5 Tips to Increase Conversions on Your osCommerce Site
By John
Winningham All the traffic in the world won't help your eCommerce site if
those visits don't convert to orders, the true measure of success of your site.
osCommerce is a flexible and powerful eCommerce system, but there is always room
for improvement. Here are 5 ways to help you improve the conversion rate in your
online store:
1. Add the Checkout without Account contribution While common on large sites
like Amazon.com, requiring a customer to register an account on a small online
store site before making a purchase can be a barrier for some customers. Adding
the Checkout without Account contribution provides customers with a lower risk
avenue for completing there order. Less commitment means less to fear.
2. Add links to your Shipping, Returns, and Privacy pages to your checkout
pages A customer with questions is a customer who is less likely to feel
confident enough to finish their order. Since you can't be there 24/7 to answer
questions that may arise, provide prominent links to all of your shopping
information pages on each checkout page, and the login and shopping cart pages.
Even if you have links to these pages in your site navigation, they can get lost
in the noise.
3. Prominently Display Your SSL Certificate Information Most SSL certificate
issuers will provide you with a code to insert in your site to display that show
your SSL certificate is authentic. Make sure to place this prominently on the
site, and especially the checkout pages.
4. Install and use the Recover Carts contribution Many customers will create
a cart, register, but then abandon for any number of reasons. Installing the
Recover Carts contribution for osCommerce allows you to view those carts, and
make offers to entice those customers to come back and complete their orders.
The contribution allows you to view what they had in their carts as well, so you
can make customized email offers. It also tracks which customers have been
contacted, so you don't end up making multiple offers to the same customer.
5. Use an Analytics Program If you cannot effectively monitor how cusotmers
use your site, you will be reduced to blindly making changes, hoping for
something to work. The best thing you can do is sign up for a free analytics
program like Google Analytics. Your hosting provider may also have a analytics
package you can use. This will allow you to see detail about where your
customers come from, where they go on the site, and what they do while there.
Once you get a handle on how your site is used, you may find areas where you can
improve (better product descriptions, changes to the checkout process, specific
landing pages for ads). Don't ever stop testing different ideas on your site,
and monitor the results with your analytics program to gauge the effectiveness
of each test.
Hopefully this will help you in your quest to make your osCommerce based
online store a success.
About the Author A web developer with over 10 years of experience
developing e-commerce sites, John has specialized in developing osCommerce based sites for the past 3
years. |
