Photo By Old Shoe Lady

First of all when I go shopping on my iPad, the last thing I want to do is to have to download an app in order to shop efficiently. The iPad screen is large enough such that browsing full blown sites is comfortable for most online stores.

The only thing that would be a detriment to online shopping on an iPad would be if the site used flash, which most sites already do not.

In any case, reading this article made me wonder how many customers shopped with iPads and other mobile devices at my online store during the Black Friday weekend and how many customers actually made a purchase. After all, I hadn’t done this analysis for several months now. Was I wrong in disagreeing with this post? Do I now need a mobile version of my store? What metrics should I use to make my decision?

Last Year’s Results

Last year, only about 6% of our online visitors arrived through a mobile device using data gathered starting from Black Friday through the first week of December. Note that this period of time reflects our busiest shopping days of the year. Here was the breakdown among devices.



It’s important to note that during this period last year, we had 0 customers actually make a purchase from our store. If you recall, last year I was considering whether to create a mobile version of my website but was still hesitant to pull the trigger.

This Year’s Results During The Same Time Period

This year, the number and percentage of mobile visits increased dramatically by over 3X. In fact, this was the first year ever where the percentage of mobile visits hit double figures at over 14%. Here was the breakdown among devices.



In terms of sales, mobile visitors accounted for about 6.6% of revenues with about 90% of mobile sales coming from iPad users. Not too shabby. Clearly, the number of people who shop on their mobile devices has been growing exponentially!

Time To Pull The Trigger On A Mobile Optimized Site?

So here’s my situation. When I first designed my online store, I had dial-up visitors in mind. I chose a screen resolution of 800×600 and optimized the site to render the pages in under 10 seconds on a 56K modem!

These days, the newest Android phones pack screen sizes that are 1280×720-pixels in resolution with download speeds that are even faster than my cable modem connection at home. It’s pretty clear in my mind that mobile devices are getting better and better at browsing full blown websites even on a phone. Am I losing out on potential customers by not having a cell phone miniaturized website?

Personally, I try to avoid most mobile optimized shopping sites when browsing from my phone because they are usually poorly done. Having another site design would mean that I would have to do double testing on both full and mobile browsers with my shop.

Real Data From My Online Store

Whenever I have to make a design decision, I always look to my stats so here are some web browsing statistics for mobile users compared to the desktop/laptop users on my website.



In addition to analyzing the data above and drawing some conclusions, I also did some research about the inherent differences between mobile versus desktop traffic. Here’s what I found.

• Mobile users are more affected by proximity. For example, if someone types in “bike shop” on their desktop computer, they are probably looking to shop online. But if they type “bike shop” into their phone, they might be looking to shop at the bike store closest to them. What does this mean? Mobile searchers might be expecting to find a place within walking distance or within a short drive. If these visitors land on my shop which is only offered online, they might leave immediately.
• The search listings are usually abbreviated on a mobile device. The fact that the title tags and meta descriptions are often abridged on a mobile device means that a user has less information when they actually click on a link. As a result, bounce rates will tend to be higher in general
• People don’t like scrolling to the right. If your site is too large to fit horizontally on the screen, chances are that your customer will leave.
• People who shop on their mobile devices have more money. I didn’t know this before but it turns out that 42% of mobile internet users earn over $80,000 a year, and tend to spend more on the run.
• Mobile users are more impatient than desktop users 60% of mobile users only wait 3 seconds or less for a page to load before leaving. 74% of mobile users will only wait 5 seconds. That’s not very long.

Analyzing The Data

Ok, so back to the million dollar question. Do I need to design a mobile enabled version of my store? If you look at the metrics above, the statistics that compare desktop users vs mobile users is pretty frightening. All across the board, the bounce rate is mostly higher, the average time on site is lower and the pages per visit is lower as well.

But if you take a closer look at the data, I chose to break things down by traffic type because I wanted to specifically separate out cost per click traffic. Why? It’s because my CPC traffic is my most predictable and consistent form of traffic. If I want to do an apples to apples comparison of my data, then the CPC data is the way to go. After all, every keyword that a visitor uses to land on my site from a PPC ad is extremely targeted and brings them to a very focused landing page.

So if I look at CPC data alone, it looks like my bounce rate isn’t really an issue. For this limited data set, the bounce rate for mobile users was actually better than desktop/laptop users. However, what worries me is that both the time on site and the pages per visit metrics were drastically lower.

Given the differences between mobile and desktop traffic, I’m not quite sure that I can rationalize a 27.76% drop in pages per visit on a mobile device. In addition, a statistic missing from the table above is that my mobile conversion rates are almost 50% lower than my desktop/laptop conversion rates. Naturally I would expect mobile conversion rates to be lower but definitely not as bad as 50%!

