Forum Moderators: buckworks
In my case, the Javascript date thing was removed a few months ago from the top of our front page. And it just occurred to me that no one's emailed asking what date today is.
What's in YOUR wastebasket?
no one's emailed asking what date today is
haha. That's always bugged me. When I have asked people in the past why they have the date on the site they say that they thought it makes the site look "fresh", like somebody updates it daily or something.
I personally think that most people should take a good look at how big your logo is when looking at how to make space above the fold.
You shouldn't get rid of it, but I find that most people have their logos being much larger than they should be. (Perhaps they are compensating for something?)
- An entire range of products from one of our suppliers - a bunch of no-good crooks!
I personally think that most people should take a good look at how big your logo is when looking at how to make space above the fold.
I totally agree. It's rare when I can't make the statement I'd like to make (or thoughts I'd like to visually convey) in 500 pixels or less at the top.
Yeah, the date thingie was supposed to: 1) be technically kewl (back in '98); and 2) imply freshness.
I'm not technically savvy and changing the date at midnight became burdensome :)
I'm removing the site template from my ordering system.
Instead of having my order form in the body of the standard page, the theory apparently goes that if you go all ultra basic in the ordering system, with only the order form and a link to the home page, it will convert more.
So removing the standard menu, and providing basically no other options but to fill the form out, you provide the user better direction.
Naturally I'll test this to see if it works on my site, but it fits nicely with the less-is-more brainstorming hopefully.
no one's emailed asking what date today is.
That's because you removed your email address too.
hehe.
Products like Zen and OS have so many features that you can cram on the front page, you just end up confusing visitors.
Some times I visit a website and it looks like it was created by a developer to impress developers, not a marketer to impress customers. The date example above illustrates that, just because the code is out there doesn’t mean you have to use it.
Worst thing on a front page IMO, ‘About Us’, no one cares, tell them about you products/services not how you were formed.
Who was the retailing genius who decided years ago that shopping sites should have warnings like:
"Best viewed using Internet Explorer version 4.0 or higher and/or Netscape version 4.0 or higher."
Else, stop shopping and download a new browser for the next hour LOL
Best viewed using Internet Explorer version 4.0 or higher and/or Netscape version 4.0 or higher
As soon as I can find an average customer who could tell me what version browser they are using (heck, that can tell me what a browser is, to be honest) I will eat a hat, or something.
All messages like this serve to do is panic a customer (Do I have a Netscape? Is is 4.0 or higher? Will I break something if I don't?) and a paniced customer is less likly to buy.
The "fold"? WTH? I had a virtual novel below the fold.
What's in YOUR wastebasket? My website!
I envy you smart people soooo much.
Give them ONLY those options. Once they are in your pipeline, keep it simple.
No flashy videos or extra popups... too confusing and they just "x-out" of your site.
D
I removed all navigation links from the first page of my shopping cart except "continue shopping" and "checkout" (and the item names in the cart contents list link back to the product details - but this is only apparent if you mouse over them).
I moved the date to the bottom of the page. I still keep it so I can search google for a date and see what pages they've got in their index from that date. Helps me see what's been updated recently.
"Join our mailing list". If they want it they can get on it in the shopping cart. I'm going to assume that if they don't want to buy from my site they don't want my spam either :)
"Gift Ideas" (our products are more the kind of thing you buy for yourself). I always laugh when I see gift ideas on a site of products that are the last thing you'd ever buy for someone (e.g. "deodorant gift ideas").
"Gift Cards" same as above. Seems like everyone just had to have gift cards last year - I even saw banks offering gift cards. Some things just aren't ever going to be gifts no matter how hard we push.
The other thing I'm trying to do is take the non-essentail items (anything that isn't directly related to the sale) and put them one click away. Seems to me that's the whole point of hyper-text. If the anchor text is right and the person wants it then they'll click. Then I try to give them a digestable amount of information and then another "click for more information" where they can get even more. But on the original pages I try to keep it really tight. The product picture, name and "buy now" (not the real text) are what's big and catching.
I removed "you may also be interested in these products" from the bottom of my shopping cart. I a/b tested it and conversion was higher without them.
Interesting. Not surprising.
Those suggestions bug me especially when 95% of them are utterly inappropriate. Put something in a cart and be greeted with 5 things you have absolutely no interest in. Then, among all the clutter, you can't find the thing you actually want.
I a/b tested it and conversion was higher without them.
