Readable Reviews
Which review is easier and quicker to read? Review 1 (actual size): Review 2 (actual size): That’s right, it’s review 2. Always present reviews in larger font size and darker font color. You’ll be happy with the result.
Message from Our CEO
Your story matters, especially for first-time visitors. This isn’t an opinion, it’s data fact. Inc. 500 award winner (#1 in travel category) Regal Wings knows this, which is why when you land on their site regalwings.com you’re shown this floating tab— I love floating mini tabs because they take up very little screen space but are hard to miss. For their tab, …
Beautiful Design Can Hurt Conversions
Here is a screenshot of the top half of mytarp.com— Spend 30 seconds looking at it and tell me which page element grabbed your attention the strongest. [Don’t scroll down till you’ve made your selection] For me it was the ugly neon green “Custom Made Tarps” message. Assuming mytarp.com makes highest margin on their custom products (which they most likely …
Discount Code Location
These days many sites have promos where they offer shoppers a discount if they ‘comment on’ or ‘like’ their brand on Facebook. Most display these promos on landing pages or product pages. While those locations are OK the best idea is to do what saatvamattress.com does, they show their message on the cart page, where it has the highest chance of …
Changing the Minds of Shoppers Thinking of Unsubscribing
I’ve been getting a lot of emails from michaels.com lately. So I clicked the ‘unsubscribe’ link in this email footer. The next page changed my mind—
Are You Giving Your Top Seller Enough Love?
Stop everything, open Google Analytics, select 9 month time period and see Conversions—> Ecommerce—>Product Performance report. It’s highly likely that your top seller sells 2X as many units as the next best seller (Zipf’s law). Now go to your top seller product page (on your site) and copy page link name. Return to Google Analytics and go to Behavior—>Site Content—>All Pages report and …
Compare and Contrast
Few facts about online shoppers— 1: They are impatient and unexcited about reading your 2,000 word product description. 2: They hate making a bad purchase decision, but the alternative of comparing multiple products on multiple sites isn’t ideal either. To solve for 1 and 2 consider adding an infographic like this on your product page—
Riding Coattails is Clever
Your #1 goal for a landing page ISNT’T to make a sale. It’s to slow the visitor down.
I Know Nothing
Because I’ve been obsessing over ecommerce for 8 years I often erroneously start believing I’m an expert. I’m not. Case in point— on my virtual stroll through ecommerce stores I stumbled on bikesdirect.com. Please stop reading, visit their homepage and return in 10 seconds. I didn’t take bikesdirect.com seriously because it was obviously a “small” site with a “1995” look. …
What’s Better Than Customer Reviews? …
… reviews of customers who live near you. Lifesourcewater.com understands this and that’s why they have a cool feature called “Search For Reviews In Your Zip Code:”— The shopper can enter their zip code and see listing of reviews of shoppers near them— Basically lifesourcewater.com re-sorts reviews starting from the searcher’s zip code. This is a good tactic for sites …
It’s the Way in Which You Say It That Matters
There are two ways to let your shoppers know an item isn’t available. Bad— 5x better—
Correlation Does Not Imply Causation
Humans are evolutionarily predisposed to see patterns, we confuse coincidence with correlation and correlation with causality. Always keep this in mind when studying your analytics data. Fun example— pirates cause global warming: A little about us Thank you for reading this article. We are Frictionless Commerce and over the last 11 years, we’ve thought about just one thing: how do we get online …
VIP Priority Processing
Noticed something new and am not sure if it’s a bad idea or a brilliant one. On sprinklerwarehouse.com when you add an item to the cart, and start the checkout process, this popup appears: At one level it feels brilliant because $2.95 is a small enough fee but at the same time, I feel it may end up annoying anyone …
Small Tweaks Are Amazingly Powerful
Leisurepro.com sells scuba gear and offers free returns all year round. But they understand during holiday gift-buying season non-scuba divers are on their site buying for scuba divers, so they make 1 small tweak to their free returns message— Every time you change a word to something that relates to the shopper’s state of mind it gets their attention. This …
Reducing Checkout Friction on Mobile Devices
Came across this really interesting article by Baymard Institute with examples of mobile sites where form fields (think checkout pages) weren’t configured properly with keyboard ‘type’. Do your site checkout pages make any of these mistakes (see notes below screenshots)?