What this tells me is that I need to take mobile a little more seriously. As of today, none of my competitors for my main targeted keyword phrases in the top 10 of search have a mobile enabled version of their site. If I start now, I can get a jump on the competition. After all, mobile traffic seems to be growing exponentially with no end in sight.

The big question in my mind is whether the browsing experience on mobile will improve to the point where it will be equivalent to a desktop computer. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not worried about iPad or tablet traffic. I’m more concerned about people who shop using their itty bitty phone screens.

At this point, it would be a mistake to sit back and hope. I’m going to start experimenting with a mobile site to see if it makes a difference with my numbers. What do you think? Do any of you have a mobile enabled version of your online store? Are your numbers better than mine? Please go to my online store at Bumblebee Linens on your cell phone and let me know what you think.

Which One Is Cheaper?

The first and foremost criteria that most people use to select a credit card processor is price. But when it comes to credit card processing, the different fees are not always straightforward to calculate.

For example, some credit card processors charge you a registration fee, a monthly gateway fee, a statement fee as well as a percentage of your sales. Some merchants allow you to apply your monthly gateway fee towards your discount rate fees. Some merchants provide a tiered discount rate depending on how much you sell. There are many different ways to get charged depending on your sales volume and all of the numbers can get confusing depending on the scenario.

The reason I like Merchant Plus is because it is cheap and the fees are very straightforward to understand. For example, there are no complicated rules on how you get charged.

• There’s a monthly fee of $19.95
• There’s a 25 cent transaction fee per charge
• The discount rate is 2.15% for Visa and Mastercard

After researching many different credit card merchant account and gateways, the rates for Merchant Plus are very reasonable, the service is very dependable and they provide good support as well. Now let’s take a look at Paypal Website Payments Pro.

The fees for Paypal Website Payments Pro are fairly straightforward as well but the rates are more expensive and tiered depending on your sales volume.

• There’s a $30 monthly fee
• For a monthly sales volume of $0.00 USD – $3,000.00 USD, you get charged 2.9% + $0.30 USD
• For a monthly sales volume of $3,000.01 USD – $10,000.00 USD, you get charged 2.5% + $0.30 USD
• For a monthly sales volume >$10,000.01 USD, you get charged 2.2% + $0.30 USD

Overall, Merchant Plus is always going to be cheaper than Paypal Website Payments Pro.

Which One Is More Convenient?

Money is important but it’s not everything. When you sign up for Merchant Plus, you are more or less signing up for a vanilla merchant account and gateway. In other words, you’ll be able to process credit cards but that’s about it. What’s nice about Paypal is that they offer additional features that are very convenient.

For example, your online store is probably going to accept regular Paypal in addition to credit cards. Paypal Website Payments Pro allows you to accept both Paypal standard payments and credit cards all through the same account. This is really nice simply because you’ll have one less account to deal with. In other words, that’s one less account where you’ll have to transfer money out of and into your business checking every single month.

The other really nice thing about Paypal is that they offer an extremely convenient and easy to use one click shipping platform. Whenever someone makes a purchase from your shop, the address information can be sent directly to Paypal. Then, using their multi-order shipping interface, you can quickly and easily ship all of your packages and print shipping labels from Paypal’s website. The best part is that all of the shipping fees are automatically deducted from your Paypal account.

If you run a small online store, that you means you don’t have to sign up for a 3rd party shipping platform like Stamps.com. You don’t have to deal with downloading and uploading customer addresses to a separate shipping service. You can do everything without leaving Paypal’s website!

The Intangibles

Sounds pretty good right? But the one caveat with Paypal is that Paypal is not a true bank. With Authorize.net and your own merchant account and gateway, any money that you receive is automatically yours once it reaches your bank account and no one can easily take it away from you.

With Paypal however, they get to call the shots with your money and can place holds on your account whenever they feel like it. For example, let’s say that Paypal detects some abnormal charging patterns with your account. Without any warning, they can freeze your assets and prevent you from accessing your funds. A full on fraud investigation can last for several months and during this period you will not be able to withdraw your money from your account.

While this has never happened to me (knock on wood), there are many websites out there such as www.paypalsucks.com that are filled with stories and complaints from Paypal users who have had their money frozen for long periods of time.

Which Should I Choose?

If you don’t care about the integrated shipping that Paypal offers and you don’t mind having yet another bank account, going with Merchant Plus is a no brainer. In addition, readers of MyWifeQuitHerJob.com can take another 20% off of the monthly fee by using coupon code: MYWIFEQUIT upon signup.

However, if you hate maintaining a bunch of different accounts and want a nice, integrated way of shipping your orders, you should consider signing up for Paypal Website Payments Pro. While it starts out more expensive, once you reach a monthly sales volume of greater than $10000, the difference in discount rate is not that big of a deal.

