10 Great Ecommerce Ideas for November 2013

Practical Ecommerce periodically asks industry insiders to share a great, innovative idea that could help an ecommerce company. Here’s what ten of them had to say for the November 2013 installment of “10 Great Ecommerce Ideas.”

Offer Support via Social Media

“Nielson research discovered that in 2012 one-third of social media users prefer to contact a company via social media than by phone. On your support pages, provide links to your social media profiles. Set up notifications in the social media accounts so you know when someone contacts you. This way you provide timely customer support to those who want it — in the way they want it.”

Joshua Uebergang
Marketing Manager
Online Visions

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Make Research Easy for Prospective Buyers

“Research [for buying decisions] is a massive resource cost to businesses around the world. It is also a primary reason for lost deals. Were you to provide comprehensive information that was easy to find and on which a buying decision can be made, then your close rate would substantially improve. Add to this, an easy purchasing process and, rather than scouring the web, a buyer would see your site as a preferred source.”

Tony Lorge
CEO
Saxum Commerce

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Stay Ahead of the Curve

“It doesn’t take a lot of time for cutting-edge to become old hat. Keep researching to be aware of the latest tools and technology. If you stay still, you will find that your competitors will quickly surpass you.”

Seth Boylan
Owner
Xpert Fulfillment

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Don’t Forget Comparison Shopping Engines

“You’ve got a great ecommerce website. But is it hard to get traffic? Comparison shopping engines (CSEs) — like Google Shopping, Shopzilla, NexTag, Pronto, and Bing — deliver millions of shoppers to product pages every day. You list your items on the CSEs where purchase-ready shoppers will see them and click through to your site to complete the transaction. CSEs typically have a pay-per-click pricing model, and many merchants find it’s worth the cost.”

Liam Supple
Product Marketing
SingleFeed

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Think Like a Shopper

“Keep your site’s design simple and clean, make calls-to-action clear, and focus on the product. Go through the flows of your site: search, browse, and buy a product, or have a friend do it and watch him without helping. Pay attention to areas where anything is confusing, doesn’t work the way it should, or takes too many steps. Then make adjustments.”

Jeff Schlicht
CEO
Auctiva

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Emphasize Product Photography

“Whether you use high-quality renderings or actual product photography, make sure you take the time to present your products in the best possible manner. With the proliferation of product and photo sharing sites like Pinterest, The Fancy, Instagram, and OpenSky, having a beautiful product shot is imperative. Lifestyle shots of your product in use could also significantly increase conversion rates.”

TJ Scimone
Founder
Slice

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Take the ‘E’ out of ‘Ecommerce’

“Retailers need to realize that the lines of commerce have been, as John Donahoe, CEO of eBay, said, ‘obliterated.’ It’s no longer a world of online and offline commerce. It’s just commerce. Retailers are competing on a global scale with everyone, everywhere. You need to give shoppers a compelling reason to buy from you. Find a way to differentiate and make sure you can grab shoppers’ attention and keep them coming back.”

Jake Gasaway
Co-Founder
Stitch Labs

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Address Commonly-asked Questions

“One of the quickest ways to lose shoppers and sales is to make it difficult for them to do business with you. Instead of hiding commonly asked questions on an FAQ page somewhere on your site, display these answers in plain sight. Include your service agreement on every page, and provide frequent updates on orders in the mail.”

Ashley Verrill
CRM Analyst
Software Advice

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Connect with Pinterest Influencers

“Connect with the Pinterest influencers — accounts or boards with large followings — that relate to your product category. Ask for a pin here and there for a product you believe they would like. You’ll get large amounts of traffic, sales, and repins from their large followings. This method is repeatable and much quicker and cheaper than building a large following yourself.”

Mitchell Abdullah
Content Strategist
AddShoppers

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Mimic the Brick-and-mortar Experience

“Regardless of what channel they may be using to shop, online consumers are demanding the quality of the brick-and-mortar experience. They want to zoom in on a product, rotate it, change its colors — in short, they want to interact with the item as though they were physically in the same room with it. Retailers with rich interactive media that can offer this in omnichannel have a significant competitive advantage during the holiday season and can convert at rates of 30 percent higher than those that don’t.”

