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In today’s episode:
00:01:36 – What the session covers
00:01:55 – Why Ezra prefers the physical products business model
00:03:54 – The importance of timing in e-commerce
00:08:38 – Ezra’s market criteria checklist
00:17:14 – Finding markets to enter
00:20:17 – Getting more from your store
00:22:32 – The channels you’ll want to occupy
00:25:52 – How do you increase your sales?
00:27:31 – Search is your best friend
00:31:39 – Sitewide conversion boosters
00:36:57 – Why you should use video to sell physical products
00:40:55 – Rich homepages win
00:44:21 – Section page conversion boosters
00:45:39 – The most important page in your store
00:52:58 – What your shopping cart should feature
00:56:36 – Additional conversion boosters
00:59:05 – Increasing repeats
01:04:13 – How Ezra tripled the value of an e-commerce store
01:08:30 – The structure of a Pinterest board
01:11:18 – Question and answer section
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Quotables:
If there’s nobody else buying traffic, you don’t want to be in that market. [Click To Tweet].
E-commerce is making a resurgence. [Click To Tweet].
You need to have a cross-sell. [Click To Tweet].
Transcription:
Hey everyone! We’re going to get started. I’ve got 90 minutes and I’m going to fill it so I’m just going to start. Cool. Wonderful. So FastWebFormula4, my name is Ezra Firestone. Thank you so much for being here and I’m going to go through this slide… has nothing to do with e-commerce.
I like to put this at the front of my presentations because I sent this presentation to a friend to have him kind of edit and look at it and he sent it back with this picture at the front as if I wouldn’t notice that it was there. So now I like to like show it off.
So one thing that James said at the start, before this session, was whether or not you are interested in a physical products business, people who own physical product businesses are fantastic folks to do services for.
No matter what type of service you offer we kind of need it all because everything that’s relevant to an information marketing business, it also turns out is relevant to a physical product business in this day and age where faceless businesses are dying and businesses of all kinds.
Even ones that are selling physical products, need a brand and a personality and things like that so whether or not you’re interested in this business model, if you consume this information and look at it from the perspective of how you can use this for your own business, that would be beneficial to you.
E-COMMERCE + PARASITE SEO + VISIBILITY + CONVERSION + X?
So we’re going to be talking about e-commerce specifically, which is my business model; a bit about parasite SEO; and then visibility which is traffic; conversion; and then the third piece of the puzzle which is something that I’ve learned from James over the past six months that have transformed all of my e-commerce businesses.
A couple of big reasons why I prefer a physical product business model or why I like the physical product business model:
The first is that there’s no persuasion necessary to sell products, right? People are already looking for those things. You don’t need a long sales funnel. They were looking for a salt shaker when they came to your website and they buy that thing when they get there, and all you really have to do is kind of make it look nice.
And you can see here that most of our transactions happen day one. 95% of the transactions in the store happening on the first day. The range will be between 75 and a hundred percent of your transactions will be on the first day. This is more of an average store here with a 75% first day transaction rate.
Another cool thing about physical product businesses is they have an extremely high value per visitor. So for every visitor who hits one of our sites, we’re making between a dollar and $5 and that’s because they were already looking for those products when they showed up so they’re not coming to consume information, they’re not coming to hang out with us, they’re coming specifically to buy products.
This is another example, $2.88. It’s a good model. You need less traffic. This is why when I initially got into physical products, it was OK, I figured out how to get traffic, I kind of understand how this works, what’s the best way I can leverage that traffic? And what I decided on was the best way to leverage the ability that I had to generate traffic was by retailing actual tangible goods.
Another cool thing, which kind of goes along with this whole concept were talking about is that these stores convert really highly because people are coming there to buy stuff. So it’s not uncommon to see a 6% conversion rate and that’s not an opt-in, that’s a purchase of a product.
Between 1 and 2% is more of an average conversion rate.