The other major thing you have to consider is whether you are comfortable with Paypal having full control over your funds. If you are even remotely worried about having your assets frozen, then avoid Paypal altogether. Once again, this has never happened to me before but just be aware that it’s a possibility. Good luck with your decision!

What Do I Need To Begin?

In order to install an open source shopping cart and follow my tutorial, you’ll need to do the following.

• Register a domain name – You can grab a domain name from Go Daddy for a dollar a month.
• Sign up for a web host – I personally recommend Blue Host because I ran my online store for 2 years there and had a fantastic experience.
• Get SSH access to your server – You need to contact your web host and ask for this access which usually requires a faxed in a copy of your drivers license
• Install WinSCP or any FTP client to transfer files to and from your webserver
• Install PUTTY for SSH terminal access to your server
• Have your web browser ready
• Download Open Cart for free from www.opencart.com

Installing Your Open Source Shopping Cart

Once you’ve downloaded all of the necessary programs above and have your web host all set up, you are ready to go!

Quick Note: All of the instructions mentioned in the video below are actually not necessary if you sign up for a hosting account at Blue Host. The reason is because Blue Host offers a program called “Simple scripts” which allows you to install many programs at the click of a button.

In any case, the tutorial below will teach you how to install a shopping cart from complete scratch which applies to any web hosting account. Enjoy the video!

Help!! I need help!! Kyle pooped in the tub again!! Come quick!!!

Naturally, my wife stopped her shopping spree and helped me clean things up. Yuck!! By the time she got back to her computer a good 45 minutes had elapsed.

Much to her dismay, when she got back to the computer to resume shopping, her shopping cart was empty!!! All of that hard work and she had lost it all because the online store she was shopping at had timed out and emptied out her cart. I will now attempt to recreate our conversation afterwards.

Wife: S#$%! F#$&! What the hell! I lost everything ! I had so many cute outfits in my cart and it took me forever to find all that stuff.

Me: Yeah that sucks….How much was in your shopping cart?

Wife: I don’t know, 700 maybe?!? I hate this store. Never shopping here again

Me: WHAT!?!?!? 700 dollars?? My entire wardrobe doesn’t cost that much!!!! What the hell!!! Do you think we are made of money?!?!

Wife: Well don’t worry about it. I’m not buying anything from this store anymore. It’ll take forever to find the stuff again

Me: (Feeling a sigh of relief) Oh….darn…..I know how much you liked that stuff (feigning concern). I feel horrible…absolutely terrible…

Wife: Shut up. Just for that, I’m spending more at the next shop

Persistent Shopping Carts

The reality is that many shopping carts behave this way. If you close your browser session or if you wait too long, many online stores will empty the contents of the cart. As a result, if a customer returns after a long hiatus of shopping, they will lose what they’ve added.

In many cases, this can cost you a sale because not everyone shops and makes a purchase in a single sitting. Just as an experiment, I asked a bunch of my friends whether they shop this way. And surprisingly, many of them use an online store like a wishlist. They put what they want in their cart, think about it and then return later. And more often than not, they shut down their browser and let things sit a bit before making a purchase.

In fact, looking at our online store statistics, a good 25 percent of customers visit our store more than once before making a purchase. The best way to deal with these customers is to make sure that whatever they put in their shopping cart stays in their shopping cart until they return and are ready to make a purchase. This is what is called a persistent shopping cart.

Implementing A Persistent Shopping Cart

This feature has been on my list for a very long time but I’ve been dragging my feet because strangely enough, there’s no plugin that does this for my shopping cart. Now this feature is very important for our online store for one main reason, personalization. When people shop at our store, then often put up to 8-10 items in their carts at a time and many of these products involve personalization with a special message.

What also ends up happening is that customers take a long time to shop because they want to think about what they want to write and sometimes they have to confer with their significant other before deciding on a message. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to lose everything you typed in just because you took an extended break?

So it was a no brainer, I had to spin my own solution. Here are 3 possible solutions that I came up with. I apologize in advance if this is next section is a bit more technical than usual.

Extend The Session Timeout Period

By default, the session length for my server is about 15 minutes long. What this means is that my server will hold the contents of a customer’s cart in system memory for 15 minutes of idle time before emptying everything out. So, a logical solution to this problem would be to simply extend this timeout period.

The problem with this solution is that it greatly increases the memory requirements for your online store. By increasing the timeout period for your shop, you essentially have to hold a customer’s shopping cart information in main memory for much longer periods of time which effectively increases the amount of main memory you need to run your website. This solution is clearly not scalable because main memory is a precious resource.

Not only that, but it also doesn’t solve the problem when a customer shuts down their browser or waits for 2 weeks before returning. Do you really want to keep their shopping cart lying around using up precious compute resources for 2 weeks? Probably not…

Store The Cart Contents In A Cookie

Another solution is to use cookies to store the contents of their cart on their computer. Cookies are little files that websites put on the client’s computer in order to store certain pieces of information so a website can recognize a customer when they return. By placing a cookie with the shopping cart contents on the client computer, you can effectively store their shopping cart for as long as you like!

