamed all the buttons to either ‘view cart’ or ‘checkout’, and put them put everywhere except on the checkout page itself.

The cart itself was not surprisingly quite ugly:

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So I gave it a cleaner look, used more concise wording, and easier instructions:

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Conclusion
So what was the effect of these site-wide changes? Well, within a couple of weeks the visits to sub-pages had increased drastically. This means that there was less homepage abandonment, therefore people were less confused.

There were also a few more orders, but still not enough, or at least not as many as such a highly targeted niche site could be getting. The conversion was not-bad, but it should be great.

The next part to this article will explain how I got it to ‘great’.

Reach out to friends for input. Extra tips helped push from not-bad to great. Part 2.