Maximise Your Sales

The primary path for the user is: Arrive > Intrigue > Inform > Decide > Buy.

Our aim is to maximise the number of people who make it to the end of the path. How do we do that?

• Arrive - top quality Search Engine Optimisation and other marketing
• Intrigue - engaging site design and content plus great and relevant products!
• Inform - products and related information should be relevant, engaging and easy to find
• Decide - sales techniques
• Buy - easy online payment

Easy Access

Make it easy for your customers to find what they want. If they can't find the product, they can't buy the product.

• Ensure that search engines pick up your web-site, index your products and rank you high up in their results - so customers can find your website
• Intuitive navigation, page layouts and creative design
• Simple categorisation hierarchy
• Efficient and accurate searching
• Good connections from social media and other websites to relevant pages.

Navigation and search should support several customer use-cases:

• Customers who know what product they want and just want to find and buy it.
• Customers who know their requirements but do know your products. They need to assess the features of your products to match their requirements.
• Customers who are looking for a bargain.
• Customers who don't know what they want to buy and are looking for ideas e.g. for a gift.

Confidence

Give your customers the confidence that they will not regret buying from you.

• Professionally designed web-site with high-quality content
• A no-quibble money back guarantee
• Detailed images, description and sizing
• Tools to visualise the purchase further e.g. a 3-D view, photos of customers using the products, dynamic flash animations showing how the product might look in different surroundings.
• Online and phone sales assistance
• Real customer reviews
• Loyalty programme

According to Jakob Nielson, over half of failed online shopping experiences were due to bad (incomplete or unclear) content describing products.

Easy payment

Make it extremely easy to pay.

• Do not force your users to register to obtain shipping costs
• Do not force your users to register
• No surprises with the retail tax and freight
• Accept payment from most credit cards and paypal if necessary

Sales Techniques

Use traditional sales techniques to increase the sales value of each customer.

Use time-limited discounts to draw customers to the shop and to create a sense of urgency to complete the sale. Loyalty bonuses keep customers coming back.

A minimum order price or carefully structured shipping costs can encourage customers to buy more. Free shipping over a certain cart value is very effective.

There are lots of cross-selling techniques to encourage the customer to buy more products:

• Other customers also bought xxx
• Suggest accessories
• A featured product
• Global and per-category bestseller lists
• Related products by associating products with each other

Up-sell by promoting the value of the next model up, but be careful as this can confuse the customer and delay/lose the sale).

Encouraging loyalty will bring repeat business. Jakob Nielson found that 71% of people who accessed online shops directly went on to buy. Only 29% of people who found the shop through a search engine purchased.