The problem with this solution is that the cookie size is limited to 4K on most browsers. Therefore, if a customer’s shopping cart is large and exceeds this value, certain products in their shopping cart will be lost.

The Best Solution

The best solution and the way I ultimately decided to solve this problem was to use a combination of cookies and my shopping cart database. Here’s what I came up with.

Whenever a customer enters my store, I place a cookie on their computer that is set to expire whenever I feel like it. This cookie contains a secret id which I use to tag certain products in my database. Whenever a customer places an item in their shopping cart, I also store the product in my database and tag it with this secret id.

This way, I can keep track of everything that the customer is interested in based on this secret id which is stored on their computer in the form of a cookie. If they choose to leave for a long time and come back, I look for the presence of this cookie and restore the contents of their shopping cart based on my database which is present for as long as I want it to be.

The downside to this solution is that if a customer abandons their shopping cart, I will accumulate a lot of junk in my database which needs to be periodically cleaned up. So to solve that problem, I set up a CRON job or automated task to automatically clean up the database every single night and remove items that exceed a certain age threshold.

I’m still in the throes of testing my additions to my store and hope to be live with this new feature by the end of the week. The best part is that by storing your abandoned shopping carts, you can also better observe your customers shopping patterns as well.

Photo By javYliz

In any case, the issues that I’m about to describe aren’t necessarily “bugs” per se but website usability issues that we discovered from talking to our customers directly.

9 times out of 10, a customer gets confused navigating through our online store because I’ve made certain assumptions about the way a user should interact with our site. I’ve made certain assumptions about how clear the instructions are written and how tech savvy the internet user is.

And you know what? I’ve found that whenever I “assume”, it makes an “ass” out of “u” and “me” (One of my professors used to say this to me all the time).

Now I’ll be the first one to admit that I have blinders are on when it comes to critiquing my own online store. The problem when you design your own website is that you often overlook obvious mistakes because you are too familiar with your own design. Of course you can ask your friends to provide their opinion as well, but most likely your friends won’t be an exact representation of your customer base either.

For example, all of my friends are pretty web savvy so they can usually navigate through any decently implemented website. The other problem is that your friends might be too polite to tell you how they truly feel. In all cases, the best way to get the proper feedback is straight from the customer’s mouth which is why I take all customer feedback extremely seriously.

Whenever a customer even hints at a usability issue with our site, I take a very close look and make changes where appropriate. Here are a few tweaks that I made because of a single customer call we received last week. You can be the judge about whether these problems were worth fixing.

Default Radio Button Selection During Payment

This particular customer called us because she could not figure out how to get past the payment screen during checkout. Here’s a snapshot of our website for the purposes of illustration. Can you tell what’s wrong with this picture?



What happened was that this customer entered in all of her credit card information, but then forgot to hit the radio button to indicate that she was paying by credit card. As a result, she kept getting the message “Please select from one of the following payment options” but couldn’t figure out what she was doing wrong.

Now most users who are even remotely web savvy would figure this out eventually and click on the “Pay By Credit Card” radio button. But the problem is that you have to design your website for the lowest common denominator. And more often than not, this includes people who don’t think like you, people who may be used to doing things in a different way, and people who are just plain clueless. In any case, as soon as she told me her problem, I was able to help her make it past the payment page.

Now I’m a firm believer that if a single customer reports a usability problem with my website, then chances are there are many others out there who are experiencing the same problem without you even knowing. So, I placed a piece of Google Analytics code on my store to track how many times people got the “Please select from one of the following payment options” error message for a period of 3 days. Turns out that over 40% of customers received this error message!!

The results indicated that my payment radio buttons were a clear usability problem with my website. So ultimately, I made a change to have the “Pay By Credit Card” radio button selected by default because paying by credit card is the most common payment method for our store.

Confirm Button Not Obvious Enough

Unfortunately, the troubles with this particular customer were not over. After making it past the payment page to the “confirmation” page, she simply abandoned her shopping cart and didn’t complete her purchase. After having just spoken to this customer on the phone, I knew that she wanted to buy so I was puzzled as to why she left without finishing the transaction.

So, I gave her a phone call to find out why. Turns out that she thought that she had already completed her order after entering in her credit card information. Now if you do a fair amount of shopping online, the way most shopping carts work is that after entering in your payment information, you are directed to a confirmation screen where you can verify your shipping address, your billing address and your shopping cart contents before you actually put the transaction through and pay.

This lady wasn’t aware that she actually had to click another button to complete her order so she simply left! After walking her through the ordering process over the phone, I decided to revisit my checkout process entirely and here’s what I changed.