Right Timing
One of the things I like to talk about in business is timing. And if you have a chance to check out the ThinkActGet podcast episode on time, I think you might enjoy it. My skincare company is called BOOM! By Cindy Joseph and it’s the main physical product business that I like to use as an example.
The interesting thing about this company is if you look at America and Australia, the UK and pretty much any society where we are right now in the spectrum of the human race, something interesting is happening.
Ezra during his presentation at FWF4
And that is that, men are valued for their production. As men age, as they produce more, as they make more money, they get more power in the eyes of society. They get more social power.
Women, on the other hand, in most societies, are valued for youth and beauty and that stems back to a hundred years ago when a woman really was more valuable to society in her childbearing years.
Well now that’s kind of an outdated model but what’s happening is we have 76 million people in the baby boomer generation in the United States, half of which are women, and they’re all collectively having the experience of their hair graying, their skin wrinkling and their bodies are aging on the outside faster than they are on the inside and people are treating them, society is treating them differently as a result and they don’t like it.
And so, every product out there is anti-age, anti-wrinkle, anti-women really, if you think about it. The messaging behind our product, it’s a very similar product to some of the other products that are out there, it’s all organic, it’s edible and all except that but the messaging is different.
It’s “Hey, you know you are right just the way you are, and you don’t need to cover yourselves up and you should celebrate who you are.” And so, the messaging is different.
What does that have to do with anything? What it has to do with is that the timing was right for that message. There’s a group of people having a collective experience and businesses and products and brands do really well when they’re talking to groups of people who are all having one collective experience.
And so we hit, we started this a couple of years ago and it’s taken off because the messaging was right for that group of people who are having that collective experience.
So what does this have to do with e-commerce? Well, timing. We are here right now. The people who are starting physical products businesses today, 15 years from now, will be really happy they did because 8% of total retail sales in UK, Northern America, take Canada, are done online right now.
When I started it was like more 4% so in the past 8 years, we’ve doubled the amount of people who buy products online and that number is growing by 15% year over year. So what’s happening is people are getting more comfortable with purchasing physical products and just making online purchases in general and what’s happening is the world is catching on.
In China last year, there’s a holiday that’s the equivalent to Chinese Valentine’s day. And two companies, the Chinese equivalent of Amazon, and the Chinese equivalent of eBay, those two companies together did a combined $3 billion in sales in one day, which to give you perspective is three times the total online retail sales done on black Friday in America.
And only 2% of Chinese people (right now we have 8% in America who buy products online), only 2% of total retail sales are done online in China so the world is catching on.
The point here is that if we look at where we are in the life cycle of e-commerce, we’re a baby. People like to say the Internet is in its infancy. Well, e-commerce is like, it is the time to be doing this business model.
So if you’re interested in this business model, if you are interested in providing services to people who have this business model, then that’s basically what I’m doing, just telling you that you should listen to what I have to say. That’s all this is all about. It’s the whole point of all this, really.
Marketing Criteria Checklist
I was kind of polling the room, and we’ve got a spectrum here, we’ve got some people who are interested in getting started in e-commerce businesses, some people have e-commerce businesses. I’m going to give you these slides but feel free to take pictures of them.
So what I did was I broke it up, we’ve got some information on if you’re interested in getting started, how you can go about that. And I put the emphasis of this presentation on if you already have an existing e-commerce business, how can you get more from that business. And the reason I did that is because if you are a service provider, you can take all the stuff that’s in this presentation and charge a lot of money for it.
So let’s talk about the market criteria checklist. This is a little checklist that I created because I have built a lot of these businesses and they’ve not all worked out and so I put together a little checklist for myself. If a market has, if it scores well on this checklist, the way it works if you add up all the points, if you have this part, if you have this part and down at the bottom, if you’re in the excellent category, you’ve probably got a winning market.
1. Average order value between $75 and $200. I’m going to start talking really fast and you guys can all keep up ‘cause this is a very smart room. Average order value between $75 and $200. So this is not average product price. This is average order value right? Because sometimes people order two products, sometimes products have accessories. Why does your average order value have to be between $75 and $200?
