Place of design

This is the first of a series of articles on SEO and conversion for e-commerce sites. This article introduces the very basics of e-commerce SEO and conversion, other articles will cover the details

Get this one in your head, it is the mantra for e-commerce:
Turnover = (average order value x conversion x number of visitors) – refunds

Turnover: sales generated from the site. You will have a margin built in to this that you need to consider in the maths
Average order value: Just that – all your site sales divided by the number of site sale
Conversion: The  number of site visitors compared to number of sales expressed as a percentage
Number of visitors: The number of unique visitors or number of visits, depending on your point of view
Refunds: need little explaination, but are a good indicator of quality and customer service

Conversion

Before we deal with traffic into the site, we need to look at conversion. Why is this important? Well let’s look at the numbers for typical conversion. Forgetting the sector, usual figures are between 0.5 and 8% most are at the lower end of this scale

Example
If your conversion is a measly 1%, then increasing it by another 0.5% will increase your turnover by 1.5 times, which is what selling is about!

If you increased your visitor traffic by 1% then your turnover will increase 1.01 times, which is a small beer change. Proportionately, getting conversion right will increase your turnover compared to the effort of increasing visitors. In fact, there is a valid argument that says if you double your conversion, the cost of getting each customer is proportionately halved, which increases your profitability too

Factors causing low conversion

• Poor site design
• Poor products
• Hidden pricing
• Poor quality photography and write-ups for the product
• Site usability issues
• Non-competitive pricing
• Site sends out wrong messages
• Attracting the wrong customers to your site in the first place

Find out more here: Increasing the conversion of your website

AOV Average Order Value

Essentially, if you can increase the spend of a customer already committed to a sale. If you do this, you make more money. Sounds obvious, but many e-commerce sites don’t employ techniques to cross sell and up sell. I will discuss the methods to increase average order value in a later article

Number of visitors

Yes increasing the number of visitors will increase sales, SO LONG AS THE VISITORS HAVE RELEVANCE

Relevance
e.g. you sell golf shoes – no point at all sending a customer who isn’t a golfer to your site, not in the slightest

Ensuring visitor relevance is tricky. There are so many people who view things in terms of “hits” or “visitors” This thought process needs to be adjusted to “how many relevant visitors come to my site”

Measuring relevance is very hard; however when you choose a route that is designed to send you more visitors, if you can’t see how it is sending you relevant visitors don’t bother. The point I am making is that whatever route you choose to drive visitors to your site, make every effort to ensure you drive relevant visitors to your site, not random ones

You can drive visitors to your site in many ways
I will discuss this huge topic in another article on another day

Refunds
We all hate these, and there are some techniques in avoiding them. I will look at this area in another article

About the Author

I am a website designer; however my background is retail management. I apply the processes that I learnt in bricks and mortar retailing to the web. Having a real face to face retail background enables me to understand why customer service and system efficiency are very important. E-commerce is traditionally very weak at customer service, and web marketing is traditionally very blinkered to “web only techniques”

If you want to deal with someone who does understand the big picture, just drop me a line

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