Selling Points: Optimizing E-Commerce

Best Placement: Kinoma

Welcome to TrialPay’s Best Of Web (BOW) Awards, where we recognize the savvy online merchants that best utilize TrialPay’s e-commerce solutions. This month we’re honoring Kinoma for their highly effective use of one of our top touchpoints, the direct placement of TrialPay as a payment method.

Kinoma consistently places a “Checkout with TrialPay” button along with a “Buy Now” button on each of their product pages, including Kinoma Play, which is pictured below.

You can follow the best practices displayed here by Kinoma by placing a TrialPay “Get It Free” button everywhere customers can buy or download your products: on the product pages or home page of your Web site, or directly in the shopping cart. By doing so, you can:

• Earn significant new revenue from your current traffic
• Acquire loyal customers by giving them a great deal
• Boost your brand by partnering with TrialPay’s premier advertisers
• Expand your customer database and earn significant upsell revenue for years to come

Don’t already have a direct placement? Log in to your merchant account or e-mail your account manager to get started.

Usability measures the quality of a user's experience when interacting with your Web site. In other words, it gauges how easily and enjoyably customers can navigate your site, view your products, and ultimately complete a purchase. Not sure if your site is following usability best practices? Here are five red flags it’s not:

1. Your pages are cluttered
The number one rule in usability is that less is more. Exposing too much information can overwhelm your customers and easily them distract from the task at hand: purchasing your product. If some of your customers might need additional help or directions, use progressive disclosure techniques (such as incorporating hover-over pop-up text, help bubbles or links to your help page) to expose information as your users need it.

2. You lack consistency
Without consistent elements on every page, your users have to learn and re-learn how to navigate through your site—which can seem like a lot of work to a shopper who wants to quickly make a purchase. For ease of use, keep all links, colors, fonts, button location, and navigation location the same on every page of your site.

3. Your call-to-action buttons don’t look like buttons
If your customers don’t know your call-to-action button is clickable, they may never complete their purchases. Make your buttons actually look like buttons by 1) using visual effects such as drop shadow and outlines 2) using short, legible, actionable text and 3) using bright contrasting colors to make it stand out from the rest of the page. Here are a few examples:

4. Your error messages are off-putting
Error messages are almost always written in red text—which can seem a bit like getting a failing grade on a test. And using the wrong tone of voice can feel pretty harsh, too.  Unless you want to offend your shoppers and send them off to another site, make sure your error messages don’t blame them for making a mistake. For example, instead of saying “You forgot to enter your billing address,” try saying “Some information below is missing or incorrect.”

5. You haven’t tested your site
You will never have a true understanding of your site’s usability unless you test it on real people. Usability testing can give you qualitative insight into how easily or quickly users are able to complete each task on your site, and what changes will make your users perform more successfully. There are many usability testing methods; Click here for a comprehensive list.

[caption id="attachment_203" align="alignright" width="180" caption="Many online travel sites that once only sold airline tickets now also cross-sell other products to make their customers’ travels easier—and their shopping carts bigger."][/caption] Cross-selling is a highly effective marketing tool used by nearly every industry, from fast food restaurants to financial institutions to software companies. Why? When you cross-sell related products and services to your existing customers, you can increase conversions, boost average order values and increase customer satisfaction. You don’t need a product catalog as comprehensive as Amazon.com's to suggest related items to your customers. Online sellers that offer a small catalog of items, or those that sell only one product, can still benefit from cross-selling by offering complementary products from non-competing companies. The Right Way to Cross-Sell You should always cross-sell related items on your product pages and in your customers’ “view cart" pages. In certain cases, you can even cross-sell within the checkout flow—but be careful not to overwhelm your customers with too many choices. Cross-selling another company’s product is relevant only when it is non-competitive, and complementary to the product you are selling. But certain occasions such as holidays are an exception to this rule, and allow you to offer products completely unrelated to your own. For example, in May, a software company could leverage its customers’ need to purchase flowers for Mother’s Day by letting them add a gift card from an online flower delivery company to their carts. The Wrong Way to Cross-Sell Cross-selling can significantly increase online sales, but if it’s not properly administered, it can backfire and end in cart abandonment instead. Offering too many products for your customer to choose from, offering products that are unrelated to the item your customer is interested in, or offering products that compete with the item your customer is purchasing can spark confusion, indecision and make your customer re-think his purchase entirely. Instead, only offer items that might increase your customers’ satisfaction with the product they are already set on purchasing.

TrialPay works with thousands of premier online merchants, and we recently presented them with a simple question: What characteristics does an e-commerce company need to ensure success? We received a variety of great answers, and below are those mentioned most frequently.

1. A unique product
Nearly half of our merchants cited that having a unique, high-quality product is the foundation of a successful e-commerce company. Ideally the product should serve a specific niche and effectively differentiate itself from the competition. Still, most of these merchants agreed that a great product alone doesn’t necessarily guarantee success.

2. Excellent customer service
An overwhelming amount of our merchants said that giving excellent customer service is a vital component of a successful e-commerce company (which was also named by our merchants earlier this year as one of the top 5 ways to increase conversions). Good customer support can improve the customer experience, add value to your company and encourage valuable word-of-mouth marketing.

3. An optimized checkout process
Many of our merchants believe that testing and perfecting the checkout process can lessen shopping cart abandonment, and ultimately make an e-commerce company more successful. A complicated checkout can test customer patience and give them plenty of reason to shop elsewhere. Those looking to simplify and improve the process should check out these great tips on how to optimize your e-commerce checkout.