Tag: conversion rate

How much should an ecommerce site cost?

This is a question I’ve been asked recently, and the easy answer is anything from £200 up to £2,000,000, with most sites I imagine costing between £2,000 and £20,000.

A key factor is the scale of the site (do you have 10 products or 10,000 products) and obviously there is a wide spectrum of ecommerce solutions available, from an off-the-shelf standard template to bespoke solutions, through on-demand and open-source platforms. The total cost comprises upfront costs and monthly/ annual costs, and revenue-sharing can be an option.

This is an interesting estimation of the work (in person days) involved in developing an ecommerce site, as taught to ecommerce students at Kingston University, which amounts to 5 months work for one person full time, or more realistically a small agency working on a handful of projects.

Project planning including creative, technical, integration, budgeting, testing and promotion 9
Wireframing/diagramming of processes, logic and functionality 5
Agreement of functionality, specifications and plan within budget 2
Graphical design (within brand guidelines) 10
Conversion of design into templates and style sheets 5
Product modelling and database design 2
Design of decision support tools to help shoppers select, choose and experience 2
Design of customer service processes and systems 5
Implementation within shopping software, CMS or from scratch 15
Integration with stock and ordering systems 10
Integration with payment partner 2
Collection and manipulation of content 10
Testing for browsers, platforms and DDA compliance 10
Delivery and training (editorial and CMS) 2
TOTAL person days 92

I have been quoted £20,000 by agencies for a design and ecommerce solution, and then opted to do the design in-house and achieved the same result for £2,000 within 6 weeks with a hosted ecommerce solution. I also see plenty of projects posted on freelance websites like peopleperhour.com where ecommerce sites are built for less than £200.

There’s an interesting discussion here amongst ecommerce developers; Should an ecommerce site cost £1,000, £10,000 or £50,000?

Whether you’re spending £200 or £2 million the same considerations apply:

  • Be clear about what you want the site to achieve; think about what the customer wants and deliver a clear message
  • Scalability; plan for today and tomorrow
  • It’s easy to focus too much on the physical design at the expense of functionality; get the right ecommerce platform with the right functionality and you can make it look however you like
  • Think about issues like merchandising, promotions and stock availability sooner rather than later
  • Research thoroughly, and build usability into the design
No Comments by on March 31, 2010
filed in Ecommerce design, Ecommerce strategy
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Online logs

Hearing it might snow again, I thought I would try and buy some firewood online…

It’s interesting to compare the delivery strategies of these two sites, which both appear top of the organic listings; neither website gets it right in my opinion.

The first site, Onlinelogs.co.uk has good call to action (big buttons to “buy logs” and “buy kindling”). You are then given a quite sophisticated-looking pop up map of the UK which 5 or 6 coloured zones, although we’re not told the key to the zones. You then select your postcode area either by clicking on the map or from a drop-down menu. Only then can you see the products available, except that there are no prices – to see the price you need to enter a quantity of bags and click to get the quote, which includes delivery. Which is just as well as the header of the site promises Free Delivery in big red letters. It all seems needlessly complex, and not very customer friendly.

The second site shows prices and does actually offer free delivery (on orders over £50 which is most products). Although – ironically – it doesn’t inform the customer that delivery is free; not on the product pages, not in the shopping cart and not even on the delivery tab on the top menu.

Stating clear delivery costs throughout the site is one of the most effective ways to improve conversion rate on an ecommerce site; offering free delivery is even better. This is true of any ecommerce site, even more so when your product is bulky and heavy like firewood.

With a small amount of consumer testing and/or using Google analytics both of the these websites could improve conversion considerably.

1 Comment by on March 30, 2010
filed in Ecommerce design, Ecommerce strategy
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Is adwords ever “not cost effective”?

I was talking to the owner of Sunspel, a website selling luxury menswear both online and offline, who came out with the statement “Adwords is not cost effective for us” (not for product-related keywords, only for brand-related keywords).