First off, I duplicated the “checkout timeline” graphic so that it was present at the top and bottom of the page. This timeline informs customers exactly where they are in the checkout process. In addition, I decided to make the “confirm” button a little more prominent so it would be less likely to be missed. Hopefully, these 2 changes will prevent other customers from having the same problems.

The Drama Wasn’t Over Yet

After finally processing her order, I thought that the worst was over. In fact, we shipped out her order immediately and 3 weeks passed so I thought everything was all good. But then she called to complain that she never received her order. Once again, I was puzzled.

And it was only after confirming her address over the phone did I notice a major flaw in our shopping cart. It turns out that the address field in our checkout form was not long enough to hold her entire address correctly because her address was abnormally long. In fact, I don’t think I’d ever seen someone try to cram so much information into the address field ever! The upshot was that there wasn’t enough room to include the suite number for her building so a few digits got cut off at the end of her address. Once that issue was resolved, I made a change to the shopping cart to allow unlimited characters in the address!

The Bugs Never End

We’ve been using the same shopping cart design for a few years now and we still find small issues all the time. It just goes to show that you need to be constantly aware of usability issues with your shopping cart and nip them in the bud as soon as they are discovered. Make sure you listen to your customers because they are ones paying the bills.

Photo By KateMonkey

But I felt compelled to respond to these review requests because all of them had the same or similar mistakes.

And when 4 consecutive websites have the same problem, I feel compelled to write about it. Here were the problems that I found with the stores I looked at this past month.

No Value Proposition

Whenever I land on an unknown store while surfing the web, especially a site where I might be spending some of my hard earned cash, the first thing I look for is what’s in it for me. Why the heck should I shop at your store over someone else’s? If this information is not concisely and effectively conveyed on the landing page, I’m outta there within 5 seconds.

For example on all of your landing pages, you should be emphasizing your unique strengths. Do you carry the largest selection of goods in your niche? Do you offer kick ass customer service? Have you been in business for a long time or are you the absolute experts in your field? Tell me why I should buy from you over all of the other stores that I can easily find from the search engines.

If there’s anything special about your online store, make sure that you shove it right in the face of your customer so they understand the value that you provide. Especially if you sell items that many other stores carry, the worst thing that you can do is to show a customer a bland array of items on your front page with no context. Find something unique and compelling for shoppers to associate your business with. And if you can’t think of anything, then you might want to consider choosing a different niche.

Using Poor Or Copied Product Descriptions

I was a bit surprised to find that all of the stores I looked at had little or no descriptions for their products. Just indicating the size and the color of your products is not good enough. Just including a picture of your product is not good enough. Good product copy and a strong call to action can heavily influence a customer to add that product to their shopping cart and make a purchase.

Have you ever been at a restaurant where the menu made the food sound absolutely mouth watering? One time, I remember going to this Greek restaurant with my wife and ordering lamb (I normally hate lamb and never order it) simply because the waiter’s description of the dish was so enticing.

Take a lesson from the Groupon guys and take the time to write good, “unique” product copy. Why did I put “unique” in quotes? It’s because the stores I looked at that did include product copy simply used the stock descriptions from the manufacturer. Do NOT ever do this!!

Not only do stock descriptions sound boring, but using them on your online store will prevent your product descriptions from ever being indexed in the search engines. Google and other search engines hate duplicate content and chances are these stock product descriptions have been plastered all over the web already. Don’t be lazy!

Multiple Product Descriptions On A Single Page

I’m not sure whether this was purely coincidence, but 2 of the stores I looked at were using poor implementations of ecommerce shopping carts using WordPress. It’s been a while since I’ve evaluated ecommerce for WordPress, but by default, the products are all listed in a linear blog style format.

Wordpress out of the box was meant for blogs and managing content and not for ecommerce. Unless you tweak the way WordPress manages your content and your products, you could be killing your search engine optimization.

Why is listing all of your products and product descriptions on a single page bad? It’s because when you shove everything on a single page, there can only be one TITLE tag and only one meta description. If you have 5 different products and you use WordPress to list them sequentially on the same page like a blog, there is no possible way to include 5 unique title tags and meta descriptions.

Every product in your store should have it’s own unique web page and it’s own unique tags. If you are using ecommerce for WordPress (which is something that I don’t recommend unless you absolutely know what you are doing), then you should eliminate the standard blog style product listing format.

Take A Tour Of Your Shop As A Customer

Often times, it’s hard to be objective when designing your own online store so you should solicit feedback from a close friend and keep an open mind. Ideally, you should ask the opinion of someone who is blunt and not afraid to speak their mind and be prepared to take criticism.

In reality, you don’t need to be an ecommerce expert to know what to do. Most of the time, designing an effective store requires a touch of common sense and an introspective look at why you shop at the stores that you do. Take a closer look at the shops you frequent and copy the attributes that you like.