Well, you’re most likely not making more than 20-30% margins on an e-commerce store. So you need to be making about $25 profit per order on the bottom end in order to be able to drive traffic effectively, and as we’ll learn later, Google pay per click AdWords is the best traffic source for a physical product store.
The reason you don’t really want to be above two or three hundred dollars is because at that point, you need a lot more customer service. People are a lot less likely to pull up their credit cards and just buy something that’s four, five hundred dollars. They want to talk to someone to do that.
2. Gross margin 20% or more. And this one is worth five points. The other one is worth five points. These are very important. The number of points next to each one of these things is its level of importance so I will stop talking about the points now but I just want to bring that back. If you’re not making 20% or more on your products you’re going to have a really hard time buying advertising.
And if you can’t buy advertising for your physical product store, you probably don’t want to be in that market. Yes, you can generate traffic and a bunch of other ways that we’re going to talk about in a second but you absolutely want to be able to buy advertising because what has happened is if you look at all of the channels, right, Google Shopping, PriceGrabber, TheFind, Overstock.com, Amazon, eBay, all of these channels that allow you to retail your products on them have now moved to a paid model.
Once they got enough people to adopt, once they had enough people using, like Google shopping was free forever and it was the most beautiful thing in the whole world, and then in August of 2012, they moved to a paid model. And the reason they did that was because they had enough people using that product that they could now afford to make people pay because we weren’t going away.
We loved the product, we were invested in the product and now we’re willing to pay for it, and now they can charge for ads on it. So you want to be able to drive traffic.
3. Fragmented Market. This one does not really matter but what I mean here is if you take your top 5 keywords and you search them, if it’s the same 10 people who are showing up, that’s not really a fragmented market. It means you got people who are in that market who are players.
4. Lends itself to return customers. This is very important, like, take my gift baskets business. I can sell a gift basket to the same person once every two months because they’re buying it for Christmas, they’re buying it for Hanukkah, they’re buying it for Easter, for Valentine’s Day.
It’s very easy to have multiple sales right? Whereas my Halloween business, I make one sale a year, does not lend itself to return customers. That’s an important one.
5. Lends itself to multiple item orders. Are people buying just one of your products? Nobody buys just one BOOM! product. They buy our skincare, they buy our… our… whatever that stuff is called? (Laughs) Moisturizer! So you want to make sure that your market lends itself to multiple items.
6. Can you add value to the market? The answer to this is absolutely yes but you just got to be willing to do it and this is what will set you apart as we’ll talk about in a second here. But, can you add value to your market beyond just listing products for sale? If you’re not willing to do that part, when all of you are, because you’re all owning the racecourse, and that’s really what it is.
7. Products, are they difficult to find locally? Where are you going to find an Elvis wig or a mullet? You’re not going to find one unless you live in New York City. People in Alabama need to go online to buy that product so that’s a really important one. You don’t want to sell commoditized products. We’ll talk about that in just a second but if your product is available locally, you probably don’t want to be selling it online.
8. Seasonal Business. I really like seasonal businesses because there’s a certain fervor, there’s a certain kind of energy and rabidness that happens when it’s Halloween, or it’s Christmas or it’s a gift or it’s some level of seasonality to that business.
And it’s also kind of a fun business model when you have a million dollars in sales in one month and then kind of nothing for the rest of the year. It’s just like… I like seasonal businesses and I think that they’re good businesses.
9. If you look at your top keywords in Google Trends, when you look in Google Trends you can see the countries and the states where those keywords are most highly searched, if your country is not in the top for that, you probably don’t want to be selling that product in that country. I mean it’s not worth a whole lot as you can see but it is something that we look at. Is this product hot in our specific country?
10. Do you have at least 70 SKUs? What this means is, and this is specifically geared towards a drop-ship physical product business model where you are going to a supplier who has a product, you’re taking their product catalogue, you’re building a website, you’re putting those products up on that store and you’re sending traffic to them and when someone buys something, they pay you.
