Place of design

Your website has a goal – to get the user to do something. That something could be to pick up the phone, to buy something, to register for a newsletter

We are going to have an in-depth look at the factors causing a low conversion. These may be blended – no real individual reason, but a blend of different reasons. It is worth both yourself auditing your own site, and having others audit your site for you against the following criteria. You need broad shoulders – be prepared to accept what others say, and understand that your view is possibly a little polarised

What is conversion?

Before we get going, like all things that need managing properly, conversion is easily measureable

Your sites conversion is simply:
(Visitors who performed the desired task / Number of visitors) x 100

Factors causing low conversion

1. Poor site design
2. Poor products
3. Hidden pricing
4. Poor quality photography and write-ups for the product
5. Site usability issues
6. Non-competitive pricing
7. Site sends out wrong messages
8. Attracting the wrong customers to your site in the first place
9. Communication issues
10. Organisation issues
11. Lack of reassurance
12. Dealing with objections
13. Localisation issues

Poor site design

Modern consumers demand crisp, easy to use, well designed sites that are pixel perfect

It is really interesting to ask a real shop owner what they think about their shop – they will always say it is clean, tidy, well fitted and decorated. It is a visual thing

A visitor however instantly sees the cracking paint, the faded POS, the dusty floor straight away – and this influences the sale. This has a lot to do with consumer confidence. The “shop looks shabby” translates to “the stock looks dated” having a knock on effect on the desire to spend. Exactly the same principles apply to online retailing. Untidy design, poor quality graphics, dated design, messy typography or broken pages all contribute to lowering conversion.

Just like in the high street shop, consumers translate “sloppy design” to: “I can not trust them to send me my product”, or “the product will be shabby”

The second element of poor design is more subtle. Is the design steering the customer the right way? Are the important elements of the design in the right places? Example – why have navigation which requires the user to scroll down? Where is the shopping cart? Where is the product search? Is it obvious how to buy something? Is the buy option too many clicks away? Does the design actually suit your offering?

The third major issue with design is usability, which we will look at later in the article. There are some obvious things that just drive visitors away. Reversed text (white text on a black background) usually is just unreadable. Menus that don’t work in certain browsers etc will also have visitors leaving as fast as they came.

The only certain way to know if your site has bad design is to ask someone to review the site for you impartially. We have a team of approx. 20 consumers we use for such a purpose. You may want to ask your staff to get their spouses or friends to use your site and evaluate it for you

Poor products

This is a no-brainer. If you are offering poor quality out of date products, then your image will suffer and so will sales. Whilst it is painful writing off products, or using them to sweeten the sale of the products your customers do want – something will need to be done. Consumers will just click away if you do not have the right products or indeed products of a high enough quality in your online store

Back to the high street… We have all seen shops grasping on to the five year old dress or cassette deck, which was over-ordered and now won’t shift. Displaying it only puts consumers off buying anything else. Dead stock needs dealing with, and ought not to be in any primary position in your store. Exactly the same thought process happens in the consumers mind in an e-commerce environment

Hidden pricing

We all hate hidden pricing, and we meet it far too often. One of the largest causes of abandoned carts is hidden pricing – postage or some service is normally the culprit

Do everything you can to avoid hidden pricing. Be upfront with your postage costs and do not spring surprises on the store visitor, especially at the last moment

Think how you would feel in the following scenario

I offer you 400 business cards for £1.00 – you fill in your name, address, you design the cards online, you fill in a long form with names and addresses, and then at the last moment, the “printing shipping and handling fees are £8.99

You feel: “cheated”, “it’s a con”, “I have wasted my time”

Conversely how would you feel if I said?
“400 business cards, you design them online, we print them, deliver them for free, within 3 working days for just £9.99”

You would think: Sounds like a great deal, I want to buy, and you would even recommend me

Poor quality photography and product write-ups

You go to a beautiful high class jeweller – what does their point of sale look like – PERFECT, in fact very perfect – perfect by design. Everything about the way they present the product, talk about the product is spot on. You go to a back street jeweller – and the prices are the same, but the point of sale is dented, the velvet dusty. You speak to the staff, they don’t really know the product that well – which shop will you buy your engagement ring in. The first one of course
Exactly the same applies to online stores, for point of sale, read photography, for sales assistant, read product write-up.