Rule #1: Your Toddler And Your Customer Have Short Attention Spans

These days, it’s really tough to keep my daughter occupied for extended periods of time. And buying more and more toys is definitely not the answer. I would say that she can focus on a single activity for about 5 minutes at most before she moves on to something else.

These days, if my wife and I need to her to do anything, we have a very small window of time to get her attention before she wanders off to do something else. For example, we’ve been trying to teach her how to pick up after herself when she makes a mess with her toys. In the beginning, she would clean up for a short period of time and then quickly get distracted.

So, we turned cleaning up into a fun game complete with a cheesy song that we sing while picking things up (Remind me to sing this for you sometime). These days, she’s more likely to pick up after herself because she has fun in the process. We managed to grab her attention by turning the act of cleaning into a game.

Likewise with your online business, you only have a short amount of time to convince your customer to stay on your website and browse your product line. In fact, it only takes a few seconds for a potential customer to decide whether to stay or go so it’s imperative to use attention grabbing images and powerful content to grab hold of their attention. Is your website ugly? Are you creating the right mood for your customers? Are you enticing customers to stick around?

If the bounce rate for your online store is especially high (greater than 70%) or if your conversions rates are abysmal (less than 1%), there’s probably something wrong with your website design and your ability to maintain your customer’s attention. If this is the case, you should solicit a friend for their honest opinion about your site.

If your friends are too polite and can’t tell you the truth, you can get an unbiased opinion by using a service like EasyUsability.com. For as low as 15 bucks, you can create a survey and obtain feedback about your website from a large group of random testers.

Rule #2: Your Toddler And Your Customers Need Guidance

My daughter is currently at an age where she wants to be independent and make her own decisions. But the reality is that most 3 year olds are not mature enough to know what they want and need. So as a parent, you have to gently guide your toddler in the right direction while giving them the satisfaction that they acted all on their own.

Daughter: I don’t want to eat any vegetables. I hate vegetables! No vegetables! I don’t want it!
Me: Oh ok. You don’t have to eat anything that you don’t want to eat.
Daughter: Really Daddy?
Me: Of course, you’re old enough now to decide what you want to eat. Tell you what….Do you want to eat carrots or broccoli for dinner toinght?
Daughter: Hmmm….I’ll have broccoli please.
Me: Excellent choice!

Likewise, the customers that land on your website often have no idea where to go or what to do next. You have to guide them through your website towards where you want them to go by using effective calls to action. In fact, every single page on your website should have some sort of goal.

Do you want them to add a product to their shopping cart? Then use a bold color for your “Add To Shopping Cart” button to make it stand out. Do you want visitors to click on a product? Then use large, vibrant images and actionable text to convince them to “Click on your product now!”.

The most effective websites guide visitors on a set path or “funnel” that usually ends in a conversion that you define. Don’t let your customers aimlessly browse your site and have a clear goal in mind.

Rule #3: Your Toddler And Your Customers Can Be Easily Influenced

No matter what my daughter happens to want at any given point in time, she can usually be convinced to want something else at the drop of a dime. It’s all about the presentation and wow factor.

Daughter: I want to play with my teddy bear. It’s mine!
Me: Sorry dear, but your brother is playing with it right now and we need to take turns.
Daughter: I want my teddy bear now! It’s my teddy bear, not his.
Me: Come on now, we should all share our toys.
Daughter: Can I play with your iPad then?
Me: Uh….Err…Um…
Daughter: Please Daddy?
Me: Why would you want to play with a ratty teddy bear or this hunk of metal when you could be playing in your awesome new kitchen and cooking up some good food? In fact, Daddy is quite hungry right now. Can you cook me a delicious meal?
Daughter: You’re hungry Daddy? Ok, I’ll make you something to eat from my kitchen.

As the designer for your online store website, you have the power to influence your customers and present your products in the best way possible. And an easy way to do this is to use high res photos and attention grabbing product descriptions.

Sounds pretty straightforward but I can’t tell you how many online stores I’ve seen that don’t bother to write good product descriptions. For example, the other day I was shopping for a wooden train set and the description simply said “This is a wooden train set. Made of 100% wood and non-toxic”. Blah!

The product descriptions on your site are what sells your product so make sure you spend some time to write attention grabbing text! Even if you sell mundane products, you can often times convince a customer to buy just by presenting your product in a different light. If you don’t know what I mean, sign up for Groupon and read some of their emails!

Being An Effective Salesman Is A Constantly Evolving Process

While the many tactics that I described above currently work well with my daughter, they probably won’t be effective anymore in just a couple of months and I’ll need to come up with new ways to influence her. Likewise with any online business, the strategies and tactics that you use to attract customers will constantly evolve. So stay on your toes. I know my daughter will keep me on mine.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

First off, can you tell why checking out was so confusing for my friend who doesn’t do a whole lot of online shopping? Let me point them out to you. I’m actually pretty shocked that an established ecommerce company like Buy.com actually designed their checkout page this way.

