Monday, March 22, 2010

Where do you start?

Do you want to sell more via the Internet? Yes of course you do and why wouldn't you? This low cost, high availability medium is just great for selling packaged products and widgets of any size, flavour & specification!

But having an ecommerce / transactional website built and running for you isn't the end of the matter... In fact it's just the beginning! Oh yes!

The art of tuning your website into an optimised selling channel is a tricky one and sometimes a bit daunting. For example, if you've spent many months and thousands (or even millions) of £'s on a new online shopping presence, there can be the temptation to just leave it alone for a while and just watch it tick-over.

But to quote my friend Tristan Bailey's recent comment on the subject "if your site's not broke, you ain't looking hard enough". And I fully endorse this approach, as there is always something website managers can do improve their sites.

So when looking to optimise, what do you look at first?

Do you start moving imagery around on the homepage? Do you change the copy on those buttons in the checkout process? Or do you provide more content in the product section to improve Search Engine Optimisation efforts?

Well in my opinion it doesn't really matter, you need to do all three and everything else you can possibly think of as well. Doing nothing is not an option, you've got to test, test and test again... And each time with the scariest possibility that you will not improve your conversion rate but make it worse.

Just remember what you did, when you did it, try to find out why it caused the effect it did and always look harder.