When you say conversion was higher, do you mean on that individual product or sales overall?
It may be dangerous to look at it on an individual product level. Some people may use those upsells to find a product they like better. On Amazon, they have the little stat that shows that what people who looked at the item ultimatly bought, which about 50% of the time (or more) wasn't the item they looked at in the first place. Half the time, they end up buying the product that was Amazon's upsell to the original item.
But, to have an effective upsell or cross sell, it does need to be related. If you can't offer related items, then you should just not offer anything
i tend to remove as much of legal stuff as possible and keep it on one page only. not that the products are tricky, but not to distract them from buying.
who wants to read the law-bla-bla will read it as a link is easily visible.
I want to know when that snapshot was done by Google, Yahoo, MSN cache tool
You can put the date and time in a <!-- comment --> and view the source code of the cache to find out when the snapshot was taken. If you don't want your visitors to see the date.
Conversion for this products went up a significant amount because people used to search around in the rest of the shop to look if they could find a similar product and then ended up not buying at all. I have found that the less choices you offer to people the more likely they are to buy.
When you say conversion was higher, do you mean on that individual product or sales overall?
Sales overall. The page being tested was the first page of the cart. I showed related products to 50% of my users and not to the other 50%. The 50% I didn't show the related products to where more likley to complete their order (at a statistically significant level).
I can see in theory how it could increase conversion, but our system did it in an automated way. It was basically "customers who bought this product also bought" (i.e. we would show products that had historically shown up the most frequently in carts that had the same products as the current cart).
I think to get it to work correctly (at least in my domain) you'd need a more complex selection algorithm and I also think you need to explain to users why you're recommending the product. I think one of the biggest failings I see in ecomm is the idea that you can put up products under a heading like "you may also be interested in" and people will buy them.
It's easy enough (through online marketing) to sell a product to someone who is looking to buy it. Because of that, I think we seriously under-estimate how hard it is to sell a product that the person is not looking for. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's a whole other level of difficulty in marketing. If anyone's had a different experience I'd love to hear about it.
We resell products for a variety of vendors with known brand names. We often have people (either other companies or internal people) saying "here's a great new brand, let's sell a bunch of it too". I then go into my speach about the difference between riding on the coattails of existing brand recognition and building a brand name. How it's not just an order of magnitude (e.g. sell 10% of the big boys), how marketing sucess won't be about ROI but about the cost of customer acquisition (over years) and how much it costs to get enough critical mass to have a brand identity. Again, I'm not saying it can't be done, I just think the marketing costs and success metrics are in two different worlds. Maybe it's just because I do really well with the former and not so well with the later.
Again, I'd love to hear other's experience with this, especially if you've found differenlty. i.e. when you're about to get a customer to buy something how do you sell them a little more?
1) Enlarged the logo. But, it actually takes up less room than the older, smaller logo because of better use of spacing with the new design.
The old site was designed with 640x480 monitors in mind, so the older logo looks relatively tiny on newer (more populous) screen sizes.
Also, there was a slight name change. So, instead of the old header which had the "My Company" logo plus "Your Widget Store" as the header, the new logo is just "My Company Widgets".
So, even though the logo is larger, it takes up less space and is more efficient than the previous version.
2) Added today's date. Ask people what day it is. Sometimes they have to think about it or look at a calendar. I work at a B&M--do you know how many times people ask you today's date when writing a check? Adding today's date on a web site does give a degree of freshness, as they can quickly see today's date as well as the date of the article or announcement they are looking that, which gives them an immediate sense of how fresh the site is.
3) Adding a shopping cart. Yes, I'm a bit behind the times...
I never saw the value of adding "Best Viewed with..." buttons to an eCommerce web site. Are you in the business of promoting a browser or selling widgets? My choice was always selling widgets. You're asking someone to pay you money--it's your job to make your site function in their browser, not make them download a specific browser to view your site. If your site doesn't work with my browser, I'm spending my money with someone else's site that does.
This is the most interesting idea i have read for months.
This is the most interesting idea i have read for months.
This idea has been around for awhile, especially in regards to PPC advertising.
Some people are also doing this on the checkout, though there are conflicting reports on how well it does. I suppose it depends on whether you want higher conversions and possible higher abandoned(remove checkout nav) or a warm, fuzzy site (give people the option to wander away and possibly not come back to the end). Test, test, test, I guess.
Yea, but it's still "new" to you when you first learn of it! ;)
