Boost Conversions With Painless Shopping

A free article on Web Design

Have you ever visited a site, liked the products, wanted to buy the products, tried to buy the products and got so annoyed by the purchasing process that you gave up and went elsewhere? It happens all the time because many online sellers do not get the basics right.

What are the basics?

- Clear instructions.
- Clear, customer-friendly policies.
- Honest, up front information.
- All the necessary options and supports.

Here are some tips to getting it right to minimize abandoned shopping carts on your site.

- Be sure that you have provided all of the necessary product information so that the buyer can make a choice, i.e. size, color, quantity, optional features.

- Let your customer know immediately if the product is not available. Do not make them wait until they get to the shopping cart or even worse, to the end of the ordering process, to find out that they will have to wait. For example, establish a system that greys out sizes that are not available or indicates a backorder delivery date. Or, create system that pops up a message about your re-stocking date.

- Do not make your buyer wait until the last page to determine shipping costs, especially if they might be considered high. Your site will feel like a bait and switch operation. Even if your shopping carts sequence gets to shipping towards the end, give customers an idea of how shipping works on the first order page or give them the option of clicking into a shipping description.

- Create a pathway at the top of your shopping pages that tells the buyer where they are and allows them to go back and forth in the process without losing their information. If the buyer takes a wrong turn in the process, build in a re-direction with explanation.

- Allow the customer to click back to the product page. So they can compare products and be sure they have what they want.

- Make it easy to find your policies on returns, guarantees of product quality and so on. Try to find the balance between the legal language you feel you need and the plain language that your customer will appreciate.

- Provide a currency converter so that your customer does not need to guess at what it is really going to cost.

- Provide several payment methods. Credit cards are not universally common so be sure your customers can use other methods such as PayPal, electronic bank transfer and so on.

- Give your buyer the option of talking to someone in person, even if it is only for limited hours each day. Some people just can not figure things out or they have questions that you have not anticipated. Plus, supplying a phone number gives your site a credibility that many sites lack.

Buyers generally dislike sites where there is no option for personal contact or where it is possible, but you need to go through many, many screens to find a phone number buried underneath all of the directions to email or read the FAQs.

Finally, be a student of shopping. You are probably shopping online yourself. Evaluate everyones shopping process. Think about your own responses and apply the lessons to your site.

Article Source: http://www.cyberlines.net/directory

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