Rory Dennis
General Manager, North America
Amplience

via Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/61247-10-Great-Ecommerce-Ideas-for-November-2013

The ‘When’ of Ecommerce Marketing

Ecommerce marketers are quickly learning how consumers use different devices and when they use them. Marketers know that different age groups and demographics use them differently. City dwellers have different patterns than suburban or rural dwellers. Each use Facebook for different reasons than Pinterest or Twitter. Fifty-year-old shoppers may be more likely to watch television on a Thursday night than 22-year olds.

I recently reviewed recent mobile trends leading up to this holiday season with a senior product director with Akamai, a leading content delivery network. Its data presents clear patterns for online access on different types of devices on a daily basis. Akamai’s data shows that consumers access the Internet much more on mobile devices from Friday morning through Sunday evening. During the week, consumers mainly use desktop devices, according to Akamai.

Other studies indicate that there is a trend within this same pattern of people heavily using smartphones — rather than desktops — starting in the late afternoon during weekdays. Consumers then switch to tablets sometime later in the evening, frequently while watching television. Those of us in ecommerce know that evenings are frequently a heavy shopping period.

In other words, there are opportunities to optimize your marketing and merchandising activities by device and by day and time.

Marketing Tactics During the Day

• Workday. During the day, when most people are working on their desktops and laptops, consider delivering email promotions and advertising that targets these devices. Use larger images. For advertising, target sites where workers are most likely to see your ads as they work.

Consider remarketing ad networks on news sites and large portals like Yahoo, or other venues your target consumer may be viewing through the day.

• Late afternoon and early evening. During the late afternoon, utilize smartphone friendly emails and landing pages. Consumers are socializing, and preparing or eating dinner. They are likely accessing the Internet on their smartphone. In urban areas, many are commuting, but still engaging in email activities from the workday.

Engage your shoppers and provide them with a path and reason to purchase later in the evening when they sit down with their tablet and focus on things other than their commutes and dinner. Consider scheduling ads for smartphones and tablet devices. Consider, too, SMS marketing during this time. Mobile and SMS ads are proving to be highly effective tactics that lead to purchases.

• Late evening. In the late evening, consider promotions in your online store that will likely to lead to conversions. Make sure your ecommerce site is mobile optimized.

Daily or Weekly Tactics

Consumers have much more time to research products and shop in the evenings and weekends. Most ecommerce merchants I know see a large volume of orders late in the weekend and early on Monday morning. Time your marketing activities accordingly. Friday afternoons and evenings may seem like a poor time to send an email, but in my previous online jewelry business, we experienced very good results from Friday afternoon promotions. Frequently, the sales from our most loyal customers.

When using social media, time your posts when consumers are likely shopping online – in the evening and weekends. Monitor Twitter and Facebook and be responsive to your Fans and followers.

If you use pay-per-click advertising, use time-of-day settings for your ads. Consider, also, geographical targeting.

Seasonal Tactics

Be aware of what your competitors and influencers are up to. Online promotional activities start earlier for seasonal events every year, seemingly. Don’t want to start the party to early, but don’t join in late after your target consumers have already made purchases.

For social media, start your promotional messaging early. This provides an opportunity to receive feedback. You may then have a better idea of when your consumers are ready to start shopping.

Know Your Customers

Know your customers and prospects and how they most likely align to these types of timing questions. Different demographics have different behaviors. Use your own analytics to look for trends in devices and visits to your store. Experiment with different tactics.

via Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/61257-The-When-of-Ecommerce-Marketing

Does Social Media Impact Ecommerce Sales?

via Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/61594-Does-Social-Media-Impact-Ecommerce-Sales

Black Friday online sales hit a record of $1.2 billion, according to published reports. But only a very small percentage of those sales could be attributed to social media, says an IBM report.

In analyzing traffic and sales from nearly 800 retailers, IBM found that only 1 percent of visits to ecommerce sites came from social networks. (To be clear, IBM’s measurements consisted of sales that could be directly attributed to traffic from social media — a “last click” from the social site to an ecommerce site.)

