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.

Here we are, in the end of 2009, patiently waiting for the New Year party and thinking about 2009, about the good and the bad and the next year :). We are all proud to have been able to enrich our software selling platforms with plenty of features, basically meant to help more vendors reach more clients.

And we were very happy to be rated as top eCommerce provider by our clients, in the survey made by Andy Brice.

We are particularly happy with the progress made with the Avangate shopping cart’s conversion rates. Using advanced analytics applications such as Omniture and extensive A/B testing, we obtained control over every tiny detail of the shopping cart – and this flexibility translated into higher conversion rates.

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.

TrialPay Lead Follow-up integrated into Avangate platform

Everybody is complaining about low software sales since this crisis situation got on the front page. It’s easy to figure out why. The million dollar question now is how a software vendor can increase software sales or at least keep income on the survival level.

I believe the answer implies a bit of creativity on your side and openness to experimenting. The client is more and more difficult to convince into buying your software and that is why I propose to try out the TrialPay incentive, which is the big “GET IT FOR FREE” button.

For those of you who don’t know already, TrialPay gives you the possibility of offering your software product for free to your customer and in return receiving a certain amount of money (usually less than your list price, but more than the minimum you are willing to receive) by being a referrer for another brand inside the TrialPay network. And that of course, is way better than no sales.