Making It Difficult To Checkout Without An Account

First off, my friend was confused because she was expecting to be asked to enter in her credit card and shipping information but instead was greeted with what looked like an account creation form. She absolutely didn’t want to create an account and simply wanted to buy the webcam and be on her merry way.

The funny thing is that she actually entered in her email address and her email password thinking for some reason that it would work. From experience, I know that this tends to happen all the time on our online store website. People who don’t shop online on a regular basis tend to make silly mistakes and as shopowners, it’s our job to make the checkout process as smooth as possible.

The main problem with the Buy.com checkout page is that the “Checkout as a guest, without creating an account” radio button is hidden under the “Forgot Your Password” link and above the big “Sign in Using Our Secure Server” button. It’s really easy to miss and people who are uneasy about creating an account or entering in their email address for no reason are led to believe that they need to login to make a purchase. This is a big no-no and one of the main reasons my friend didn’t buy the webcam.

To prevent this from happening, a better way to design a login page is to make the “Checkout As A Guest” option much more visible. In fact, I would make it a button on its own and label it “Click here to checkout with an account”. That way you don’t inadvertently drive away potential customers.

Too Many Payment Buttons

The second thing that really confused my friend was the massive array of payment options. Should she click on the “Sign in Using Our Secure Server” button? Should she click on the Google Checkout button? How about the Paypal or Amazon button?

Personally, I don’t even think my friend even knows what Paypal is let alone Google Checkout or Amazon PayPhrase. Essentially, Buy.com confused the hell out of her by bombarding her with all of these options without providing the one option she was expecting to see, payment by credit card. Also, she asked me what the hell a “Rakuten Super Point” was and I actually had no idea.

A better way to create a checkout page is to present a single form where the customer can enter their shipping and billing information and then provide radio buttons on how they want to checkout making sure that “credit card” is one of the options displayed.

For our store, most customers pay by credit card while only a small fraction use Paypal or other payment methods.

Keep Your SSL Certificate Current

While my friend was shopping for a webcam, I was doing a little shopping on my own for wooden toys when I noticed my own share of shopping cart snafus. When I tried to checkout at this Mom and Pop toy store, I was greeted with the following message.



This shopowner inadvertently forgot to renew their SSL certificate and was keeping their store live without one. In large BOLD letters, the shop owner displayed a little note…

Please disregard the message about how the connection is untrusted. Everything on the site is fully functional and we are currently working on getting that message removed.

First of all, forgetting to renew your SSL certificate will drive away just about all of your customers. Without the padlock, no one is going to buy anything from you. As a result, make sure you setup a reminder for yourself to renew your SSL cert way ahead of time.

Second of all, this shopowner is just asking for trouble by running his site without SSL. Without a valid SSL certificate, all transmissions including any and all contact information including credit card information is transmitted in plain text. Anyone sniffing on the line could obtain your information since the data is unencrypted.

Not Everyone Shops Online…Yet

Believe it or not, there’s still a large population out there that rarely shops online. As a result, you have to make your checkout process as simple as possible or else you may risk alienating those who don’t know what they are doing.

Photo By Generation X-Ray

While mobile users only represent about 5% of the overall traffic to my store, this number is clearly trending higher. In fact at this exact same point last year, our mobile phone and mobile device purchases were at zero. In other words, last year no one bought anything from us using their phones. But given that mobile phone purchases are now on my radar, do I need to create a brand new store optimized for portable devices?

Some Statistics

Since I was curious, I dug a little deeper and found some statistics regarding ecommerce shopping on mobile devices and this is what I found.

• 35% of US Web-enabled mobile phone owners said they had participated in some form of mobile shopping in the past year, such as browsing or researching but not necessarily purchasing products.
• A PriceGrabber study showed that mobile purchases were only up 3% from the year before.
• The largest category of products purchased via a mobile phone were apps or other digital content (ie. ringtones, music, video clips, games)
• The second largest category for shopping via mobile was consumer electronics followed by computers, electronic equipment, books and finally clothing.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a concrete number for the percentage of consumers who actually made a “purchase” on their phones. I can understand doing a little comparison shopping on my phone while I’m at a brick and mortar store but in general I find it too frustrating to go through the entire checkout process on a 4 inch screen.

What Does It Take To Make A Mobile Version Of A Store?

So fine… The use of mobile devices for eCommerce is increasing. I can accept that. But what does it take to create a mobile optimized site? In the back of my mind, I was thinking that it wouldn’t be such a big deal. Adjust the screen resolution, fiddle with some CSS parameters and voila! A mobile shopping cart! But after doing some research, I found that optimizing your site for mobile isn’t all that easy.

To make a website truly mobile, there are a number of things that need to be taken under consideration.