Let’s just take my wig business for example. I get all these wigs for about fifteen bucks a piece. I put them on my store for $35, $40. Someone finds them, they buy the wig, they pay me the $40, I then go to the supplier, I say “Hey, this person has just bought this thing, here’s your $15. Please ship it to them.” So that’s the business model that I’m specifically discussing here.
There’s also other business models like BOOM! and some of the other businesses that we have where we are either manufacturing or white labeling, and you can have much less products there because you’re doing more brand building.
But the point here is if you’re doing a physical product business, you want at least 70 items because you need a certain number of products out there ‘cause you want to rank for the long tail keywords, you want enough products to buy traffic on.
And what we’ve found is when we have under 70 SKUs, it’s really hard to scale that business to get it up over seven figures so you want to have at least 70 SKUs on your store.
11. Is there competition? Right. Are there other people buying traffic in that market? If there’s nobody else buying traffic, you don’t want to be in that market because nobody’s making money.
12. Is the average weight of your product under 10 lbs? It gets really tough when you’re shipping heavy products because it’s harder to offer free shipping. They get damaged quite easily. Now we still do this, we have a bar stools business, it does quite well. But it’s just kind of a pain in the butt so if you can sell products that are light to ship, you’re going to do better.
13. Do your top three keywords have a combined 15,000 exact match searches per month? If you don’t have at least 15,000 in your top three, you better have a really long tail because you got to have a certain amount of volume.
And now with channels like Amazon and eBay and all that stuff, it’s a lot easier to generate traffic for physical products, but you still want to be able to get Google traffic because Google traffic is really good traffic.
14. Is the target market women? Something interesting, I mean, what I love is that almost half of us in here are women. That’s fantastic. When I used to go to these conferences, six and seven years ago, there was no women. E-commerce is making a resurgence. It was very popular eight years ago and it kind of, in our community, the popularity went down and now it’s coming back.
But all of the, sort of small mom-and-pop e-commerce businesses have been built predominantly, I’d say in 80-20 by men. So there’s an opportunity for women because a dude is not going to do a maternity clothing store. He’s not going to do that. There’s an opportunity for female-focused markets. We look for female-focused markets because there are less people doing that.
And another interesting thing about e-commerce is that once you get up to one or two million in revenue in a market, now you have some players, but anything under that, there’s really not many people who know what they’re doing in those mines. They’re very easy to break into a six-figure e-commerce store.
It’s very easy to create one of these things. With everything that you guys know from a traffic generation perspective, you could have six-figure e-commerce businesses fairly easily. It’s not super difficult to build one. Once you get over seven figures, then you end up dealing with some people who are doing a little better.
But when we just look at all the stores in our markets, there’s usually one or two who are doing any kind of sophisticated marketing so it’s a good business model.
Finding Markets
Alright, let’s talk a little bit about how to find markets to enter. This is a little dirty diaper trick. One of the things we like to do is we will go and look at the top designers on every platform.
If you look at Magento, Shopify, Volution, Bigcommerce, Zen Cart, ShopSite, any one of these platforms and you just do a Google search – Magento designer, Magento developer, Magento web development – you’re going to see the people paying for ads are the people who can afford to pay for ads within that market which means they are the top designers on that platform.
If you go to their sites and you look at their before’s and after’s, if someone can afford to pay the top designer to re-do their site, they’re doing well in that market. So it’s really a good little way to think that and we get a lot of markets that way.
Other markets are niches of niches right? We don’t do Halloween costumes, we do wigs. We don’t do dog supplies, we do dog beds. These little micro niches of bigger niches are what you want to go into. Hobbies are fantastic. Anything that people are kind of a little bit crazy about right?
People who are into model trains love their model trains. I mean they love them and so they’re willing to buy like a lot of them and all kinds of things about them. Hobbies are fantastic.
