Posted November 20th, 2008

Are You Driving Away Your Potential Buyers With These Two Common Mistakes?

There are two major Web design errors that can cost you up to 70% of your conversions.  I am dead serious and not exaggerating. I have personally seen an immediate decline of 70% in both sales quantity and dollar amount that stayed at that level. The cause was a site redesign that included these two common mistakes. Imagine having an existing business suddenly lose 70% of their sales!

So what are the two worst ecommerce Web Design mistakes you can make? Here they are:

  1. Requiring your buyers to “register” before they can shop. Big mistake. Imagine walking into a store and being asked for ID before they will let you in. Once someone decides they want to buy from you they’ll gladly give you their personal information - and not a minute before. They just “met” you and don’t know whether they trust you yet. Don’t bar the door - there are plenty of open doors waiting elsewhere.
  2. Not providing easy access to shipping costs - and the earlier in the shopping process the better. Infomercials and some eBay sellers have been sucking buyers in with cheap prices and then gouging them with high “shipping and handling” charges for decades. Shipping costs have been the number one complaint of online shoppers in every ecommerce survey I’ve ever seen. Make sure your potential buyers can determine their total price - do it for them if you can. Better that they know how much they’ll have to pay for shipping and get used to the idea while they’re still shopping than have them get sticker shock just before they checkout!

If you are making either of these two mistakes correct them quickly and then read on for many more suggestions on increasing conversion rates through improving the usability of your site.  If you are using a store solution that won’t allow you to eliminate these two issues I strongly advise you move your site to a solution that will. I highly recommend Volusion for their dependability, pricing, ease of use and more.

Responses to “Are You Driving Away Your Potential Buyers With These Two Common Mistakes?”

There is NO Done Because There is Always More You Can Do to Grow Your Business | GROWMAP.COM Says:

[...] Are you driving your visitors away by making them register before they can shop or comment? Do you answer all the questions your visitors are likely to have (but rarely ask) on your site? Can they easily find what they want from products to shipping costs? Remove these obstacles or your success will always be limited. [...]

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