Okay, so maybe you’ve never actually piled a cart full of groceries and then had a change of heart, leaving it somewhere between the produce aisle and the deli. But, more than likely, you’ve taken an item from its place on the shelf, examined it and handled it and maybe even placed it inside the cart, only to think better of it and return the item to its original home. We’ve all done it, more than once, and not just in the grocery store.

In the land of eCommerce, it’s called the “abandoned shopping cart,” and it’s responsible for the demise of countless would-be purchases every day. In fact, according to a report issued by the Boston Consulting Group, approximately 65% of online shoppers jump ship at some point between adding items to their virtual cart and clicking the “Buy Now” button that is the holy grail for eCommerce businesses. MarketingSherpa conducted another study of sample websites that determined an average abandonment rate of 59.8%.

The abandoned shopping cart signifies lots of things, none of them pretty or profitable. Lost sales. Missed opportunities. A failure to connect or resonate with a potential consumer. And, perhaps most frustrating of all, you’re left with no recourse but accepting the desertion. Unlike a physical store, you can’t follow the guy to the door, asking what changed his mind and waving coupons in his face. You don’t even have the luxury of reading body language or facial expressions. But blindness doesn’t have to translate to idleness. Based on feedback from absconding shoppers, there are some things you can do to help lower the rates of abandoned carts.

Why it’s Happening… and What You Can Do

The labyrinth of the checkout. Many sites make the mistake of subjecting their shoppers to lengthy checkout processes with multiple steps and screens, way too many input fields, and confusing intermediary steps. As any good salesperson knows, the most important tactic in closing a deal is to make it the process as easy as possible for the customer. Try to capture all necessary information on one or two screens, and minimize the amount of clicking and data entry required of the customer. The more pages and fields during checkout, the more opportunities the customer will have to re-think their purchase and go off on their merry way.

Concern about security. In today’s age of identity theft and credit-card fraud, customers are more wary than ever of their personal and financial information being compromised. Be sure to pepper your shopping cart and checkout screens with links to your privacy and security policies, as well as any icons that represent your affiliations with reputable business verification companies, such as the Better Business Bureau. Be sure to use a secure https protocol with an SSL security padlock, as more and more customers are checking for this before entering their credit card information.

Sticker shock. Another common reason shoppers leave their carts in the dust is a grand total that’s higher than they expected. Once their balance is inflated by shipping fees and, in some cases, sales tax, the sum can easily scare off customers who were already on the fence about the purchase. To prevent sending shoppers into panic mode, provide shipping quotes earlier in the process, perhaps on the product pages. You might also consider placing banners on the cart that emphasize money-back guarantees, easy return processes, and other factors that may help mitigate higher price tags.

No-man’s land. Many customers bail at the cart because they feel like they’re suddenly alone, navigating into a strange and unfamiliar territory without the benefit of a guide. Set these nervous shoppers at ease by providing quick links to Customer Service phone numbers, Live Chat links, and FAQs.

Backordered products. Getting all the way to the shopping cart only to be informed that the item they were about to buy won’t be available for another two months can compel a would-be customer to shut their wallet pretty darn quick. To prevent abandonment due to (lack of) product availability, be upfront with the customer early on in the shopping process. If the blue shirt won’t be arriving from the manufacturer until March, tell them on the product page, so they can order the in-stock red or yellow one instead.

Ugly shopping carts. This may not seem like a critical factor, but looks do matter. If a customer navigates his way through a beautifully designed Home page, category page, and product page only to stumble upon a poorly designed shopping cart, they instantly lose some confidence in the online vendor. Rather than going with a free or very cheap cart that doesn’t allow much in the way of customizations or branding, invest in one that blends seamlessly with the rest of your site and provides the customers with options, not limitations.

Let’s face it—even if you address all of these potential causes of abandonment, there will inevitably be some percentage of shoppers that jump ship before closing the deal. But you don’t have to just let these runaways slip into oblivion. Some sites have implemented pop-ups that warn a user they’re about to leave their cart, incorporating some sort of discount or incentive to complete the sale. These pop-ups can even include a couple of quick questions about why they’re departing, to help you pinpoint common threads. Follow-up emails to cart abandoners are another popular tactic—the “hey, we’ve got your stuff” approach can help to revive the customers’ initial interest in the products, especially when paired with product images and a discount offer.

