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)?
Now I Want It
I wasn’t super interested in this item. But seeing this … … increased my interest level 10%. Why this is a clever tactic– no one really ever buys 4 units in one order but seeing a purchase limit has a psychological sway on the subconscious mind.
PSST! Yes You
A very cool tactic to drive up signups. This popup appears when the site visitor has spent a certain amount of time and visited a certain number of pages–
Exclusivity Messaging
Received an email from titanium-jewelry.com. Like most marketing emails this one had a coupon code, but what was different was the way in which the coupon code was presented. Read the underlined section in the screenshot below (underlined in red by me)— This is a very clever line because it creates a sense of exclusivity in the mind of the …
Spin the Digital Wheel
Allaboutdance.com has a sweepstakes page where shoppers can spin a digital wheel and win a giveaway— Is this a good idea? I’m not sure, but I give allaboutdance.com props for testing something different.
The Best Conversion Trick of All
There are many tactics to improve website conversion rates (here, here and here). But that’s what they are, tactics. If your aim is to actually change the way site visitors think there is only one true way to do it— dulcet copywriting. Here is an example from zingermans.com where they are talking about their spicy cashews (posted below)— Spicy Cashews …
Banner Ads of eCommerce Site 2 on eCommerce Site 1
There is something that’s bothered me for years. Some ecommerce sites (example www.fast-growing-trees.com) have banner ads promoting other businesses. This is the banner ad that’s currently on display at the footer of www.fast-growing-trees.com — Mind you, www.fast-growing-trees.com isn’t a low traffic site, their traffic is impressive— I can see why a tiny ecommerce site would have link-sharing with other sites, …
Reducing Checkout Friction
An incredibly large number of shoppers abandon during checkout. On the first half of their visit (homepage, category page, product page and add to cart click) shoppers are building a mental case for buying an item. During second half of visit (cart page, shipping and billing page) they’re building a case to not buy. During this phase even the slightest inconvenience …
No Michigan Sales Tax
Personalization works— When I see a message like screenshot above (pointed by blue arrow) the thought that crosses my mind is, “Michigan residents don’t have to pay sales tax. I’m a Michigan resident. Awesome.” Turns out, this kind of location-based targeting is pretty simple. Just add a piece of free javascript code (https://freegeoip.net/) to your site and then the code will …
All Conversion’s Aren’t Created Equal
I’ve had a thought float in my mind a long time, but never managed to figure out a way to express it. Now thanks to Smriti Chawla from VWO (who pointed me in the right direction) and Rand Fishkin (who beautifully described it) I can just link to my thought— https://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/xq1iovyyaa
Paid Service
Allrecipes.com is a great site where members submit and rate recipes. They have a paid plan. If you want your customers to signup for a paid plan don’t talk about features that are down the road, no one cares about that—