Weird and embarrassing stuff, right? Nobody is going to buy, nobody wants to go down to the store and buy their manscaping kit, you know? Or their fungal cream, or whatever. Just stuff that people are embarrassed about are good products, like breast pumps, and things like that. There’s a guy called Internet Retailer, which is if you’re interested in e-commerce business, that’s probably the authority in our community.
They run a conference called the Internet Retailer’s conference. They got a guide called the Top 500 Guide which will tell you all of the businesses, all of the categories of physical product stores, gifts and flowers, and all that stuff, and which businesses are doing better year over year. It’s just the best. There’s 500. They actually have a second 500 Guide now.
So they’ll give you the top 1000 e-commerce stores and not from a revenue perspective so you just get all these weird interesting markets. It’s a fantastic place to find markets.
And then the other places, like, I buy sites on Flippa, on BizBuySell and Latona’s. We’ll go and we’ll buy these e-commerce sites that are maybe doing 30 grand a year in profit. You can buy one of those for 50 or 60 grand, or 15 grand a year in profit. And the other interesting thing about a physical product business is that it’s a very simple business model to understand. It’s buy low, sell high.
Everyone understands the physical product business model so they’re very easy to sell these assets. There are people out there every day looking to buy these things so when you build one up it’s quite easy to flip. Now, granted you need a year’s worth of data to prove that this business has been viable for a year but all of the places that you would go to buy a business, you go and you look for markets there.
Because these people are selling businesses that have done well. That’s just a little bit about if you’re interested in getting into physical products, there are some ways to find markets. There’s a bit of information on what to look for, as far as market criteria goes.
Get More From Your Store
So now we’re going to talk about, is what I’m most excited about, is how do you get more eyeballs? There’s three ways to grow a business right?
1. Get more visibility. Get more people to know about your product, your service, your business. That’s traffic and well, there’s all kinds of ways to do that.
2. Have a higher conversion rate. So, for all those people who come to your website or come to see your offer, can you get more of them to take you up on it? And along with that goes can you increase your average order value? So maybe you don’t get more people to take you up on your offer but you increase the value of each sale. That’s the second way to grow a business.
3. The third way is to increase repeat business. That’s all you got. You got more visibility, you got higher conversion rates, or you got repeat business. Let’s talk about how we do this for e-commerce.
Structure Basics
First thing you got to know about an e-commerce business is you’ve got six main templates or eight here I guess. You got your homepage, your section page, your product detail page, your blog, your checkout pages, your pay-per-click landing pages, your more information pages and your social profiles. That’s all you have with e-commerce. It’s pretty simple. We’ll talk about each one of these.
Now, one of the things you should know from a traffic perspective, from a visibility perspective, from a physical products store is that every search query on Google has a unique set of channels. What does that actually mean? And I’ll tell you about the channels to occupy in just a second.
Every search has a unique set of channels
So if you look at a search like “wigs.” Google understands that that’s a search for a physical product so they’re going to deliver you a set of channels. You’re going to see video results. You’re going to see channels like Amazon and eBay. You’re going to see websites. You’re going to see blogs. You might see news results. So it’s just different classifications of media formats right? James has Own The Racecourse.
So Google understands that different people prefer to consume media in different formats. Some people like to read, some people like to listen, some people like to watch, some people are looking to shop and so they understand from a query perspective what the searcher’s intention is, and they deliver multiple options for that person.
Maybe the searcher who’s looking for a physical product wants to read information about that product. Maybe they want to buy that product. So if you understand these channels for each given query, then you can figure out how to occupy more than one space on Google because you can have content that’s relevant for each one of those channels.
With physical products, here are the channels that we have to occupy from a physical product perspective:
• We got Search Engine Optimization right? Which is what I just talked about.
• Pay-per-click where we’re buying a traffic on Google, on Amazon, on PriceGrabber and all these other engines.
• We’ve got comparison shopping engines like Google Shopping and TheFind and some of these free ones
• We’ve got email marketing
• We’ve got social media
How To Generate Visibility For A Physical Product Store
So, how can you take advantage of this for your store? Well, you want to have an image for every one of your products. If you don’t own your image, if it’s your manufacturer’s image, watermark it. Change the size.