With Andy MacDowell playing the role of Googlebot…

Have you ever seen the movie Mulitplicity? Do you also happen to run/manage an eCommerce website? If so, then you should know exactly what I’m referring to without even reading any further. This isn’t a signal to hit your back button now, but instead an indication that what I’m about to share with you will shed light on this important subject and how it affects all online retailers - and really any website with pagination for that matter.

Most online retailers use pagination in their product catalogs, and many don’t even understand the underlying effects of this feature. This topic is something that I’ve been performing quite a bit of research on over the past year and is near and dear to my heart. It’s a concern that not only spans SEO, but also Usability, so it is important to define a balance between those needs. Read more…

Time and time again, we encounter eCommerce retailers that think “they know their users”. And sure, most of them have a good idea of who they are. But knowing who they are is a different story than knowing how they act, what they like, and what they don’t like about your website. In fact, these behaviors and attitudes have a tremendous impact on the effectiveness of your eCommerce website converting visitors into buyers. The good news is, that you can gain insight into your users by performing user testing. An often-overlooked tool by eCommerce merchants, this tactic has typically been reserved for government organizations that are mandated to ensure their websites are accessible to everyone, and to large scale corporations with the wallet to fund user testing.

My experiences working with the Centers for the Disease Control and Prevention demonstrated the value generated by performing usability testing - as there was a heavy emphasis on the usability of any page or site developed. Now, some of you may be asking yourself “I’m a small company, I can’t afford to hire a firm to bring users into a room for usability testing and feedback”. Others may be thinking, “why should I care about usability testing” or “I have more important things to worry about”. However, what you should be asking yourself is “what is the opportunity cost of not performing usability testing?” Read more…

In today’s highly competitive eCommerce marketplace, the savvy online shopper rarely makes a purchase without doing a little homework first. To a consumer, there’s nothing more exasperating than spending $200 for an area rug and then stumbling across the same product for $50 less at another website. Of course, no-one has the time to visit hundreds of sites hunting down the lowest available price, which is why shopping comparison engines have become so widely popular. According to industry estimates, 68% of online purchases begin at a shopping comparison site or search engine, with only 30% of conversions originating from a direct visit to an eCommerce store.

The premise is simple—online merchants set up a feed of hand-picked products to the shopping comparison sites, which then accumulate all of the product information into a database and create a search index. When the consumer visits the shopping comparison site and does a search for, say, “golf clubs,” a search is performed against the database and returns a listing of all relevant matches. The consumer can then quickly compare their attributes. Different sites may fluctuate somewhat in their presentation and layout, but most will display such product information as price, product name, seller’s name, product image, and key selling points. Nearly all will provide the consumer with various sorting options, so they can shop by price, by brand, by rating, or by other parameters. A link is also provided, so the shopper can quickly hop to an online store to obtain more information or to purchase the featured item. Read more…

What do you get when you throw a bunch of people in a room together with nothing more than their thoughts and a few hours to kill? One thing you can count on—once they’ve gotten past polite small talk—is animated, revealing conversation about whatever happens to be on their minds. As a general rule, people love sharing their opinions and gauging the reactions of others.

The same concept holds true in the world of cyberspace. With the proliferation of social networking sites, people need not be in the same room—heck, not even in the same country—to share their viewpoints. Most everyone is scrambling to make their mark in the online medium, and interactive forums and blog postings make it virtually effortless to get their thoughts and experiences on the record.