• All pictures and photos need to be scaled down to lower resolutions for faster loading times
• All background images need to be removed
• The font size needs to be increased to improve readability
• The site needs to be redesigned to flow vertically as opposed to horizontally. In other words, you need to turn your site into one long column that requires no side scrolling.
• Pages that use the “float” attribute tend to wreak havoc on phones so they need to be removed
• Pages that use mouseover states don’t work too well since your finger doesn’t quite work like a mouse, so these attributes need to be altered

In addition to all of the attributes above, there’s also the problem of detecting the fact that a mobile phone is accessing your site. One way is to parse the user agent string at the server level and look for a mobile device, but with new user devices and new user agents coming out all of the time, you have to constantly update the list of devices that require mobile access to your site.

Do I Need To Take Action?

Given the amount of work involved, it still doesn’t seem quite worth it at the present time to design a new mobile version of my ecommerce store. 3% of revenues isn’t large enough of a percentage to sacrifice a good chunk of my time or my money to hire a developer. But there are some lingering questions in my mind. Would the number of mobile conversions go up if I did have a mobile optimized version of the store? In addition, mobile versions of websites tend to be really ugly. Would a mobile site drive away customers who are looking for an attractive store to shop at?

These days, there are several open source shopping carts like Magento that have mobile features already built in. Should I just bite the bullet and migrate my site altogether to a brand new and more modern platform? These are all questions that I will need to answer in the next year or so. Way back when I first designed our shopping cart, I had dial-up users in mind so I’ve already somewhat optimized our store for low bandwidth customers. Hopefully, that will tide me over for another year.

Just curious though. How many of you actually shop using your mobile phone? And if any of you run your own online stores, what percentage of your revenues come from mobile devices today?

Photo by alamodestuff

You’ve no doubt heard the hype that a blog is the way to for marketing (along with its good friend social media). And it’s true that blogs are excellent marketing channels for many online businesses. But is that true for online stores? Are blogs worth it? Can they boost sales?

They can indeed. Here are five ways a blog can boost sales for your ecommerce store.

1. Search engine optimization to get found

Shopping carts have become much more savvy about SEO in recent years, but blog SEO is outstanding. If you’re using WordPress for your blog with a couple choice plugins and the right theme framework, your blog’s SEO will be killer.

In a product page, you can’t have a headline that’s the exact wording of a question your customer might have. But you easily can in a blog post headline. Exact match keywords get searches all the time, and one of the best ways to snag that traffic is with a blog post where the question is the headline (and of course the post body contains the answer)

Link liberally to product pages from your blog posts in order to send traffic to your shopping cart and get sales.

2. Lifestyle content that hooks readers

Products are not sold in a vacuum, they’re part of what consumers think of as their lifestyle. If you sell ecologically safe products, for example, your customers live an ecologically conscious lifestyle. Your blog can provide tips and highlights for the lifestyle, which of course would feature your own products. This is a perfectly natural fit and doesn’t come across as being too pushy or “sales-y.”

There are many lifestyle blogs that make a lot of money including affiliate links in their posts. What you can do is flip this around: be a store with a lifestyle blog.

3. Education to get the sale

An educated customer is the best customer, right? You don’t have the room to educate customers in a product description, but you do have the room in a blog post! Tips, tricks, hacks, new ways to use a product… these are all viable blog post ideas. The best part is you can do this for so many of your products that you’ll never run out of posts to create. People lament all the time about how they can’t think of anything to blog about. When you’re running an online store, you always have product to blog about! Show customers how to use products and the best way to use them. Demonstrate them with video (host the videos on YouTube, keep it simple).

4. Humanizing the company for stronger relationships

One cool thing about blogs is that they’re not stuffy corporate sales brochures: they’re conversational. Blogs humanize the company. Microsoft learned this big time when Robert Scoble was working for them: he humanized Microsoft to a lot of people. Since then, Microsoft as a company has embraced blogging in a big way, and it’s paid off well for them. On a slightly smaller scale, your blog does the same thing for you: it shows real people are behind the store, people customers could get to know and like.

People love to do business with those they know, like and trust. Blogs help build that trust, and get more sales.

5. Get valuable feedback for better sales

Because blogs are social, two-way streets, we get an invaluable window into our customers’ minds. Based what posts they visit, comment on, ignore and share, we start to build up a good idea of what they like and don’t like. More importantly, we understand more about what they buy and don’t buy.

And of course, the comments they leave can be pure gold. Many store operators are afraid of blog comments. Don’t be. You’re worried about someone being upset or angry, but it just doesn’t happen that often. And when it does, it’s the perfect opportunity to show how you handle things which will impress and win over others. These situations are definitely blessings in disguise.

Over to you

So there you have it: five ways a blog can improve ecommerce sales. Are there other ways that have worked for you? Share your stories in the comments!