E-Commerce Blog

In an era of Internet commerce, it?s an unsurprising phenomenon that we expect the vast majority of our interactions with customers to happen in an online environment. The expectation is that people will send an email, contact us through support forms or simply place an order. But it?s still an inevitability that things might not work just right!

The telephone is normally considered to be a powerful sales tool for every type of commerce. If you want to make your business available to your customers, you publish a phone number on your site. This gives your customers another way to contact you ? great for those who are less than entirely comfortable ordering online or who simply need a little more information.

But the telephone doesn?t serve much of a function for the hard-of-hearing. At least, it doesn?t serve them the same way it does the average person.

The traditional telecommunication method for the deaf used to be through a teletype (TTY or TDD,…

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Customer Service For The Hearing Impaired

WeddingThings is an established ecommerce company that sells the unique gifts wedding guests traditionally take home, as well as other wedding essentials for the perfect wedding such as invitations and bridal-party gifts.

Eugene Mar, vice president of WeddingThings, wants some insight for increasing referrals from search engines and increasing conversions from visitors to customers and he?s requested this site grade. Lets take WeddingThings through our conversion scorecard and see what opportunities exist.

Findability

Qualified prospects must first find your website, and once at your site it must be easy for them to locate the products they are seeking. A broad search for ?wedding favors? does return WeddingThings.com on the first page of Google results, but broader need-based queries such as ?eco friendly wedding favors? or ?wedding reception guest ideas? does not return WeddingThings in the first few pages of Google search results.

When performing these…

Excerpted from:
Conversion Report Card: WeddingThings.com

I?m a musical gear-aholic. My apartment is littered with instruments leaning against walls, stashed in corners, and propped up in closets. I?ve never met a guitar or keyboard I didn?t like. Having said that, while I frequent online music malls, I?ve never shopped at Music123.com. That site is similar in many ways to other musical instrument websites in that the focus is on brands and products, and the variety of choices is quite large. At the end of the day, though, the same search engine optimization parameters apply to music stores as they do to any other ecommerce entity. Staff of Music123.com requested this review, so let?s strap this site on and turn up the SEO.

Home Page Content

Search engines love textual content, and as long as it?s focused, the general rule is the more the better. Music123 has a distinct lack of such content as most of the page is graphical. The homepage doesn?t feature heading tags either, which offer a way to highlight focused keywords….

Original post:
SEO Report Card: Music123.com

Now that your analytics tool is tracking your conversions, you can measure the conversion rate of search engine keywords, referring sites and ad campaigns. The strategy is to find a traffic source that generates higher-than-average conversions, and increase the traffic from that source and ones like it.

Simple right? The eye instantly notices keywords that generate 25%, 33.33%, 50% and even 100% conversion. But for several reasons, these numbers should be suspect, and sometimes ignored.

Too Perfect

Conversion of 25%, 33.33% and 100% are suspect because they rarely appear when there is an adequate sample size. Let?s use one of our newer stores, Brainwaves Educational Toys, as an example. In the analysis, the keyword phrase ?superstructs pinklets? brought three visitors, and one of those visitors converted. The web analytics reports a 33.33% conversion rate.

While this is an excellent conversion rate, it doesn?t yet represent a trend that supports investment for the…

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When To Ignore A 50% Conversion Rate

Online forms have become much more elegant and usable in the last couple of years as developers take advantage of ?Web 2.0? technologies like visual effects and ?behind-the-scenes? calls to the server. In fact, I have seen forms that are just downright fun to fill out, which is something that I never thought I would admit. However, developers need to understand the cost of using these technologies, and some basic best practices with regard to implementing them.

First, most of the ?Web 2.0? features that we speak about are created using JavaScript, which is interpreted and run by a web browser, such as Internet Explorer. There are many cases where someone may not have JavaScript available, or it has been turned off in his browser. This is an important consideration because if an online form interface is not ?degradable,? users that do not have JavaScript will not be able to interact with it. For example, if you have a contact form that requires Ajax calls to send the…

Source:
Programmers: Web 2.0 Forms