So how does all of this impact eCommerce? More than you might expect. Social networking has become a largely untapped resource for the marketing of online products and services. Remember word of mouth, perhaps the oldest and most effective method of advertising? It’s still alive and kicking, with a twist—instead of Aunt Sue telling her neighbor about the incredible deal on that sweater she got at the department store, she’s blogging to thousands about the steal she found on Amazon’s site. Read more…

My husband is not an impulse shopper. His purchases are weighed out carefully and deliberately, usually weeks or even months before he dusts off his rarely-used credit card. So when he went to Macy’s last month to pick out a new tie for an upcoming wedding, I was more surprised than anyone when he came home with not just the tie, but also a $500 Ralph Lauren suit. When explaining the spontaneous spending, he didn’t point out the suit’s impeccable fit or fine wool fabric. Instead, he said the sales guy was the same one who’d helped him pick out my birthday present last month, announcing “He remembered my name!”

The power of recognition has been influencing the direction of shopping dollars for hundreds of years, so it’s no surprise it’s one of the top initiatives of today’s successful eCommerce sites. Just as you’re more likely to get your lunch from the hot-dog vendor who asks after your family and remembers how much mustard you like, the website that goes above and beyond to personalize your browsing experience enjoys longer and more profitable shopping sessions. E-tailers who have jumped on the “welcome wagon” have reported such benefits as increase in average order size, lower cart abandonment rates, positive feedback from satisfied customers, and greater levels of customer retention over time. Read more…

For those of you who might not be aware of Mahalo - it is a “human edited” search engine. It’s goal is to provide spam-free search engine results that are deemed most valuable to the searchers as determined by a group of human editors. I’m not going to go into the whole background of Mahalo and the controversy stirred up by it’s founder Jason Calacanis - you can find plenty of that on almost every major SEO blog out there. There’s some pluses and minuses to the search engine, but in the end, they make a valiant stride at creating a spam-free search engine. So I agree with the goal, but the practicality of having a human edited search engine when Google estimates that 25% of searches have never been seen before, make it very hard, and in my opinion, unscalable, to capture a large market. However, they forge ahead, and have turned some heads along the way. But I’m not here to debate their methodology, the controversy, or the like - in my opinion a spam free search is a great goal, but the best way to get there is debatable.

Today, I did some quick searches in Mohalo to see just the quality of results that come up for certain phrases - and I don’t know if it was just me but it seemed awfully slow running a simple search - some queries took more than 10 seconds to load! But, moving forward, it became quickly apparent that Mahalo had some favorite sites that consistently made it’s top list for every query, amazon.com, eBay.com, wikipedia.com, etc. In doing some beer specific searches, I came across this section of their Guinness page for Guinness Merchandise: Read more…

The hype surrounding Magento Commerce’s official release has lingered for about a year. For those of you who haven’t been privy to the news - Magento Commerce is an open source eCommerce shopping cart platform brought to you by a company called Verian. The shopping cart is quite feature rich out of the box, and is positioned to be the de-facto standard for open source eCommerce platforms. As it stands, this product is expected to oust Open Source frontrunner OSCommerce along with a handful of other open source, PHP based solutions. I won’t get into much detail about what Magento Commerce is and its history, there’s plenty of coverage the company has had over the past year in anticipation for it’s release - which by the way, was March 31st.

What I do want to discuss in this post is my first take at Magento Commerce. Now, I’ll preface this by stating that I’ve only gone so far as installing the software (well, actually the Magento Commerce host Crucial installed it all for me), playing around with it, setting up some products, and toying with its features. My goal is to setup a fully functional production eCommerce site in the near future. But, before we go jumping onto the Magento Commerce craze, let’s tackle a few things we like about it, and a few things we don’t. I’m sure there will be more added to both sides of the table (hopefully in favor of the software) as we get more involved with the application, but for now, here’s our first takes. Read more…

It may be shocking to some, but even in today’s high-tech Internet age, there’s a sizable chunk of consumers who can only be described as “Web-phobic.” Instead of hopping online to quickly and efficiently locate a product, they’d rather drift from store to store in hopes of stumbling upon it in person. When I asked one such shopper their rationale for avoiding online shopping, she admitted she was afraid she’d “get lost.” Ironic, given that she’d just spent hours driving in circles looking for an obscure piece of china she could have found in minutes by searching Google.

