It looms over ecommerce like a rain cloud over the parade. While online shopping continues to grow in leaps and bounds, all of us lament that it could be many times better if two-thirds of shoppers didn’t abandon their shopping carts before checkout.

To get an idea of the impact of shopping cart abandonment on ecommerce, look at the numbers. If you assume an average abandonment rate of 65%, then all your ecommerce sales come from the 35% of carts that are not abandoned. If you reduced abandonment by 10%, or 6.5% of those who abandoned, your online sales would …

How’s your social media marketing working for you? If yours is like most businesses, it’s fallen a little short of expectations, or a lot short.

If your social marketing has been a let down, consider these three points:

Stop thinking of social as a straight-line sales or lead generation channel. If you’re trying to sell directly on social, you’re missing the point. ‘Social’ means ‘human interaction’ and without that interaction, your social will fail. Stop thinking of social as a popularity contest. If you consider your social to be a failure because you have fewer ‘likes’, ‘followers’ or ‘connections’ than you hoped, then …

Remember the good old days of retailing? You could count on at least two truths. First, advertising would get people into your store and, second, you converted some of that traffic into customers – at least 20% of them, with many sectors enjoying rates of 50% or more.

And there was a bonus truth: ‘cart abandonment’ wasn’t in your vocabulary.

Then along came ecommerce. The two truths remained the same. Online advertising, like SEO and PPC, would drive customers to your website. But the second truth proved shocking. While conversions still occured, online conversion rates were an appalling 2% to …

If in the past year there’s been an ecommerce topic hotter than the disruption caused by mcommerce, well, let us know in the comments below. Other issues may have enjoyed their 15 minutes, but mobile commerce has been somewhere on the podium for the past few years.

E-retail specialists, conversion rate optimizers and web site designers tout the advantages of mobile optimization because shoppers increasingly use their mobile devices to buy. Many (at least those sounding the death knell for desktops) go so far as to say you should optimize your site for mobile first, then convert your mobile site …

There’s a golden rule to conversion optimization that is actually crucial to understand before you begin any optimization effort: What works for one site, may not work for yours (even if they’re in the same vertical). This is key for many reasons because once you understand this rule, reckless copying off competitor sites will stop, and many blogs or books that give all the “conversion” secrets will be appropriately deemed as useless. There is never a one size fits all in conversion. There are best practices, sure, but never assume that there are single answers. Take something as simple as …

For the purposes of this post, we need to get one basic thing straight: what is a landing page?

The literal definition is: a ‘page’ that a web visitor ‘lands’ on when clicking on a link to that page or when arriving at a site after entering a URL in a browser.

So a landing page can be just about any page on your website. A fact confirmed by lots of leading landing page specialists, including Unbounce and Hubspot.

The Term ‘Landing Page’ Sucks

What good is it if it refers to every page on your site? Why not just …

The silver lining of appallingly low online conversion rates is that even small conversion improvements can produce big bottom-line improvements.

And whether you listen to the experts, like Neil Patel, or simply observe the experts, like Google (which performs thousands of tests each year – pardot.com) you’ll know that A/B or split testing is integral to improving conversion rates.

But, believe it or not, if you run any kind of testing program, you are in the minority.

Only 44% of companies use some form of testing to improve their conversion rates.

But Don’t Get Smug if You Split Test 

Perhaps …

Editor note: If you are looking to get more information on the design of call to action buttons, we highly recommend reading our complete guide to effective CTA buttons.

Website owners are often surprised by how giving visitors easy to locate options, and often repeating a “Call to Actions” multiple times on a page, can lead to significant increases in conversions.

The Problem

Our customer, Fulcrum Gallery, a company that specializes in selling of art pieces online, was facing major conversion issues. Our analytics assessment pointed to several areas, which we can focus on: the homepage, product pages, checkout process, …