eCommerce Simplicity
Everything online usability, marketing, and measurement
The China eCommerce boom
Establish growth from abroad
Is your eCommerce business multi-national? If it isn’t, you may want to reconsider your options for utilizing new markets to establish an eCommerce revenue stream. Numerous countries are growing at a stronger rate than the U.S. – which is no surprise considering our early adoption patterns.
Brazil is one area to look at. Forrester reports that by 2016, Brazil eCommerce will grow at a rate of 178% – a healthy compound for sure that bodes well for South America commerce. India is growing fast as well, as this fast growing nation was expected to reach 47% growth in 2011 – although a definitive metric has not been released.
The clear cut winner though is China, as growth from 2010 to 2011 was a whopping 66% as reported by International Data Corp.
66% in one year! In the country that is growing GDP at one of the fastest rates on the globe. As eCommerce and marketing executives ponder how to continue improving overall net income – one can not ignore the positive impact that establishing a Chinese eCommerce presence would bring to an innovative brand.
If the current eCommerce platform that you utilize provides the framework for establishing a “mirror” site within an alternative language, getting a roadmap developed for China makes business sense.
Certain challenges will come of course. Translating your content, nailing payment processing, dealing with any government challenges, and establishing a staff and distribution location are some of the potential roadblocks.
Master Baidu - The Google of China
Also your business will need to be on Baidu, the “Google of China”. With 83% market share of search within the world’s most populated country, with the majority of the country yet to go online, the ability to out-execute Chinese national companies from a marketing perspective exists. The key: Getting the right talent. Look to re-locate U.S. based eCommerce directors – assuming they speak Mandarin and are familiar with Chinese merchandising patterns.
If you are interested in discussing Chinese eCommerce opportunities and how to migrate your store within this new market, contact us – or learn more about our eCommerce consulting.
Google Analytics and their comical take on checkout abandonment
At Trinity, we are HUGE proponents of testing and optimizing the checkout process to maximize sales and minimize friction within an eCommerce transaction.
Recently, Google Analytics (Trinity is a certified partner) published a video that provides a comical take on this aspect of online retail.
Worth 3 minutes of your time for sure. Enjoy!
Rethinking Category Page eCommerce Presentations
As eCommerce platforms have evolved over the last 10 years, one thing has stayed fairly constant – the presentation grid used within category and sub-category pages. As a definition for “grid based”, I am referring to the type of product presentation that shows numerous products for a given category, provided in a table format.
These tables vary by retailer in terms of default numbers. Some retailers may have 4 products across and 6 rows vertically before a user has the opportunity to scroll to the next page. Other retailers might have a much more deeper product showing on the page – for example the retailer may present 10 rows of products.
Interestingly enough, in all of my years of working in this sector, I have never seen available research relating to tests within this site aspect. Many of the leading platform providers offer standard default numbers with their category grids, and their clients are likely not pressing hard enough to alter the status quo within their systems.
Limiting cognitive processing within eCommerce
Site usability often relates to human cognitive processing and how this guides user behavior. This question of “what type of merchandising grid size works best” is in direct correlation to this theory.
What we want to know is are users scrolling down the page to fully absorb the offerings for which the retailer is presenting and at what number do they most likely take “browsing” actions.
At Trinity we have recently conducted site tests that changed the number of products presented within a key site aspect in the transactional funnel. Within this test we found that a substantial increase (20%+) in conversion happened when we reduced the number of offerings that were being presented to the user.
What we did within the test is reduce the cognitive overload within the page and assist the user in digesting information. Ultimately this increased the ratio of users who took the desired action and created sales growth.
So where do you begin if you are looking to drive optimization within this site element? First, conduct some user tests that are highly focused on tasks that are realted to finding products on category and sub-category pages.
Observe how users progress through your products. Are they scrolling below the fold? Are they progressing forward to the next page of products? Understand what percentage of your test executed these two site actions.
Ask verbal questions to the respondents after and during the test. Ask questions that focus on the location of products and how easy it was to identify items during the test scenarios. Often the verbal responses that you receive can uncover unthought “nuggets” that are correlated to cognitive overload.
You see your website daily and these respondents may be seeing it for the first time. This new set of eyes is invaluable in understanding how new visitors interact with site elements.
Now you have some primary research relating to your site which is going to help your decision making. The next step is to evaluate your current abilities within your eCommerce system and if you have the ability to change the default grid attributes (the number of rows and columns of products).
