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Shopping cart optimization can result in easily measurable, lucrative results, mainly because:

I always say that if you are not continuously optimizing your eCommerce shopping cart, you are leaving money on the table. Lots of money, most of the time!

So, if you are new to the ecommerce game and you want to start optimizing right away, here is where you should start from: Shopping cart best practices whitepaper.

If you are not new to the game and want to go a few steps further, here are 3 of the methods of optimization that will do you a great deal of good.

Custom language optimization

Let me tell you an insider tip from Avangate: languages can generate large conversion rate differences when compared. Translations of the cart are regularly checked and improved and payment methods are added to make sure all user needs are covered. However that is not enough to get the most out of each language.

But maybe I am not saying anything new to you. You already know that just translating your website in different languages won’t get you the same performance for each language. If you want better results you need to think of each language as being more than just just a translation.

The same goes for the shopping cart. Each language should be treated as a standalone optimization target. This way you optimize independently for each language, because the optimizations for English won’t produce the same conversion rate results for other languages as well.

If you use Avangate, treating each language independently is easy. You can have radical designs based on the user behavior of any of the 30 languages we offer our cart in.

Customize the cart flow

For some website, the purchase funnel starts on their website while for others the purchase funnel is included in the 3rd party shopping cart. In both scenarios you need to treat the whole funnel as a whole.

If after clicking the Buy now or Upgrade buttons on your website, people are redirected to another page (e.g. to select options or versions of the product they’re buying, to create an account, etc.) you need to make sure that when they get to the 3rd party cart they won’t have to go through a large number of steps.

For this we launched inside Avangate the “One step cart without review” purchase flow. In other words, people get to the 3rd party cart, fill in billing and credit card data and they are done.

If they already have an account on your website and you know part or all of their billing data, make sure they don’t need to fill it again inside your 3rd party cart. If you want to do this with Avangate, just write to your account manager.

Switch to custom domain

If your website is an established one in the market and you own a brand that your visitors trust, make sure that your 3rd party shopping cart loads on a secure subdomain of your choice. Make sure to get in touch with your account manager and ask for it.

I’m a big advocate of custom domains. They offer a flawless experience to your visitors: from their point of view, since they never leave your website. That adds to the trust and feeling of security, which are crucial when it comes to buying online.

Custom domains make the tracking of visitors behavior in Google Analytics much easier and more accurate. And you know, without accurate data, you’ll just be optimizing blindfolded.

As the saying goes: Keep optimizing, my friends!

There isn’t a single merchant on this world selling through affiliate programs that hasn’t got idle affiliates. These are affiliates that are not active, meaning that they don’t generate any sales or, worst case, they don’t even refer traffic for the merchant (no exposure for the merchant’s products). When labeling an affiliate as “inactive” from the time’s point of view, you should take into consideration his sales history (if any) – the frequency / amount of sales he was generating at one point – and also the type of product / services you sell through them. In the software vertical, for example, an affiliate promoting consumer software get inactive quicker than an affiliate promoting enterprise products.

Why do some affiliates become inactive?

In order to activate an inactive software affiliate it’s best to address the issues they’re having. From what we’ve seen so far, the most frequent reasons why some affiliates have periods of time in which they don’t perform are:

• missing the tools to promote your products – e.g. for coupon affiliates you must provide them with a coupon;
• affiliate joins the merchant’s program but it takes a while until he actually starts promoting the products online;
• search engine algorithm updates impact their traffic / SEO efforts – Google Panda is most popular;
• affiliate finds another product to promote with better conditions – higher commission, special promotions, easier to sell product;
• lack of targeted traffic on the affiliate’s website.

How can I activate affiliates?

Here are 6 ideas to activate idle affiliates:

1. Proactive approach: keep your affiliates close to you from the beginning – even if it could mean a lot of time spent for speaking with them, it’s worth it. You will be able to know what happened directly from them and help them better engage their traffic with your products. Send them a personal welcome message once they join your affiliate program and keep the communication open with them periodically. The newsletters are a good option for the mass of affiliates, but for your top affiliate a constant personal email approach is recommended.
2. Incentivize affiliates for each little step taken into promoting your products – you may offer a flat commission percentage to begin with to which you can add increments of 5% to the commission for: sending an email back to you with an URL where they promote your product on your website, giving you feedback about your products after they test them, featuring your products on the page that gets the most relevant traffic, recommending your products on the homepage, etc. A good example for this is how VSO Software does it.
3. Run sales contests within your affiliate programs but set realistic goals – the idea is to get those latent affiliates to start selling, so you might just want to address them. You have a flying pig’s chance to get things moving for inactive affiliates by setting a goal of “10,000 sales to reach within a week”. The way we’ve seen it work is to take a look at your sales numbers distribution among affiliates and set the goal to reach somewhere in the middle for inactive affiliates. Don’t forget to send at least a reminder for the contest to your latent affiliates.
4. Cash bonuses and special affiliate conditions work best – a recent survey we’ve been running inside our affiliate network shows that 45% of affiliates think that the most appealing prizes in a contest is money. And we can extend that even further if we’re talking about inactive affiliates – they need the cash to keep things rolling, further invest in PPC for example, etc. The second most appealing prize would be getting special conditions from the merchant: increased commissions, exclusive products, etc. This applies to the more experienced affiliates.
5. Generate exclusive discount coupons for them to use – coupons are a great way to accelerate sales, especially in the software vertical, where there’s no physical or delivery cost involved. Some latent affiliates can be motivated by sending them time limited discount coupons. Try to also include the affiliate’s website / name in the coupon / coupon description – vanity coupons; affiliates really like those.
6. Offer affiliates the chance to test your products themselves – there are lots of content affiliate websites nowadays which use reviews as their primary way of promoting products to their audiences. Sending them a fully functional version of your product can help accelerate the reviewing process, thus the listing on their websites. This is especially useful when you notice that potentially good affiliates are still inactive.