These findings are commensurate with a 2011 survey conducted by Practical Ecommerce, which revealed that 77 percent of responding merchants saw less than 5 percent of sales coming from social media.

Social Media’s Role in Customer Purchase Journey

If social media has little bearing on direct sales, then what purpose does it serve in the overall ecommerce sales continuum?

An article from Google Think Insights points out that social media does, indeed, play a role, albeit a supplementary one.

The article outlines four different segments where marketing channels fit along the customer path to purchase: Awareness, Consideration, Intent, and Decision.

Google divides the customer purchase path into four segments.

It refers to the first three as “Assisting” channels, which “build awareness, consideration, and intent earlier in the customer journey.” In each of the industries considered, including retail, social media functioned as a means to influence purchases rather than be directly responsible for them.

Social media assists in the purchase process.

5 Benefits Gleaned From Social Media

Despite not being a direct sales channel, social media can support ecommerce in the following ways.

• Promote brand awareness. One of the chief benefits social media provides is its ability to help retailers build brand awareness. A survey conducted by online marketing tools vendor Wishpond found that 89 percent of respondents said social media marketing generated more business exposure.

Due to its viral nature and ability to quickly and easily spread a message, brands that commit to regular posting of relevant content on social sites grow their base of fans and followers, and have ongoing interaction with them should, over time, expect to see an uptick in awareness.

• Help overcome customer reluctance to purchase. While customers still express some degree of confidence in advertising messages, that pales in comparison to their reliance on word of mouth, especially when it comes from trusted sources such as family and friends.

According the most recent Nielsen Trust in Advertising report, 84 percent of those surveyed said word of mouth was the most influential factor when deciding on a purchase. Consumer opinions posted online ranked third at 68 percent.

If “trust” is a potent factor in convincing consumers to purchase a product, through its focus on building relationships and fostering interaction, social media can serve as a channel to help consumers overcome their reluctance.

• Improve customer loyalty. In a day when customers are one click away from doing business elsewhere, the importance of increasing customer loyalty and lifetime value cannot be overstated.

By building relationships with new customers and strengthening relationships with existing ones via social networks, it stands to reason both will increase.

• Provide marketing insights. Even retailers who choose not to pro-actively participate in social media can benefit by listening to the groundswell of opinion expressed by consumers on such sites.

If it’s true that people trust recommendations and advice from other people online, then it behooves merchants to make a practice of hearing what these folks have to say about their brand, products and services.

• Support search engine optimization. In her Practical Ecommerce article, “SEO: 5 Reasons Not to Ignore Google+,” search marketing expert Jill Kocher cited a report from search marketing tools vendor Moz, which stated there is a correlation between higher search rankings and Google +1s.

“Though Google denies that +1s are an algorithmic factor in search rankings, some speculate that sharing content on Google+ has a causal relationship with higher Google rankings. As Google’s social network becomes more mainstream, we can expect its social signals to be incorporated into Google’s search algorithms,” said Kocher.

If that is the case, or soon will be, then social media participation merits consideration for SEO purposes alone.

Recommendations for Merchants

• Think Social, Not Shopping. Facebook and other social networks are “social” environments where people gather to share updates about their lives and interact with friends, not as a place to shop.

Merchants can still utilize the channel, but have to think differently about their approach. The experience needs to remain social, interactive and contextual. They should balance promotional posts with those that educate, inform and entertain, and put the needs and interests of customers above their own.

• Start with a Strategy. Merchants need to first determine the reason they want to participate in social media and what they expect the outcomes to be. Unfortunately, strategy is often usurped by tactics, leaving such outcomes uncertain.
• Establish Measurable Objectives. Even with a strategy in place, unless there are hard numbers associated with it in the form of measurable objectives, merchants may not be aware of social media’s impact on their business.

Objectives can fall under several categories including:

• Traffic from social media to their ecommerce site;
• Ratio of traffic from social networks to conversions;
• Number of fans and followers that represent their target market;
• Ratio of social media audience growth to overall sales;
• Ratio of social network engagement (comments, likes, shares) to sales;
• Number of repeat sales from customers connected to their brand via social media;
• Percentage of customer service inquires handled through social media as opposed to a traditional channels.

