Converting Canadian but not American Customers

Interesting conversion bottle neck.

[lgn]

I was looking at my shopping cart statistics and have found something weird.

Once a user puts something in a shopping cart we get the industry standard 25% proceeding to the checkout regardless of if they are American or Canadian.

However a Canadian customer is 10 times more likely to put an item in the shopping cart than an American.

We are based in Canada however we do geographic profiling on the IP address so American prices come up for the Americans and Canadian prices come up for the Canadians. Our actual Canadian address is buried in one of our faq pages.

Our prices and shipping rates are just as competitive as our American competition.

Im a little bit lost on this. I was thinking of setting up a USA mail forwarding address and use both the Canadian and the American address (it will be a suite not a po box) on the bottom footer of all my pages.

Any ideas or experiences.

[Shane]

Have you checked you spelling to see if you are using the Canadian or American version of the common words?

Have you had an American proof your content for anything that might lead an American to not want to deal with the site (like "We love Cubans!"!?) Well, maybe something more subtle.

..... Shane

[lgn]

Yes we are using the American spelling variations.

Up until yesterday our domain was .ca but we are now using an asp script to do a 301 permenment redirect to our .com domain, just in case anybody ever looks at the url bar in the browser.

[Shane]

Would the shipping information somehow give it away? I know that logically they would not be looking at the shipping information at this point but might they be checking out "How am I going to get thing here?" and go oh, Canadian eh!? Maybe I should order from my country/state to:

(pick one)
1. save jobs
2. save on shipping
3. lessen risk of fraud (not that you ever would)
4. price compare a local supplier

Only food for thought,
Shane

[Jenstar]

.ca name alone may have done it. I wouldn't be surprised that many Americans don't know what country the .ca extension is for. I think switching to a .com domain name is the smart thing to do, and you should notice a change. If they don't know what country .ca is for, customers could be more worried about the possibility of fraud (even though there really is not any reason to be more concerned over a .com name)

You also might want to see if the converting Canadians drop when using a .com name rather than a .ca name. Since you direct people to different priced pages based upon their location, is it possible to send all Canadians to .ca and the rest to the .com?

The reason I mention this is I know many Canadians who will only order from Canadian companies due to often-inflated international shipping fees, as well as having to pay customs fees. This is assuming your products are tangible, of course.

If the entire page served to customers based upon IP is different (as opposed to just inserting the Canadian or US pricing into the page), you might add a "proudly Canadian" or something similar on the page, which makes it clear you are Canadian-based.

Overall, I think you will notice the difference with using .com But do watch to make sure you aren't losing some of your Canadian customers in the process.

[lgn]

Most Canadian sites use .com domains now anyways.

I use geographic profiling on the IP so Canadian prices and a Canadian flag is served to the Canadian customers and US prices and a US flag is served up for American customers.

We use the canada post shipping server to serve shipping prices, however I replace the Canada Post logo with the United States Postal service logo on the shipping screen for US customers.

Shipping to the United states from Canada is now comparable with shipping within the USA. Canada Post has done an excellent job in offering good rates and delivery times to the USA.

[Essex_boy]

This might sound really silly but during the 2nd Gulf war I heard tales about US firms and people not wanting to deal and activly turning away Canadian customers.

Is it down to this?

yeah I know its daft but people are strange.

[lgn]

Yeah. The tourism industry is way down in Canada.

I wish the Americans would understand that the vast majority of Canadian are behind the Americans in making the world a safer place, and that the opinion's of our governement (on issues such as IRAQ) does not reflect the opinions of the people.

I assume that the trash Canada treatment also caries over to web businesses.

[Shane]

Isn't tourism being down more a thing to do with the concern over SARS? I know it hit us in the west even though we contained the two or three cases and had no transmissions. Toronto was devastated though.

..... Shane