Interesting thing – if everyone has the same image and yours is watermarked, and yours is bigger, your image will outrank theirs. I don’t know why but it’s working.
Video – for each one of your section pages, your homepage and your top, best-selling products and we’ll talk about video and how well it sells but videos are super easy to rank, you guys all know that. No e-commerce businesses out there are ranking videos for their section pages.
Every time I come into an e-commerce market and I create a video for my top 3 keywords I get a ton of traffic, because I’m the only video on that page. You have pay-per-click where you have image ads, text ads, retargeting, that’s probably your best channel from a physical product perspective.
Amazon Ads – if you just use Google, I just did this thing where I’m launching a course like James mentioned where I kind of take, go through my whole system for drop-ship businesses and I did this challenge and I said “Hey guys, I’m going to find a market, build a platform, set-up an advertising campaign and run traffic to a store and try and make a sale within seven days, and if I can do that I can prove to you that you can do this business model.”
It got to day four and hadn’t made any sales. I was a little worried but we finally made a bunch of sales, ended up working out really well. But the point is that you only need one or two, it’s good to have all these different channels, but really, with a physical product business you’re probably going to live and die by whether or not you can buy traffic at a profit.
Amazon listing – for every one of your products, that’s the beauty of a physical products store, is you have your own asset but you also have your products on all these other channels.
And I’ll show you in a second here, if you look at any query for a physical product, really above the fold, you’re going to see ads, you’re going to see Google Shopping, and you might see one or two organic results. Your videos, your images, your website are all below the fold. And then obviously your blog and whatever educational content you have and MP3s and PDFs and that kind of stuff are going to rank in that market, too.
So, here’s what an average query will look like. You can see we’ve got our ads, we’ve got Google Shopping (which is also paid), and then we’ve got Amazon. And that’s above, that’s the fold on my laptop.
Now, one of the things I want you to see is that Apple is running a text ad and they’re also running an image ad. And that’s the beauty, is you get to run two ads within that same ad network. So we have image ads for every one of our products and also text ads. And image ads are still so cheap.
We’re getting 50% cheaper clicks on image ads and we’re converting at 50% higher than we are on text ads. So, I just wanted to show you that these are the channels that you have to occupy if you’re selling physical products. And it’s mainly above the fold, paid opportunities at this point. Alright, so that covers the overview of how you generate visibility for a physical product store.
How To Make More Sales And Increase Average Order Value?
This is the stuff I really like. This is what I’m excited about. Is how can we take the store that already exists and get more from it? Well, I’ve got a whole bunch; I’m going to go through all of that right now.
So, site-wide conversion boosters, with a physical product store it’s a very simple funnel. All you’re trying to do is get them through your store. You want to get them from your homepage, into a section page, over to a product page, and then finally in your shopping cart.
And you can see here that 10% of the people who make it to our product page actually buy something and 37% of the people who end up in the shopping cart actually buy something. So, if you are not tracking goal flow on a physical product store, then you don’t know what’s going on.
You need to be tracking the flow. And you can set this up in any business. What is the flow that you want people to go through? Are you tracking that in your analytics? Because you might make a tweak and find, because it multiplies too. If you end up getting 20% of the people to go from the homepage to the section page instead of 10% you’ve now doubled your business on that one little tweak.
So, goal flows are very important concept to understand from an analytics perspective. What is your goal here? What are you trying to get people to do? It might just be an opt-in but from that opt-in perspective what do you want them to do? Set up tracking for that and then monitor those results.
This is just another way of showing you that same data that Google has in analytics. I like to look at it from traffic type. I like to look at it from source medium and see how well my goal flow is going from a pay-per-click perspective, from an organic perspective, etcetera.