These represent but a few of the ways to tie social media to sales. For more insight, read the Practical Ecommerce article, “How to Measure Social Media Marketing; 3 Steps.”

Conclusion

Even though social media has not proven to be an direct sales panacea, the ability to build brand awareness, overcome reluctance, increase customer loyalty, provide marketing insights, and improve SEO makes it a worthwhile channel that merchants can use to influence purchase behavior over the long term.

Ecommerce Profitability: The Critical Second Sale

via Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/61531-Ecommerce-Profitability-The-Critical-Second-Sale

Acquiring new customers is so expensive for retailers that it wipes out any profits from a first time sale. New analysis from my firm, SeeWhy, of data from Forrester and U.S. Census Bureau shows that on average 73 percent of online conversions come from first-time customers, but that these first-time conversions are not profitable due to the acquisition costs.

In contrast, the 27 percent of conversions that come from returning customers generate 41 percent of the revenues, and 100 percent of the profits. This mirrors work done years ago by Bain and Company and made famous by Fred Reichheld’s book, The Loyalty Effect.

There are several factors at play here.

• Returning customers spend more than first time customers.
• The cost of acquisition is born solely by the first purchase.
• Factoring in customer service, fulfillment, and returns eats into margins.

New shoppers generate an average 9 percent loss, due to the acquisition costs, compared with repeat shoppers who spend more and generate a 14 percent gross margin, on average.

However, it’s worth noting that even though new customer conversions are not profitable, they still make a contribution to overhead. A proportion of new customers will go on to become profitable returning customers.

Your own data will likely show some variation from industry averages. I’ve assumed a gross margin of 40 percent — some retail sectors are significantly more profitable than this, and others less — and I’ve also not amortized the customer acquisition cost across the expected lifetime purchases of a new customer. However, if this prompts you to do your own analysis, and consider tactics for securing the second sale, then it will have been a fruitful exercise.

So what tactics are important when it comes to getting the first and subsequent second sales?

Getting the First Sale

Getting ecommerce prospects to purchase for the first time is a topic that warrants a novel, but here are three essential tactics to focus on.

• Nurture new prospects: Remarketing, brand messaging, promise of service. Only 0.25 percent of new visitors buy — but if you can get them back to the site, your chances of securing a conversion go up 9 times. The reality of the conversion process is that each visitor is on a journey toward a potential purchase, spanning a sequence of visits to your site and others.

There is a huge temptation to view all visitors on a particular page as equal and to focus solely on conversion optimization of the page. Prospects behave differently from customers and have different needs. It’s also tempting to chase the holy grail of securing a conversion from the first time visitor. But it’s probably going to take a sequence of visits before your prospect is ready to purchase.

Nudging nervous prospects with reassuring brand messages via email helps drive new customers back to your site. This is best done using retargeted advertising and email remarketing, and the key to success here is to be 100 percent consistent with your brand and to promise great service.

• Build trust: Content, authority, social proof. You can build trust in your brand and purchasing experience with great site content. When writing content, step out of your shoes and into those of your prospect by giving objective advice about which products to buy so that you earn a trusted adviser status. Remember that new customers aren’t looking to be sold, they are looking for confirmation that your proposition is a good fit.

Social proof in the form of reviews, testimonials, number of products sold, and authoritative reviews by independent third parties, are all critical for building trust in both your products and the brand and service that go along with it. Don’t forget to feature reviews and testimonials about your service — they may have decided to buy the product, but not yet decided whether to buy it from you.

• Make it easy: Phone numbers, free shipping and returns, payment methods. Studies consistently show that consumers seek free shipping and free returns above all other promotions. Easy returns are of particular concern to first time customers who have no experience with your brand or customer service. If you can’t offer free returns then make the process transparent and as easy as possible. Don’t bury this information on your site or hide your phone number, which only deters nervous prospects from purchasing from you. A prominent phone number goes a long way in reassuring a prospective customer that you will be easy to contact when something goes wrong. Ensure you have thought through your payment strategyas it has a big impact on mobile conversions, in particular.

