E-commerce: Spruce Up Your Web Site with Improved Web Selling Techniques

“The goal of any change to an e-commerce platform is to decrease the customer’s cost of time and effort in doing business with you,” said Eric Svenson, vice president of DMinSite, an e-commerce service provider to the catalog industry, in his talk “Advanced Web Selling Techniques for Catalogers” at the New England Mail Order Association conference held in Cambridge, Mass., last week.

Customers will respond to a simplified shopping experience with higher average order values (AOV) and higher conversions, noted Svenson. In order to facilitate this goal, Svenson offered the following techniques:

* Test, test, test! Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is that whatever changes a cataloger makes to its Web site, a thorough testing process should be implemented to ensure positive customer response, said Svenson. “Catalogers test new list universes, new catalog covers, but too often they don’t test a brand new Web site.”

He cited the example of women’s plus-size apparel catalog Ulla Popken. Before launching a brand new Web site in 2003, featuring a revamped shopping cart and checkout process, an advanced site search, and an advanced results sorting page, Ulla Popken set up an A/B split test to measure if there was any effect on sales. For seven days, 50 percent of the traffic to the main URL was sent to the old Web site, and 50 percent was sent to the new site. Only after noting that the new site generated 32 percent more sales than the old site did executives at the company order the full launch of the new site.

Svenson cautioned that not all Web site platforms are built to enable a split test, often because they were built by engineers rather than direct sellers. An effort should be made to change over to a testable platform, noted Svenson.

* Use solution-based navigation. “Shoppers are looking for solutions and experiences, not products,” said Svenson. Customers should be able to search, not just for specific products, but the experience promoted by those products, he noted. Audubon Workshop, a wild bird products catalog, features not only a search box in its Web site, but a navigation bar that allows customers to search the site based on the type of bird they’d like to attract to their backyards.

“Online, you are not limited by rigid product categories,” pointed out Svenson.”Allow items to appear wherever applicable, not in one category as in a catalog.” He further noted there is a higher conversion rate on items customers found as the solution to a specific problem than on items located via a typical keyword search.

* Cross-sell on the product page. Every product page should have a list of similar or related products featured somewhere on the page, said Svenson. By showcasing similar merchandise, every product has the ability to pull the customers deeper into the site, increasing the likelihood they’ll purchase something else and increasing AOV, he noted. By way of example, Svenson cited The Sports Section, a sports merchandise catalog, which increased its online AOV 70 percent just one day after launching cross-sells on every product page.