I’ve also seen some merchants using negative motivation to try and activate affiliates – sending “ultimatum-type” emails, getting the affiliate commission lower than the default one and so on. I don’t recommend that mainly because in 99% of the cases it didn’t work – I think mostly because there are always alternatives to your products / services on the market which they can pick up and get better conditions. Here are more mistakes you should avoid when dealing with affiliates.

Did you try activating your latent affiliates? What else did you do?

In the first part of this series we spoke then about promoting software to your customers on a try-before-you-buy model, converting the customers from your website and sending newsletters to your audience to grow your sales.

Here are 2 more ideas other affiliates have found productive while promoting software products online:

Use discounts to get traffic and increase conversions

Coupons have an important role in the online purchase flow – potential buyers will always try to get a lower price for the product. They don’t even have to search explicitly for coupons – lots of coupon websites show up among the first results when you search for a product.

Hence, if you don’t have a dedicated coupon website and want to boost up your least performing product, you could try offering your visitors exclusive coupon for those products. You can get them from the merchants or you can even generate them yourself and the discount amount will be deducted from your commission – some affiliate networks (including Avangate) offer this possibility.

If you have significant traffic on your website and a good relationship with the merchant, you can even ask for a discount coupon of greater value which you would use to run a deal-of-the-day campaign – e.g. 70% off Product X – today only. A good example of such software niche website is BitsDuJour.

Why is it so hard to track flawlessly third party shopping carts? Mainly, because of the technology. Google Analytics uses cookies to track visitors and those cookies can only be accessed by the domain on which Google Analytics is installed, i.e. your website.

When a visitor goes from your website to a third party cart, the visitor essentially gets to a new domain which can not read the cookies from your website domain. This means that Google sets up a totally new set of cookies and will consider the visitor as referred by your website.

Having all your sales “ referred” by your website clearly doesn’t help you in your marketing efforts. That’s where Avangate Analytics MiniBible V3.0 comes in to help you understand the real analytics behind your online sales.

Aimed at software selling websites, the Avangate Analytics MiniBible V3.0 is a step-by-step guide showing you how to be in control of Google Analytics for high performance analysis of your users.

Why Custom Domains?

Shopping cart Custom Domains mean that the third party cart platform, in our case Avangate, will load from a subdomain of your website, something like store.yourwebsite.com. As subdomains can read the cookies of their mother domains, Google Analytics will be able to track a visitor from your website to the cart and know that is the same one.

Still not convinced you need a custom domain? Here are 3 reasons why (plus the 4th of  making your marketing life much easier):

Reason 1: Accurate sales referrers

Using custom domains for your shopping cart will make the eCommerce tracking feature in Google Analytics work flawlessly. That means that you will get the following report for sales and you can be sure the data will be accurate:

The best part is that when you use a Custom Domain, no hacks need to be in place for the above report to work. It just works out of the box.

Avangate is proud to launch its 2012 line of contests for affiliates that generate sales.

Software is a great niche to promote as an affiliate, no doubt about that: big commissions, instant gratification for customers, easy to test & promote. But here’s another reason you may want to grow your sales through the Avangate Affiliate Network: we’re offering $8,000 worth of prizes for both our existing affiliates and the new affiliates that will join us into promoting software online.

Here’s what you can win:

• VIP Pass to Affiliate Summit East 2012 in New York, US – August 12-14, 2012 plus a cash prize of $1,500
• Cash prize of $1,000
• iPad3 4G 64GB worth of $829
• 5 x iPad3 4G 16 GB worth of $629 each

We left aside the “luck” factor – there will be no raffle for this contests, since affiliate marketing is all about generating sales. However, we arranged so that all affiliates have a chance of winning the prizes, splitting them into several categories.