The purchase process should be easy and intuitive. Read Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think and consider your own site experience while wearing the shoes of a prospective customer.

Getting the Second Sale

Again, I’ve picked three tactics, out of many, to focus on in securing the second sale.

• Deliver exceptional service. We know that customers choose to spend with you again based on both price and previous experience. So it’s critical that first time purchases go off smoothly, and you should use any hiccups as opportunities to deliver exceptional and memorable service. These are the “moments of truth” that cement a relationship with your brand and lead to brand advocacy and future purchases.

Since the first purchase is unlikely to be profitable, you may encounter resistance internally to spending money on outstanding service. This is why understanding where the profit comes from is important. Leading ecommerce companies know this. It’s not a coincidence that Amazon is the largest ecommerce retailer and also has the highest customer satisfaction score.

• Get customers browsing your products on their tablets. Tablets are increasingly being used for recreational shopping, so take a page from the catalog companies’ playbooks and link the pleasure of browsing catalogs with easy online purchases. There are massive online conversion benefits from having customers research your product catalog at leisure on their tablets. If you were planning on building a tablet app soon, you might want to reconsider and look at digital catalogs instead as they are more in line with what customers want when shopping recreationally. Or, focus your efforts in having a stunning tablet shopping experience that recognizes the recreational nature of how many consumers are starting to shop — in the evenings from the couch.

If you’ve not yet investigated digital catalogs, they can be produced cheaply and will drive high-quality traffic to your site that spends more. Put this on your to do list, or read my previous article, “Do Digital Catalogs Drive Conversions?” to learn more.

• Keep email communications relevant. Simply adding new customers into your email program will keep your brand message in front of them but does little to build a relationship. Instead, think about triggered email programs that are more relevant, including leveraging recommendations on the purchase confirmation, soliciting for post-purchase reviews, and real-time triggered emails based on products and categories browsed. All of these techniques increase the probability of securing future purchases.

Conclusion

Examine your own numbers so that you have a clear picture of profitability for new and returning customers. The tactics above offer some opportunities to improve first and second time conversions. Actually making changes that improve the new customer conversion experience can be challenging. But hard data tends to win the day and offer objectivity that allows you to make much better informed decisions.

15 Online Shopping Pet Peeves

via Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/61536-15-Online-Shopping-Pet-Peeves

Being an avid online shopper, I buy from many ecommerce sites. Most of these sites are helpful and effective. But there are some that have annoying features.

Here are my top 15 pet peeves.

1. Slow Site

A site that is slow is a complete turn off. I switch to another site unless I need a specialized product that is only sold there. Slow, for me, is a page that takes more than three seconds to load. Unfortunately, based on a recent Marketing Land report, the average page load time for the top 2,000 U.S. retail sites is 7.25 seconds.

Make the home page and key landing pages faster to load to avoid losing customers.

2. No Support for Guest Checkout

It is important for retailers to identify shoppers and personalize their experiences, to increase the chances of closing a sale. But this should not be done at the cost of losing the customer by not offering guest checkout. Many sites still require shoppers to create accounts or log in using their Facebook accounts.

Allow guest checkout and offer an option to set up an account during the checkout process after the shopper has entered her shipping and billing information.

3. Incorrect Product Recommendations

Most retail sites have some sort of recommendations functionality — though the logic used to display these recommendations varies from site to site. It’s annoying when sites continue to recommend a product even after the product has been purchased. Some other sites base their recommendations on a shopper’s search terms, his browsing history or preferences. These recommendations are not always helpful.

The best way to avoid annoying shoppers with meaningless recommendations is to offer an option to indicate if the recommendation was useful or not. This can be done using a small icon overlaid on top of the recommended product’s image that asks the shopper if the recommendation was helpful.

4. Misleading Product Availability

Ecommerce sites sometimes allow a shopper to add a product to the cart and go through the complete check out process before displaying a warning about the product being “out of stock.”

