Shift4Shop eCommerce Blog | Conversion Optimization (5)

There’s another online store that isn’t much different from yours. They seem to have the exact same products, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them from selling something that isn’t proprietary to you.

They might be working with more capital than you are, giving themselves the room to charge a little less for the same things.

While You can’t keep hacking away at your prices,  you can make people see the merit of shopping for the same products with you instead of the competition.

In this[...]

An abandoned cart in eCommerce is worse than a rusty old shopping cart in the middle of a parking lot. When you’re selling online, someone adding items to their cart and then exiting without making a purchase represents lost revenue, flaws in your conversion strategy, and could even signal poor UX.

However, if your online store is facing high levels of cart abandonment, you’re not alone. According to The Baymard Institute, 69.89% of carts are abandoned -- that’s more than half the shoppers you[...]

So you have a great website that has great content, your SEO is on point, and you are regularly producing excellent content, butwhy aren’t you able to convert?

This is a question several business owners and marketers ask themselves every day. Sure, driving traffic and search engine performance is one thing, but converting visitors into paying customers is a whole other ball game. This is where Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) comes into play.

The basic premise of CRO is simple: to make the[...]

Selling on Amazon means competing with over 2 million sellers pushing over $135 billion in goods each year. Whether you’re already established on the site or relatively new, increasing sales means using a combination of tactics to drive conversion, increase visibility, and to rise above competitors.

Chad Rubin, CEO of Think Crucial, is an Amazon top 250 seller with a decade of experience on the platform. His Amazon adventure began after college and Wall Street, when he began selling parts and[...]

If you’ve just launched an online business, you know how crucial attracting and retaining customers is. However, the world of e-commerce is increasingly competitive as customer expectations for speed, price and service continue to increase. When you’re just starting an e-commerce business, take special care to avoid common mistakes that are known to drive online shoppers away — and are easy to remedy.

Here are some typical mistakes online sellers make that lead to lost customers, and how to[...]

If your website is well-optimized, the content is of good quality and the clicks are off the charts, then you must be swimming in a pool of money. However, if you receive massive traffic but only a small number of those visits buy your goods or services, then you need to find tools that can convert them into customers.

Turning visitors into short-term or long-term buyers requires both strategy and extensive testing.

Borrowing a leaf from others who succeeded at this is recommended. However, you[...]

No one in the ecommerce world likes cart abandonment. It’s a statistic we like to see drop and drop and drop.

It’s no secret that upselling and cross-selling can be major drivers of revenue growth for eCommerce businesses. Industry leaders like Amazon report revenue increases of nearly 35% as a direct result of upselling and cross selling efforts. If you’re not currently using these tactics on your eCommerce site, it’s time to embrace this trend in online selling and see for yourself what online giants have been experiencing for years.

Although it might seem daunting to get started, it doesn’t have to[...]

Selling on eBay isn't an exact science, but there are some strategies you can use to make your listings more appealing to shoppers. An important part of learning how to sell on eBay is understanding how to optimize your listings, not just for buyer appeal, but for better positioning in search results.

The following 5 tips will help you optimize your eBay listings.

It's easy to be excited about selling on Amazon. Your products are out there in front of hundreds of millions of shoppers, and you're selling beneath the umbrella of one of the most valuable brands in the world.

But don't let your enthusiasm distract you from taking a careful approach to your Amazon sales. Just like any other business venture, you should approach selling on Amazon methodically so as to make the most of every one of your product listings.

To get you started, here are six common[...]

"Mistakes were made."

This is a phrase that has been spoken countless times throughout history, usually when a speaker is trying to distance themselves from actions and their consequences. Of course, if you do make a mistake, the best course of action is to take responsibility, correct it, and improve.

This isn't always easy, but sometimes, it's as simple as understanding where you went wrong, why it matters, and what you should change. In that case, there's no reason not to jump right on it,[...]

It should come as no surprise that in 2017 there were over 215 million online shoppers in the United States alone, with that number projected to grow to over 230 million by 2021. As an ecommerce business owner, it’s your job to not only figure out how to capture a piece of that pie, but to keep visitors on your site until they complete a purchase.

Consumers want their experience to be as smooth and quick as possible, and online shopping is no exception.

There are a number of reasons why your [...]

Shopping cart abandonment has plagued online store owners for years. As new technology develops, we’ve been able to better understand and address the causes of abandonment. But with these new solutions, technology has also brought new challenges.

Mobile shopping.

Shopping done on mobile devices now accounts for over a third of all retail ecommerce. That number is only set to grow in the coming years, so it’s nothing to scoff at. If that sounds great, like your customers can shop from anywhere,[...]

For every e-commerce company that exists, there is another with a similar offering and similar products.

Customers don’t have to shop with you and in most cases, they have no loyalty to you. So, if you want your e-commerce business to succeed you need to have a serious think about your pricing because it will play an important role in how well it sells.

More specifically, you need to think about how you optimize your pricing. Pricing optimization is an ongoing approach that seeks to help you[...]

Shopping cart abandonment is an epidemic in the ecommerce world.

Recent data shows the average cart abandonment rate is almost 70 percent. That means only 3 out of every 10 people who places an item in their cart actually buys it.

Cart abandonment comes with the territory of owning an ecommerce store, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do about it. Customers abandon shopping carts for all kinds of reasons, but many online store owners commit the same common mistakes that drive up[...]

The vast majority of shoppers these days browse from their mobile devices, and eBay shoppers make up a strong portion of them.

It's common for eBay users to rely on their smartphone even more so than most online shoppers — eBay users who bid on auctions like to be able to check them frequently with a device they keep close at hand.

Even if you don't auction your items and sell only for a Buy it Now price, you still need to optimize your listings for mobile devices in order to appeal to the huge[...]

Cart abandonment.

In the ecommerce world, it’s a four-letter word.

At a time when 7 out of every 10 online shopping carts is abandoned, ecommerce owners have to get serious about addressing cart abandonment. After all, the best abandoned cart is the one that’s never abandoned at all.

That’s why it’s key to focus on prevention first. The lower your abandonment rate, the fewer sales you miss out on – and the less effort you have to spend to win them back.

With that in mind, here are 7 tried and[...]

Amazon is one of the most highly competitive marketplaces in the world and is home to sellers of all kinds and walks of life, whether you’re a hobbyist selling your crafts or a major corporation. However, with this in mind, more and more people are turning to Amazon to sell their products, meaning there’s more and more products on the Amazon's search results page.

And the more products there are here, the more products that could potentially push yours down the ranking list. But this doesn’t[...]

If your ecommerce website could only do one thing well, it should be very, very fast.

The truth is an enterprise ecommerce website has to do a lot of things very well to provide the high-quality shopping experience modern consumers expect, and your enterprise ecommerce platform should handle them all.

But there is a strong relationship, or even correlation, between how fast your enterprise ecommerce website is and how much your retail business will sell.

A One-second Improvement Equals a[...]

Take a look at some of the largest and most successful e-commerce retailers today: Amazon, Walmart, Nordstrom. These behemoths are the undisputed champions of e-commerce.

How do they do it? We could write a book on the strategies that make Amazon successful, but let’s boil it down. There’s one element each of these online stores leverages to boost their conversion rates: customer reviews.

Business.com reported that 77% of customers read reviews online before making a purchase. And you don’t[...]