Getting Your Site Visitors To Take Action
Now, one of the things that we discovered… What do you see here on this slide? What do all of these people have in common? They all have something in common at the top. They’ve got this giant search boxes at the top of their stores.
Why are they doing that? It goes back to influence, the “Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini, if you can get commitment and consistency, if you can get someone to take one action they’re more likely to take another action.
We discovered this on accident. We used to put our search boxes in the left hand navigation, top of the left hand navigation, and we’re tracking site search right? Two percent of the people who visited our stores were searching and 10% of the revenue from the store was coming from those 2%. I thought, “What if we put our search boxes right up here in the header?”
This is what happened, you can see it bumped it up to 5% of the people who were visiting that store were searching. Check this out. Whoa. There it is, second slide, is 30% of that store’s revenue. So, 150,000 out of 600,000 in that time period came from those 5% of visitors.
So, getting people to take the action of searching on your store. And now, what we’re testing is having the search bar flow with you, you scroll that search bar stays with you. (Laughs) I’ll let you know how that one goes but we want to really encourage that behavior.
The other thing is that you get, you can see what people are searching and if they’re searching for products that you don’t have. Google Analytics really makes it easy to track site search and what people are typing into that search box. You’ll be fascinated to find out some of the weirdest stuff they’re typing into your search box, and you want to know that stuff right? Because you want to know you’re your people are looking for.
And so, we end up like figuring out products that we should add or products that we should remove, or weird requests that our customers have that they think the search box is the customer support. It’s just fascinating, it’s just weird but it’s something worth looking at.
Header Best Practices
Alright. Header best practices. So, these are some of the top retail sites online. I want to talk to you guys about a couple of things in the header. You want to have, now, Zappos introduced this (see Zappos at the top one there) they introduced this double header model, which has now become standard on e-commerce stores.
One of the interesting things about a physical product business is you got Zappos, Amazon, eBay, a couple of these other stores that like 20% or 30% (I think it’s up to 40 now) if you take those top 10 stores, something like 50% between 30 and 50%, I have the actual statistic of transactions that are happening online or happening on those stores.
So, they are training your customers, they are training people what needs to be available, the way a store should look. They’re like training your customers how the shopping experience should be. So if you can model what these people have, your conversion rates will increase because they are used to these kinds of things.
So Zappos introduced this double header where they’ve got an offer at the top, they’ve got the navigation links that you’re looking for right? Like Your Cart, About Us, My Account, whatever. And then they have their offers. They got their logo, their search box, their unique selling proposition, their guarantees, and then they’ve got another level of navigation. So that double header and now if you look at any big e-commerce site they all have this.
We implemented just the double header model. We saw a doubling of our conversion rate. Your header is your most important area on your entire website, on any website; your header is the most important area because nobody scrolls.
So what do you have going on in your header? From an e-commerce perspective you want to think about having trust seals, you want to think about having live chat, all of the information people are looking at – your shipping information, your return information, frequently asked questions, About Us, all the stuff that people are looking for needs to be in that header.
It needs to be laid out in a full view perspective because your eye can only see, look at how Zappos does it – they’ve got little chunk, little chunk, little chunk. It’s not all… It’s chunked up, and we’ll talk about that in the Navigation.
So, and I’ll give you guys a list. I have a list of the top 100 e-commerce stores that we follow from a testing perspective, because we’re following what these people are doing. They run tests, “Oh, they just changed that, let’s see how that works.” I’ll give you guys that.
Sitewide Conversion Boosters
Obviously you want to have your Favicon, your social buttons, you want to have video (which we’ll talk about in a second), frequently asked questions and educational content is a no-brainer. People have questions about your products; you should answer them because you’ll make more sales if you do.
Randomly displayed testimonials and then in your footer you want to have a Trust Symbol and another search, an opt-in, a security symbol, some guarantees, and then whatever links you want to have.
Incentivized Time Constraints
Let’s talk about some other sitewide conversion boosters – incentivized time constraints. There’s a company called Exclusive Concepts. They run a website called ConversionsOnDemand.com.