This is annoying. If a product is not in stock, it should be displayed on the product page or before the product can be added to the cart.

5. Pricing Variations

Some of the omnichannel retailers that I shop with price the same product differently depending on whether it is online or in the physical store. I understand that the cost of carrying the product is different across channels. But these days when consumers use multiple channels, it is a must to offer consistent pricing for products regardless of the channel.

6. Complicated Use of Promotion Codes

Promotions are a popular way to attract shoppers to a site. But it is frustrating if the promotion code can be used only if rules or conditions are met. For instance, I have received promotion codes in emails and when I try them on the site, a message appears saying that this product is already on sale (so I cannot use the promotion code), or the promotion code is not yet active, or promotion code only works on a subset of products.

Promotion codes are helpful only if they are simple to use.

7. Product Page without Pricing

A brick-and-mortar store does not have products on shelves that are not available for sale. So it is frustrating to search for a product on-site and then find that it is not for sale.

If there is a product shown on the site, there has to be a way to purchase it.

8. Lack of Channel Integration

Consumers are becoming omnichannel shoppers. It is annoying when, for example, a product added to a cart using the mobile site does not show up in the desktop site. Or something purchased online cannot be returned in the store.

Omnichannel is here to stay and it is important to have a seamless integration across channels to avoid customer frustration.

9. Too Much Email

Unfortunately there are some sites that do not respect their shopper’s time and send multiple emails for product campaigns, news, product releases, and more. In some cases, the site does not even have an option for a customer to opt out of these emails.

Too much email is an easy way to lose shoppers.

10. Needing to Log In Repeatedly

Though I do not register or change passwords frequently, it is still annoying if a site asks me to log in when I have just registered or changed my password. It should be straightforward to authenticate a user based on the password that was just set up instead of introducing another step.

11. Not Secure

Most shoppers do not pay much attention to security features of a site. But a frequent online shopper will see the difference if your site does not support a strong password policy or allows credit card information to be transmitted without using SSL. A customer account can be easily hacked or a credit card can be misused if the site is not secure.

12. Browser Favoritism

Some retailers do not take the time to test their site on different browsers. They assume that if the site works on one browser, it will work the same way on others. I run into this frequently, as I am a Apple Safari user.

Retailers should review their analytics periodically to identify their visitors’ browsers and ensure that their site works on all of them.

13. Bad Customer Service

A good customer service team resolves issues quickly and ensures that telephone hold times are short. Sites that do not have such teams and policies struggle to retain customers.

This is an easy fix and should be a priority for all retailers.

14. Not Mobile Friendly

Some sites still do not function on mobile devices, or they partially function on such devices. I use my phone and tablet for the bulk of my online research and shopping. I much prefer sites that are mobile friendly.

Retailers have no excuse not to support a mobile friendly site, as there are several easy-to-use tools that can instantly convert a website to a mobile friendly version.

15. Third-party Payment Options Hosted on Another Site

Ecommerce sites often support different ways to pay for a purchase. Some of these payment methods take customers to a third-party site for checkout and leave them there. In some cases, there is no confirmation that the payment went through and the order was successful. The only option is to wait for the site to send an order confirmation email.

Use the PIE Method to Prioritize Ecommerce Tests

via Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/61922-Use-the-PIE-Method-to-Prioritize-Ecommerce-Tests

In “Top 5 Things to Test in Ecommerce Websites,” my previous article, I addressed the testing priorities that merchants should focus on. However, it’s not realistic to tackle all five tests at once, and depending on the unique circumstances around your site and business there can be many more areas to test.

Since every site is different, it’s not always easy to know where to start. After all, even if you have resources to plan and create tests, you may not have enough traffic to split between them.

Worse, without prioritization, you could spend months testing the wrong areas of your website, waiting too long for tests to complete, and missing the much more important areas. The opportunity cost is significant. So making the right choices is crucial.

How to Prioritize your Optimization Efforts?

This is a key part of “optimizing the optimization process” and it’s an important step to avoid wasting significant time and effort. At WiderFunnel, my optimization firm, before we start thinking about designing optimization tests for our clients, we always start with the prioritization process.

