How high is your shopping cart conversion rate? Is it 30 or less? 40? 60? One day a client asked me: what exactly makes a conversion rate to be smaller or higher? Is it the number of steps, the security logos, the product images, adding/removing cross selling? Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a secret formula to it. However, we have found that the absence of 3 elements can influence in a negative way your shopping cart conversion rate: trust, confidence and security.

On trust, confidence and security

Trust comes from the experience with the shopping cart itself. Most of the users don’t care about technicalities or 3rd parties and so on, but when they find themselves in a cart that doesn’t look like anything on your website, some of them will hesitate to trust it. A feeling that something might be wrong could take over. It’s common sense after all. In all the tests we’ve done, the better the customized cart was (in terms of look and feel), the higher the conversion rate.

Confidence comes from the feeling that everything is straight forward. No elements that can generate doubt. So, before deciding to offer by default Backup CD or Download Insurance in the cart, test it. Sometimes it works, sometimes doesn’t.

The security element is a little bit more sensitive. To accomplish a sense of security, you will most definitely need the mandatory secured elements in the browser. After that, you can start testing security logos, payment methods logos, revealing information on how the payment goes and so on.

Let’s get something clear: the higher the conversion rate for a client, the more sales they have, the more commission we get :). So it would be plain “not very smart of us” to neglect this aspect. That’s why we have a dedicated team working on shopping cart A/B testing and customizations for our  clients.  Once the test results are validated, we include it as an option for everybody – either as a shopping cart feature or widget.

Today we are proud to let the first widget out into the wild

It’s a widget that tries to assure the security element, and we call it simply: Who is Avangate?

Research into the Avangate shopping carts used by software vendors led us to the discovery of a first pattern.  The more clear it was for customers they were buying through a 3rd party, the bigger their trust, reflected into higher chances of finishing a buying process. So, naturally we had to test it. We have come up with the “Who is Avangate?” widget that everyone can now include in their shopping cart. Here are a couple of examples from our tests (yes, it’s multi-language supported):

The goal of this widget is to let people know they are buying from a secure third party, without having to leave the shopping cart. The information is shown only to users interested in learning about Avangate (they click on the link), while the rest of them are not being disturbed from the buying process.

When users click on the Who is Avangate link, the following overlay is displayed:

Results

The best results we obtained through our testings were of 3% increases in conversion rate for the templates using this widget. However, not all the tests came with the same result. In some, the increase was lower than that. It all depends on the audience of each shopping cart. According to the tests we have conducted,  it’s safe to state that the more visitors trust the website they are buying from, the less impact of the above widget. So far, none of the tests we’ve implemented had a negative impact on the shopping cart.

Therefore, I invite you to take the challenge and start an A/B testing campaign with this widget on your shopping cart as well. The worst that can happen is to see a little bit more cash in your account. :)

For deploying this for your shopping cart just contact your account or write to us directly at info@avangate.com.

Just in case you missed it, we are organizing our first Software Selling Conference in China that will take place on December 5th at the Park Plaza Beijing Science Park.

If until now China was just a very big country or a very fast developing market, now it’s getting personal:  I’m going there and join for a couple of days the Avangate Chinese sales team. Well, I should say we are going there, as 3 geeks and one lady are going to play a very serious and challenging role of the host at the event :) We are going to try to make it fun.

What is this event all about?

For a start I am looking forward to meeting some of our clients I’ve been working closely with on web analytics implementations or a/b testing.  Talking about testing, this is going to be the main focus on my presentation: Effective and tested ways to increase conversion rates. I will also try to make things interesting and hold a workshop just after the presentation, analyzing a website from the audience… depends on who will volunteer. Nothing staged there.

For the last couple of months there has been a frenzy here in our web marketing department about A/B testing and Conversion Rates. Why the frenzy? Basically because all elements came into place: we developed a high performance A/B testing module within the eCommerce platform, we finished rolling out Omniture Site Catalyst on the shopping carts and we improved the template editing areas for all the accounts so it’s easier than ever to start testing templates.

We have finished quite some tests so far, some with better results than others, so we are pretty confident on making some bold statements on the 3 factors that impact conversion rate in our experiences.

During a research on shopping cart conversion rates I did the last couple of weeks, I found websites with 0,4% funnel conversion rates and others with completion rates up to 70%. I never expected to find such big discrepancies; no analysis can be made in such conditions so I started to look up  reasons for these discrepancies.

After talking to different software vendors about various issues their potential customers reported and after noticing different trends in multiple analytics data, I found the fugitive criminal guilty for many many abandons in shopping carts: Shopper Trust.

Shopper Trust Wanted. Reward Offered.

How to find it? Easy, or so they say. Check out the following clues.

1. Among Trust’s best friends there’s a guy named “Price”

Showing prices & discounts next to buy buttons

It’s important for your users to pay the “right” price for your products, but more important is to really know how much a product costs. You might say this is obvious (I for sure would have said that), but going from one website to another I found many where it was unclear how much a product costs.

It’s not mandatory to  have the price on the right or on the left of the screen. The important thing is that when the user says to himself “I wonder how much this software costs. I’d like to buy it”, he should get the answer before he gets to finish his sentence.

My 2 cents is to always have the price next to the buy button or link. This way you make sure that every time a user gets in the shopping cart he already knows the price of your product. Also, place it next to the product box, something very similar to the offline world where the user is used to always have the price next to the product he is buying.

To be honest more and more software vendors our company works with don’t track downloads and, what is more exciting, “downloaders”. So, I went to my favorites dev geeks in our team, Alex and Serban, and asked them to help me find out a really-really easy way on how to track downloads and “downloaders”.

This method is specially created for all those website where there is a download button which just starts the download and nothing else. Yes, we do recommend having “Thank You for Downloading” pages which are very easy to track (just place the standard Google Analytics tracking code on the pages), but for those of you who don’t intend to do that I’ve come out with this neat 4 step tutorial on how to do it.

Step 1: Adding some code

Just add the following code between <head> and </head> on all your pages from the website where the download can be initiated.

<script type=”text/javascript”> function setIframe() {var avIframe = document.getElementById(‘av_iframe’).innerHTML = ‘<iframe src =”/software_download.html” style=”border:none;width:1px;height:1px;” marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ frameborder=”0″></iframe>’;} </script>

Most of you are already accustomed with URL address shortening services. You know, those websites which make your URLs short and ugly so you can post them on Twitter, Facebook or just send them to a friend. The thing is you never know where these links end up and how much traffic they drive. For me, working in web analytics, not knowing something like this is itching like hell, so I have decided to find a solution to it.

Tackling the problem

What I did is create a special GreaseMonkey script for Firefox (you need to have GreaseMonkey installed), which offers the possibility of adding Google Analytics variables in order to easily track all the users clicking on the short URL you are just about to generate. Here is how the the new http://is.gd homepage will look like after you install the script.