There are a variety of tools you can implement on your eCommerce site to help prevent the feeling of disorientation my friend described. Enter the breadcrumb. The online equivalent of the “You Are Here” designation on a shopping mall map, breadcrumbs provide a subtle identification factor to show shoppers where they are currently and where they’ve been. Although not nearly as important or widely used as the global navigation or the search box, breadcrumbs have nonetheless become an industry standard in ensuring the comfort level of online shoppers. Read more…

Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Aaron Wall, of SEOBook.com, regarding the SEO issues specific to eCommerce websites. I prepared a few questions I thought would be interesting to hear his responses to:

(1) How does catalog pagination affect SEO for particular keyphrases when each page targets the same? (take 10 pages of pepsi t-shirts for example, all with different URLs for each page)

Aaron: Pagination ends up splitting PageRank across a number of pages. If you rank #5 with pagination pulling down your PageRank maybe you would rank #2 without pagination, for example.

My two cents: This is an issue that I’ve been emphasizing lately in regards to eCommerce pagination and Aaron backs up my conclusion, that pagination is a negative factor for eCommerce sites in regards to SEO. Borrowing a diagram from SEOmoz explains why dividing up the link value across multiple pages divides up the link value between all of the pages instead of focusing it on one page:

Basically what this means, is that if you had one page of Pepsi t-shirts, it would have more concentration of link value than it being spread out over 10 pages of Pepsi t-shirts.

(2) What is the recommended method of targeting keyphrases in a paginated environment? (eg. Only index page 1, use AJAX to paginate so only one URL, etc.)

Aaron: If possible (and it makes business sense) put all the content on one page. For product listing sites like an eBay or Amazon.com, I think the key is to use a sorting mechanism that places a lot of weight on your most important and best selling items. Another way around some of the pagination issues is to try to break things into as many logical precise categories as possible. Rather than kitchen maybe you break that into categories like utensils, and then break that into spoons, knives, and whatever else.

If you have multiple pages of similar content and you can get most of the best selling items on the first page then I would recommend just getting the first page indexed, and use javascript links or something like that to prevent getting the deeper pages indexed. The one exception to this rule is that you need to find a way to get most of your product level pages indexed…so perhaps you have one page of the top sellers, one page of new items, and one page that offers a comprehensive listings of items in the category. The first two (top sellers and new items) help focus PageRank on your most important items. The third (comprehensive listing) makes sure that some PageRank makes it down to your deepest articles.

My two cents: AJAX pagination has some pluses and minuses. The typical implementation that we’ve seen may fit the bill from an SEO perspective (the URL is always the same thus one page is being indexed), but they have some usability issues in that it doesn’t retain any settings for what page your currently on, or what you currently have filtered or your # of products per page. Meaning, when a user is looking at a page of products, they click on one of those products, when they go back to the main products listing, the page doesn’t know where they were originally. So you’re back at page 1 with your original settings. Aside from that, you also have to be concerned to Aaron’s point of making sure the products in the deeper pages get indexed at all, because search engines don’t crawl AJAX-ified pages (aside from the first set of content loaded - ie. page 1).

I think what would be ideal, and something I’m currently working on, is a method of loading all of the “pages” of results into divs on one physical page. Pagination would then be a matter of showing/hiding divs. The issues that are present here are that you need to control when all of the images load (only load them once the div is visible) otherwise you might have hundreds of images trying to load on page load thus slowing down page load times. Another issue concerns filtering, without some kind of server-side code, it would be very difficult to filter the resultset. All issues that I will be working through in my ideal product grid project.

(3) How important are product descriptions from an SEO standpoint? (realizing that they have value regardless from a conversion standpoint)

Aaron: If you do not have much unique text on the page (ie: no descriptions and/or using the same description as everyone else) then there is almost nothing unique on your page that will make search engines want to list that page over other competing pages. But as soon as you write unique product reviews now you have a keyword rich block of text that is unique and can start pulling in longtail traffic.

My two cents: Product descriptions provide a lot of value, and from an SEO perspective specifically they do differentiate your product pages (say you sell 50 different pepsi t-shirts) as well as your competitors. Don’t use the standard manufacturer copy!

