Following yesterday's blog posting on why new websites might intially have poor conversion rates , here's my further thoughts on why your shiny new eCommerce site might not be converting as you'd hoped...
Your site isn’t optimised for eCommerce
Yes, that’s right, your new site may have a new funky way of taking visitors through to purchase or whatever, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the optimal way. By looking at your analytics packages you’ll have to hypothesise why users are leaving the process when they should be converting. You’ll then have to change things in a systematic way to see what makes an improvement (and what has a negative effect). This is called A/B (where you swap 2 things to observe the impact) and multivariate testing (where you change a number of things) in the eCommerce industry. You may well find that the right supporting content or imagery provides the necessary reassurance to sufficiently encourage more people to do online business with you.
You’re losing visitors from search engines
Oh, did nobody inform you that having a different site structure and page naming convention could affect your search engine traffic? Well I’m sorry to inform you that all those pages of your old site that were indexed by the popular search engines aren’t going to help you if they don’t exist anymore. You’re going to have to speak with your search engine optimisation (SEO) agency before you move to the new site and make sure you’re doing all you can to minimise the impact of the new site.
Note:
They will suggest things such as ‘301 redirects’ and other such clever stuff. You really should take this advice (especially if you’ve moved to/from using ‘WWW’ at the beginning of your URL structure).
In a nutshell..
Getting a new site is just the beginning. You now have a new task ahead of you, to quickly make the most of what you have had built and to eventually surpass those conversion stats you gave the boss.
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