Executing this type of experiment within a split test could be difficult depending on the flexibility of your code base. A more realistic approach would be to try an alternative layout on a week per week basis to assess the difference. When considering the KPI’s that are going to be used to identify success, consider the following:
Number of carts started
Number of product page views
Progression ratio of category to sub-category pages
Average dollar value per visit
These four metrics can provide the intelligence and data to see if an alternative default layout for your category page works better for your customers and makes their site experience easier.
Try testing your default merchandising grids and see how the numbers impact performance within your eCommerce store. To learn more about Trinity Insight and our eCommerce optimization services, please contact us online.
Competitive Intelligence and SEO
For search engine marketers, it’s very easy to get engulfed in our day to day tasks to improve our search rankings. Many factors come into play when performing SEO including: varied on-page optimization practices, editorial outreach, and social media creation and curation. However, the most effective search marketers understand that while it is extremely important to constantly monitor their own actions, they must also carefully monitor the competition to identify “ranking cues” for a given marketplace.
The purpose of this article is to dive into exactly how we can go about getting a “leg-up” on the competition by beating them at their own game. For the purposes of this article, we will assume the role of a prominent eCommerce company which retails electronics. We’ll call this company “Standard Electronics.”
So, as the sole internal SEO guru, you finally sit down at your computer to start the competitive research process. The first thing that you’re going to want to do is identify who your competitors are. You may already have quite a bit of this information from your initial SEO Plan (if you have one), but you’re going to want to do some more research as well.
The first and most obvious way is to search for your keywords on a search engine (preferably Google). Your top competitors are going to be on the first and second SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) for any given keyword and may differ for certain keywords. For example, as Standard Electronics, your competitors may be different for “Televisions” than for “Laptops.” While you may have many more direct and indirect competitors, the competitors on the first two (or three) SERPS are going to be more invested in SEO than competitors lower on the totem.
You will probably want to do this every time you target new keywords or once per quarter (or half) depending on your type of business. Once you’ve identified your competitors, you’re going to leverage web-based tools to use in order to do research and analysis. There are many tools out there, so it is to your advantage to do good research into the specifics.
Here are the types of tools that you’re going to want to use:
A tool for backlink mining
Crucial for identifying link targets. SEOMoz has a great tool called Open Site Explorer. This is limited for free users.
A tool for automating rank checking
These are not an exact science, but they will certainly save you time on checking for multiple keywords.
A tool for keyword research
Google’s tool or wordtracker both work well for naming conventions
A tool for analyzing on-page SEO
Most for a fee, but these tools will help you in crafting metadata
In order to get further insight into the data, you should export each of the tools results into an excel document. How you format the document is up to you, but it is effective to utilize the tab based layout in Excel for segmenting by keyphrase or by competitor. When sorting and analyzing link data, you will want to pay close attention to link anchor text. This will help gain insight into what keywords your competitors are optimizing for and targeting. You will also want to sort by authority and relevance, basically the pagerank and site age factors.
After sorting, you will want to then analyze the data to make some sense of it and get a better picture of your competitor’s link profiles. What types of sites are linking to your competitor? Are they all forums or directories, or are they receiving links from blogs and news sites? Are the sites of high authority and relevance? Maybe your competitor has a lot of links from its distributors, or is highly involved in forums or social media. Do they have a lot of no-follow links or are the links all passing link juice? Do they have a great company blog which they link to pages deep within their site? How about their metadata? Are the title tags and meta-descriptions well written and properly applied? These are some of the many questions that you want to ask yourself when looking over competitor data.
The final step is to act on the findings. Do you see your client obtaining links from writing great original content? If so, then take a similar strategy. You may want to consider starting a company blog. Is there a large community based around your products? You may want to consider starting a support forum where people can interact and you can establish your company as a thought leader and community supporter. Maybe it’s time to determine some new keywords that your competition is targeting. Or maybe it’s time to update all of your on-page SEO. If you see your competitor is doing well with social media, you may strongly want to consider this as a new area of focus to incorporate into your SEO (you’ll probably want to do this anyway).
Competitive research is part science and part art. There are many important steps that you simply cannot ignore, but creativity highly comes into play when interpreting raw data. It is always good to involve other members of your team where possible. Maybe your marketing or sales department has some information on competitors you may have missed in your research. Maybe they have relationships where you can obtain links that are highly valued that your competitor may not have. This is an ongoing process that should be evaluated and kept current. By integrating competitive intelligence into your SEO gameplan, preferably on a quarterly basis, your business will be stronger positioned within the highly competitive organic search market.