(4) Tips to generate deep links to individual product pages

Aaron: In the second question I offered a couple tips there, in that I was suggesting you link to it yourself in proportion to its value. To encourage links from other sources you could open up an affiliate program. And if you can get the manufacturers to link to their sections on your site that helps a bunch too. I also think that consumer reviews can be segregated into hate it and like it pages…and people may be willing to link to others promoting things they like or lambasting products they do not like.

Another cool thing to do is to create tools for shopping. Amazon.com’s diamond shopper page is linkworthy because it is cool. Almost any shopping activity can be supported by how to guides or tools. We offer SEO tools on our site, and if we were to review other tools and software, perhaps we could even put lite versions or video reviews on our site to make our product review pages better than other sites. On our tools pages we often offer lengthy how to documents to help the page answer common user questions AND make it more relevant for a wide net of keywords.

My two cents: Today’s blogosphere make the job of generating product specific links a little easier. Some ideas: request a product review from a blog, join topical communities, engage with industry sites regarding specific products and niches. Let’s take our Pepsi t-shirt example again, find bloggers who focus on the food and beverage industry, or groups that love Pepsi - or even those that hate it (I’m in Atlanta - the land of Coke, so nobody likes Pepsi down here), find t-shirt review websites and blogs. Since you may sell many different brands of t-shirts, you can apply this logic to all of your brands that might span various product lines and industries. It takes time, but if done tactfully, you can generate deep product specific links to your site. I’ll have a full post about this topic in the near future as it can be quite involved.

(5) How to create “link value” to eCommerce pages besides a blog (basically, how to improve the linkability of a product page)

Aaron: Unique house editorial reviews help a lot here. Comparisons between products help. Being first to market listing the products is useful too. Rankings become somewhat self reinforcing, so if you list a product early and feature it on a “what’s new” page you may rank right out of the gate…and if a few people link at your listing then you might be able to keep that ranking as that item rotates out of your “what’s new” section. That will not happen for all products of course, but worth setting it up and hoping for the best.

I think you can learn a lot from looking at some of the large sites…like Amazon.com does so many things right.

From a smaller site perspective, debunking some of the worst products on the market (and getting links from others who hate them too)… that can float your whole site’s link trust scores. John T. Reed did a great job of that.

My two cents: It’s a lot easier to have link-worthiness in your product pages if they’re trendy, cool, fun, or exciting. The difficulty lies in the products that do not fit that category. How to add link value to those pages that maybe sell paper? This is where creativity plays in big time, create a fun video, game, or tool of some sort to add value to the page. The fact of the matter people aren’t going to get exited about (and link to) something that’s dull and boring, so one angle is to spice it up a bit with a creative spin.

(6) Importance of consistency between title and h1 tags on page

Aaron: I think they should be conceptually related, but ideally they do not exactly overlap. In our online training course ( http://training.seobook.com/) we offer a guide and excel spreadsheet showing how to make them feed off each other. Essentially what is best is that you use alternate modifiers, tenses, and even acronyms. If the page title has SEO in it then maybe the page title has search engine optimization in it. Subtle differences like plural vs singular and hyphen or no hyphen can make a difference in rankings as well.

Mixing it up generally means you are less likely to get filtered out for over-optimization AND your page is relevant for a wider array of relevant search queries.

My two cents: In addition to Aaron’s comments, using relevant and related copy between your title and h1 tags keep them different, but semantically similar and relevant as well as boosting your long tail capabilities.

(7) I’m sure in your experience you’ve come across any number of issues that might pertain particularly to eCommerce sites, so feel free to inject your own insight.

Aaron: I actually wrote like a 40 page report on some sites in that space, so I could write for a long time. But I think you covered most of the most common and biggest errors, other than perhaps URL structure, canonicalization issues, internal redirects on tracking, session issues, etc. but most of that stuff can get a bit complex and is quite site specific.

I’d like to thank Aaron for taking the time to contributing to our blog, for those of you not familiar with Aaron or SEOBook.com I encourage you to check out his site, the tools, the training, and of course, the book.