I would love to be able to share the actual client data but they would like to remain anonymous. Ayat is leading a full website conversion optimization project for an apparel company. We focused on the checkout process during the first phase of the project. Our goal was to reduce shopping cart abandonment rates. We asked the client do 3 things:

1. Add an “assurance center” to the right navigation of the cart page. The goal is to reduce any FUDDs, customers may have (note: image of Land’s End assurance certain is an example. They are not our client)

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Note from Khalid: This is a guest post from Samantha Gonzales

Business is war. Any serious entrepreneur will tell you so. But businesses with online presences face especially difficult battles because of how easy it is for potential customers to choose competitors’ businesses over their own.

The Internet has made it easier for prospects to find your business, but it’s also made it easier to leave it. Gone are the days when customers had to visit brick-and-mortar establishments and make decisions to do business on-the-spot. Also absent are the business owners, sales people and other representatives that could sway …

Creating a successful e-commerce operation is no easy task. Take the grueling process of creating a successful company offline and add to it a multitude of complexities from online marketing challenges to technical issues and you have an ecommerce operation. When I reflect back on my experience during the last 12 years in creating ecommerce websites and online portals, it is difficult to contribute the success or the failure of an ecommerce operation to a single issue. It is usually a culmination of several issues that can make or break the company. And I’ve learned from seeing ecommerce sites fail …

On most ecommerce websites category pages and their categorization schemes are driven by a business process giving very little attention to the heart of any transaction: the online visitor.

Ultimately, a category page plays an important supporting role in funneling traffic to product pages. Amazon.com, for example, expects the visitor to navigate to the product page to add an item to your cart.

Content is King!

The statement above has become the holy grail of blogging. No matter what we do content still is and will forever be the main catalyst to drive your blog to success. Without an eye catching, attention grabbing content it is hard to persuade readers to “hang” around your blog and compel them to subscribe. We have all seen blogs that have been launched around the same time but one hits the rock bottom whereas the other reaches the heights of success. They both might be expert in the same field, but one rises and the other fails. …

I experienced one of the most valuable lessons in the late 90s when I ran my first business, Quill Publishing. At Quill we had achieved the majority of our business and financial goals and had taken great strides to carve a nice niche for ourselves. Everything seemed to go exactly how I had envisioned and hoped.

Until one day…

Email marketing offers a great opportunity to connect with current customer as well as potential prospects. Compare for example traditional website visitors to subscribers of an opt-in mailing list. Site visitors include those who land on the site by mistake and may not be interested in what you have to offer. An opt-in mailing list on the other hand provides a segment of visitors who are interested in a particular topic who actively chose to subscribe to your mailing list.

Here is the painful truth: Visitors do not care about you or your company. They come to your site with different objectives and goals fueled by unique personalities and many times just browsing or surfing the net. So, what can you do to persuade them to take an action?