Archive for the ‘E-Commerce’ category

Trust: SSL Extended Validation & Hacker Safe

January 26th, 2010

Trust. It’s a big word. It can mean the difference of thousands of dollars in revenue. How do you convey a message of trust to your site visitors? How can you turn them into customers? We touched on this topic in the past: “Maximize Trust Level By Displaying Affiliated Third Party Logos“. Here is some more info that can make or break the bank.

McAfee Secure / Hacker  Safe

If you sign up with McAfee Secure (formerly HackerSafe/ScanAlert), they will give you a logo to display on your site that shows your compliance with their policies. The logo includes the date of the scan, which will always be ‘today’. This logo ensures customers that any personal information they enter into your site is essentially Hacker Safe.

Aside from displaying the logo, McAfee Secure will actually scan your servers on a daily basis and notify you of any errors or vulnerabilities. They will find things like a page giving a PHP error or SQL injection vulnerabilities. They then work with you to resolve these issues.

Another added benefit is the fact that McAfee has partnerships with many Comparison Shopping Engines to display the McAfee Secure logo next to listings from merchants in the program. This can help increase your Click-Thru-Rate on the CSEs.

More Info: www.mcafeesecure.com

SSL Extended Validation


SSL Extended Validation takes SSL to a whole new level. Instead of the standard lock icon in the address bar of the consumers browser, it will make the background of the bar green and show your company name. This will make consumers feel more comfortable with your site and increase the likelihood of purchasing from you.

Most SSL vendors offer this option, just keep in mind that it will cost you more. But then again, you get what you pay for.

More Info: www.verisign.com

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How To Track Magento eCommerce Sales In Google Anayltics

December 9th, 2009

In a previous post we covered how to set up 3rd party tracking pixels in Magento. Setting up Google Analytics eCommerce tracking is much easier. There are two steps to this process:

Magento Configuration

In Magento, navigate to System –> Configuration –> Google API –> Google Analytics. Select “Enabled” and enter your Google Analytics account number. (The account number can be found when you login to Google Analytics on the main page, right next to the site URL.

Magento-Google-Analytics

Google Analytics Configuration

In Google Analytics, navigate to Analytics Settings –> Profile Settings –> Main Website Profile Information. Set “eCommerce Website” to “Yes, an E-Commerce Site”. This will track orders, total order amount, products ordered and quantity. It will also allow you to break down revenue by geographic location.

Google-Analytics-eCommerce-Tracking

Bottom Line

eCommerce Tracking is very simple to set up in Magento. You may as well take advantage of it.

Read how to track eCommerce sales in Google Analytics on other platforms. You can also track Site Search behavior in Google Analytics.

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Posted in E-Commerce, Tracking & Analytics

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Raise Your Average Order Value With Up Sells & Cross Sells

September 16th, 2009

Product Recommendations

A great opportunity for revenue growth and an easy way to extract the highest return on ad spend is by increasing the value of each order by a small percentage. This can be accomplished by promoting cross sells and up sells during checkout.

There are a couple of ways to do this, you can either manually set up cross sells in your ecommerce system or you can outsource personalized recommendations to a company like MyBuys or Certona.

In-House/Manual Recommendations

Most shopping cart/ecommerce systems will allow you to add related items to each product. Promoting cross sells manually can also be great if you have the product knowledge and know exactly what to recommend. Although this is a manual process, it is great for offering recommendations for smaller ecommerce sites that can’t afford to outsource recommendations.

Third-Party Recommendations

If you have a large ecommerce site with thousands of SKUs, it is very hard to manually recommend related products on a per product basis. By using a third party partner to generate recommendations from your aggregate customer purchase history, you can make this process much easier and more intelligent.

Most third party recommendation providers work off of a percentage based commission model. You would pay a commission on all items purchased specifically from their recommendation engine.

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Posted in E-Commerce, Site Design

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Ultimate Guide: E-Commerce By The Numbers

September 1st, 2009

Google AdWord Fuzzy Math

Here is a guide to ecommerce by the numbers that can make it or break it.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

The first metric to look at us your average cost per click. You will want to optimize your different advertising channels to try and get as low of a CPC as possible. If you can lower your average CPC, you can purchase more clicks for the same budget. You can accomplish this by lowering bids on very generic search terms and adding many long tail keywords to your campaigns and Ad Groups. In addition you should try to use ad few Broad Match terms as you can get away with.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

Once you’ve lowered you average CPC, you should concentrate on getting the highest Click Through Rate possible. In order to boost your CTR, you can test different Ad Copies and see which ones perform better. You can also try Dynamic Keyword Insertion to help make your ad copy more compelling. Keep in mind that a higher CTR will help lower your average CPC because it will contribute to your overall Quality Score. If you have Broad Match terms, you will want to utilize the Search Query Performance report to fine tune keywords that will display your ad.

Conversion Rate (CR)

Note: If you don’t have Conversion Tracking set up, you won’t have a way to track this.

Once you have tracking set up properly you will be able to see how many visitors turn into customers. A good number to aim for is 2%, although it can vary a lot from industry to industry. Most analytics software does not track phone sales out of the box, so your conversion rate might be higher than what you see on your reports.

You can boost your conversion rate by optimizing your landing pages and checkout flow. The goal is to ensure a smooth passage from the landing page to the checkout confirmation. You can do this by highlighting your call to action (i.e. Add To Cart, Buy Now) and eliminating the possibility for the consumer to get lost by clicking on irrelevant links.

Average Order Value (AOV)

If you can raise your average order value by upselling each order with additional items an accessories, it can have a positive impact on your total sales volume. It’s simple, try to get more out of your existing customers before trying to get new ones.

Bottom Line:

Lower Cost-Per-Click + Higher Click-Through-Rate + Higher Conversion-Rate + Higher Average-Order-Value = Much More Revenue.

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Posted in E-Commerce, Search Engine Marketing

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