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.