Marketplace Earth is in the business of helping our clients dominate their industry on the search engines.  This means our business is driving traffic, but we’re unique in that we share the risk with our clients by only receiving payment for actual sales from our work.

Because of this, Marketplace Earth is obsessed with conversion techniques, especially ones that result in huge revenue increases.  This article is one in our Conversion Tips category aimed at helping our clients increase their revenues (and ours!).

Anyone who has any experience with owning or running an ecommerce store knows that there are a million little variables to running a successful business.  Because of our extensive experience marketing ecommerce stores (and because we’re store owners ourselves), we have identified 3 main “pillars” to successfully converting browsers to buyers:

  1. Selection.  Let me say that again.  “Selection”.  Deep selection.  We use the term “deep” because so many ecommerce stores are a mile wide and an inch deep.   They have limited “depth of category”. The number one thing that customers are looking for is selection.  If they think that others have a better selection, they will go to where the largest selection is.  Limit the number of categories on your site and provide the best selection that you can.  You will make more money this way.
  2. Price.  Price is important to internet shoppers, although not quite as important as selection.  If you have the selection, work on your pricing.  Perform competitive analysis in your industry.  Create loss leaders in your categories with the purpose of selling accessories or companion items.
  3. Trust.  Trust (or a lack of trust) is a major factor in low conversion rates.  How is your site designed?  Does your store look like it’s run out of a basement?  Potential customers would rather buy from a store where they don’t have to wonder if they are going to get their product, or if the order is going to be filled properly, or if their credit card or personal information is going to be distributed around the internet.  There are many things that you can do to increase trust with your potential customers:  A professional designed store, Trust seals from SSL Certificate issuers, privacy policies, aggressive bug testing, easy customer feedback mechanisms, the list goes on.

Good tuning!