Fact
Too many stores have poor quality product photography; it stands out a mile, makes consumers cringe and drastically reduces sales. Paying a professional is not cheap, but if you want to sell products, this is exactly what you need to do. Paying for a professional is indeed not cheap; it offers very good value for money when looking at the big picture
Photography also needs to be uniform and fairly homogeneous. When its style or quality jumps from page to page – or worse still on the same page, the store visitor mentally notes untidiness, and the chance of a sale is reduced

Fact
People buy in different ways, and you need to accommodate different styles of buying. Some people are “educated buyers” they have already decided exactly what they want, they are looking for a specific product, and it will be price, and service that determine if your store will make a sale. Some people are fact seeking buyers – they want comparisons, datasheets, colour charts. They need to know all of these things before purchasing. Some people are visual – they need to see visual details about the products, others are emotional – they need to know how the product will make them feel, the benefits

All of these shoppers can be accommodated by “layering information” in a methodical way.

The e-commerce information layer stack

Layer 0: Front of the store – sets the tone and breaks down barriers, invites the browser in – same as the traditional shop window
Layer 1: The category page – orientates the customer, each product with an image, a brief description, a few benefits – the high street store equivalent is the departments in a store
Layer 2: The product page, explaining benefits, showing more images, testimonials, detailed description – Almost the traditional high street store equivalent of POS and the product itself
Layer 3: Data layer – technical specifications, datasheets, extended colour charts, dimensions, health and safety datasheets etc. In the real world, this is the manual, the data on the box, the paint chart, the leaflet with the wardrobe dimensions

If at each layer, the customer can buy, then the store presents more and more information about a product as the customer clicks deeper into the layers, all types of customer are catered for

Many stores ignore the quality of later 2, and layer 3, and often totally omit layer 3. This disenfranchise the undecided fact seeking customer whilst also reducing the content readable by a search engine

Other important issues about the product write-up

The quality of the words, the craft of the phrasing, the call to action, the usage of English and the conciseness of the text is very important.

Just as having a professionally produced product images is very important, having professionally written texts will make the world of difference to conversion. Using a professional copywriter can pay absolute dividends. The difference to changing one or two words can make to conversion is dramatic

Site assessability and usability issues

There are 2 areas to this – accessibility, and usability. If you get either of these issues slightly wrong, then your sites conversion will be much poorer than it can be

Some people are deaf, some people are blind, some have learning disabilities, others struggle to concentrate. Designing your site, giving options to people with disabilities, or making sure that by design they are innately catered for is a must

Blind and visually impaired users may use screen readers. Does your site cater for this?   Is your site optimised in any way for this? Visually impaired people struggle with small text, reversed text, low contrast text. There is no reason at all why you need to make it hard for such people

Giving verbal instructions, via audio is cool, but how about a text version – Great for deaf people and great for search engines too

Having an inclusive site is the aim; don’t drive away customers by being thoughtless with your design
The next area is usability. Do you know what browsers your customers use? Your website statistics will tell you. If your customers are on corporate networks, they may be locked to using IE6 and an old version of Flash. Some sites are totally non-viewable by the customers they want the most – people who are working, and earning money, whilst they surf at work on a break
Do all of the technologies in your store work in all the browsers, properly? How about on phones? Or micro PC’s? What about customers on a Mac?

You really do want to avoid:

• Dead links
• Cryptic processes
• Fancy clever menus, when a simple one will do
• Un-readable text (do look on many machines, reversed or white on black, or grey on black is the worst culprit)
• Too many things going on a page
• Inconsistent navigation, or menus that move from page to page
• Non-obvious / obscured / hidden links

The aim is to have really logical navigation, with consistency. If clicking on images opens the next page, make that a site wide feature. If the menu is on the left, keep it there. If the add to cart button is under the product image, keep it there on all pages

Important features like “add to cart” and “checkout” and “Search” must be very obvious and consistent on you site. Website designers, and site owners who know their own sites backwards, don’t believe people get lost in their websites. The only way to know is get new users to test it for you, and then listen to their honest comments

Can your customer add any product to the cart in fewer than 3 clicks? The less clicks, the higher your conversion will be

Any accessibility or usability issue WILL impact in the wrong way your sites conversion

Non competitive pricing

While it sounds very obvious, having your pricing set too high (or low) will have a fundamental effect on conversion

Online store owners have a much finer line to judge than traditional retailers. The process of buying in a bricks and mortar shop is physical. You drive to town, you park, you walk to the shop, you browse, try to remember the price, go to the next shop… Conversion in high street stores is easier, because shopping elsewhere requires effort

Shopping elsewhere for online customer is easy – you can even be in many shops at once. Comparisons are easy, and the effort to look elsewhere is minimal. This is why getting the price spot on is so much more an issue for online shops

Have you analysed your competition? If you haven’t, you ought to be, constantly in some sectors. Why not offer a “price match”, get people to e-mail you where they can get it lower. Don’t guarantee a price match, but offer to look at it

Site sends out wrong messages

We have all seen sites that we cringe at… Why did they say that? Simply, it is because the owner and designer think the site looks OK

For some people cheap, loud in your face window salesman type advertising is absolutely fine for a fine art book shop. For others, it just drives them away. Again the only way to know, is independent testing
It is very important to give several people from different viewpoints evaluate your whole site, its proposition, its texts and imagery

Attracting the wrong customers to your site in the first place

There is an obsession in some quarters that website traffic is good. Peruse forums, and people are desperate for traffic.