We use a simple tool we developed — the PIE Framework — to determine the best places to start. You can use the same approach to determine your own testing priorities for your ecommerce website.

The PIE Framework considers the three factors — “Potential,” “Importance,” and “Ease” — to prioritize which tests should get the most attention.

The PIE Framework helps you decide what is the best page to test.

1. Potential

How much improvement can be made on the pages? Although I’ve yet to find a page without some potential for improvement, you can’t test everywhere at once and you should prioritize your worst performers. This should take into account your web analytics data, customer data, and expert heuristic (or rule-of-thumb) analysis of user scenarios. Essentially, with “Potential” you’re ranking your pages based on how poorly they’re performing.

2. Importance

How valuable is the traffic to the pages? Your most important pages are the ones with the highest volume and the costliest traffic. You may have identified pages that perform terribly, but if they don’t have significant volume of costly traffic, they shouldn’t be testing priorities.

Your web analytics data will be one of your most valuable resources to prioritize the importance of each page. Your data will point to some of the clearly problematic pages — landing pages with high bounce rates, for instance — but some problem areas won’t be so obvious.

For example, if one problem you identify is a high rate of shopping-cart abandonment, your web analytics won’t tell you why people are abandoning their carts. Perhaps your visitors are only going to the shopping cart phase in an attempt to find shipping and returns information that should be shown earlier in the process. If you work on optimizing the cart, where web analytics points to the problem appearing, you won’t be able to fix the issue.

It’s always crucial when testing to step back from the website analytics data — i.e., visits, duration, and bounce rate — and remember to consider the financial aspect of the page, from a cost point of view as well as revenue. The cost of bringing visitors to your landing pages is an important consideration when prioritizing testing opportunities. Given a choice between testing on two pages with similar traffic and conversion problems, one with high-cost traffic sources will provide a better return on investment from your conversion-optimization efforts.

3. Ease

The third and final consideration is the degree of difficulty a test will take to get running on a page, which includes technical implementation as well as organizational or political barriers. How complicated will the test be to implement on the page or template? The less time and resources you need to invest for the same return, the better.

Don’t underestimate the “political” ease of a test opportunity: A page that would be technically easy may have many stakeholders or vested interests that can cause barriers.

In many organizations, you could add an arbitrary image to one of your product detail pages and no one in the organization would notice; but add a call-to-action button on the home page, and the CEO could call to ask if you’ve violated the company’s graphic standards policy.

You can quantify each of your potential opportunities based on these criteria to create your test priority list. We use the PIE Framework table to turn all of the data inputs into an objective number ranking.

You can use a PIE Framework table to determine which page has the most testing potential.

Your Prioritization Is Unique

There are no standard rules for which pages are best to prioritize. Your website lives in a unique target market, including factors like your competition, seasonality, and internal cultural environment.

All of these affect how your site is used and should be optimized. The priority rating you give each of your potential test pages will depend on this unique business environment.

View Data at the Page-template Level

I mentioned earlier that the home page can be a political hot potato in some organizations. The good news is that, despite appearances, your home page may not be the most important page on your site.

Even if your home page is the most popular single entrance page, it often loses its top ranking if you count all the pages that use the same template. Doing this will help to determine where you have opportunities to test site-wide template layouts in addition to individual pages.

You may get only a fraction of your entrance visits to any single one of your product detail pages compared to the home page. But if you add all the visits to all the product detail pages, there are probably many times as many entrances on these page as you get on your home page.

When WiderFunnel performs the PIE analysis for our clients, we’ll typically rate their standard template pages as a single page. This makes sense, since testing every individual product page in a large ecommerce site would mean thousands of tests and testing individual pages rather than the template creates an inconsistent experience for visitors, which can destroy any potential conversion rate gains. Template pages need to have a similar structure, or visitors will get distracted and confused as they move from product to product.

As you apply the PIE Framework to your ecommerce site, you should be able to prioritize your ecommerce tests in a logical way. You’ll remove gut feeling from the decision-making process and focus your team’s efforts on the right place at all times.