YOU ARE PAID IN CASH. YOU ARE NOT PAID IN HITS OR VISITORS

Getting the correct, demographically profiled traffic is exactly what you want. When you consider Adwords, PPC or SEO make sure you are driving traffic to your site, from the correct demographic group, that are actually searching for your products, that are actually form the right geographic location

Any other visitor potentially just increases your server load and slows your site down. You don’t want traffic, you want the right traffic

Communication issues

Failing to get the right message over properly will have an adverse effect on your web shops conversion. Pay particular attention to where a customer is seeing an image and text at the same time – Is the message consistent and on the same sheet?

Communication issues can be cultural. In the USA Pants are the British equivalent of trousers. In the UK, pants are underwear. Knowing and dealing with such issues will have a direct effect on conversion, and reduce refunds

Be very aware of your target demographic – what is acceptable for adults in terms of font usage, complexity of language – will be totally unacceptable on a children’s site. However, there will be times (in the checkout for example) where the language needs to become adult again

Some products lend themselves to technical descriptions, others to visual descriptions. Others require both. Have you fine tuned your site to maximise this distinction?

It is well known that some people see and describe things in the following groupings: Aural, visual, tactile, and in terms of numbers and facts. Failing to present your products in such terms will possibly disenfranchise some groups of users. Clearly some products can’t be all of these terms, but by understanding and trying to accommodate the four types of visitor, your conversion will rise

Organisation issues

How products are (or are not) organised will make a huge difference to conversion, and the up-sell. Some products naturally fall into a few categories, and have natural links to other products. To ignore this, will result in decreased conversion, and a lower average order value

Look at every product in your store – is it in the right category? Does it also belong in another? Can you sell something else with it

The next thing to consider is attributes. Consider an online ladies shoe shop. In stead of displaying the shoes in terms of: trainers, boots, court shoes – why not offer choices to aid selection
Filter by: colour, heel size, style and shoe size
By offering filtered searching, your store can be more effective at converting customers – because the consumer simply can find the product they require efficiently

Lack of reassurance

Many online consumers are rightfully sceptical. Are you reassuring them – example do you have real address, phone number, customer care line? Without these, some people think they are being conned, and wont buy

Leaving just a mobile number and a POBOX says – I want to take your money and run to some consumers
How about returning goods, refunds policies – are there clearly defined texts in place that are friendly and reassuring?

Does your copy try to mislead the customer, is your copy positive and helpful, or sowing a twisted convoluted deal? The fist scenario reassures the second just turns people away. We recommend you have a third party assess your site for this, because often site owners are too close to the text to notice the problems

How about honest consumer reviews? Reviews are usually on a product by product basis, where consumers can rate and leave reviews on your goods and services. Not only will you find out what people want, your consumers will know what other consumers think

Dealing with objections

In real high street retailing, salesmen deal with objections verbally, face to face. Objections can be very varied, and dealing with objections effectively is usually the defining difference between a well performing salesman and a porr performing salesman

Online the principle is the same, but you need to predict the objections. You ought to be doing SWOT analysis for each product, and deciding if and where the core group of objections lay. FAQ’s are an easy way to resolve objections, but also inviting people to call a free phone number to discuss their questions, will pop your site ahead of the crowd, and ultimately increase turnover

If you know your product well, and you have sold it face to face, you will know the top ten objections to a sale. Make sure your site is addressing them

Localisation issues

Really this refers to the fact that most stores are based on American English. By failing to properly localise all of the texts in your store, you are subliminally sending a mixed message – we are not a local company, we are an American company. The little differences zip code / post code etc. are really picked up by consumers, and can contribute to a lower conversion

If your store markets to multiple countries, you need accurate translations, and easy contact details for each country. If you market to USA and UK, then you will need two language templates

Conclusion

This article really covers the very basics which cause conversion to be lower than its natural level should be. Raising conversion even higher than its natural level is a fine art, that deserves discussion all on its own.

If you make sure you don’t get any of the basics wrong, you will be ready for the next step – Raising conversion above its natural level

About the Author

I have had more than 20 years experience of face to face selling and store management in a retail environment

I recognise that many in the online e-commerce environment have no experience of real face to face shop keeping. I aim to transfer my real retail skills into my client’s e-commerce environment

I have been developing websites for as long as websites have been developed, If you are looking for a designer that offers real experience where it matters call me

If this article has provoked you into action, or you want a new store done properly from the word go, call Richard King on 0115 845 8953 to get the ball rolling

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