My main experience with Adwords was for Viners.co.uk where my adwords campaigns generated 50% of sales at a cost per conversion of around 10% of the average order value – so very cost effective, in fact the most cost effective marketing channel in that particular case.

Of course an adwords campaign will not be particularly cost effective if the keywords chosen are not relevant, if ads are poorly written, and landing pages are poor. But the point made by Sunspel was that there were too many competitors bidding on keywords like “T Shirt” or “mens clothes”, and with so much competition it’s difficult to push a luxury message vs. a price-based message.

To some extent I had it easy running campaigns for a site selling mostly cutlery, where the majority of traffic came for a handful of “cutlery”-related keywords. And there are fewer Adwords competitors in the world of cutlery than T shirts. But to a much bigger extent Adwords was cost effective due to constant optimization; stopping keywords and ads which were not cost effective, refining keywords and ads which were more cost effective; constantly looking for trends and opportunities in the long tail of search terms.

No Comments by on March 15, 2010
filed in Ecommerce strategy, SEO
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Building usability into ecommerce design

With a specialist website, selling one product or category of products, thinking early on about the best way to present products can be beneficial. Not only will you improve usability and conversion rate from the start but it’s an opportunity to make the site stand out from competitors, both the not-as-well-designed specialist shops and the more general retailers using the same layouts to sell a huge variety of different products.

Two contrasting examples I’ve worked on are cutlery and umbrellas.

In the first example, Viners cutlery, I was responsible for the design. Through looking at other websites selling cutlery (good and bad), and understanding patterns of sales through the company’s other sales channels, I made sure each cutlery range was presented with a means of ordering cutlery sets and loose pieces all on the same page (without having to go back and forward to the shopping basket).

Hence this page…

product layouts - Viners

… is the same in terms the product hierarchy as this page…

product layouts - Viners 2

The difference being, a customer is much more likely to purchase more than one product from a range of cutlery (e.g. some knives and some forks, or a cutlery set and some extra teaspoons). With cookware, it’s less likely a customer would want to purchase more than one saucepan. And there’s more detailed information on a saucepan on the product detail page a customer would want to see before making the purchasing decision.

In my second example, Fulton Umbrellas, my involvement was much further down the line, when the design was almost complete. The first design I saw showed around 10 umbrellas on the womens page, mostly black and with technical descriptions like Superslim-1 and Open and Close – 3. This was the way the company presented the range to trade customers, but obviously not the optimal way on B2C online shop; because consumers don’t know the difference between a Superslim and an Open and Close, and because a consumer looking at that page wouldn’t know unless they clicked on it that the black umbrella pictured came in 10 different designs.

Unfortunately the ecommerce platform chosen was limited in the filter and sort views available; the ideal solution would have been to allow the customer to view by type, by colour, by pattern, by price etc. however, the least-bad option for launch was to show all the products.

product layouts - Fulton

No Comments by on February 22, 2010
filed in Ecommerce design
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What to believe?

“Whizzy imagery out-performs ratings and reviews in Adobe survey”

A survey by Adobe concluded the following are effective in increasing conversion rate.

  • Product tours or multi-media viewing which combines guided spin, zoom imagery, videos or animations with copy (36%
  • Visual filtering and advanced search on product features including size, color, and price (33%)
  • User comments and reviews (32%)
  • Search landing pages (32%)
  • Product comparisons (28%)
  • Zoom (28%)

Well, looking at the numbers not significantly, and it does seem like a convenient conclusion for Adobe, who sell “whizzy imagery”…

Also today I was interested to read this discussion questioning the value of “trustmarks” such as McAfee, with plenty of examples where adding such logos actually decreased conversion rate.

The key lesson from these two examples is to take claims to improve conversion rate with a pinch of salt. Work out what’s most appropriate to your business. Tackle the low-hanging fruit first. And test everything.

No Comments by on February 18, 2010
filed in Ecommerce design, Social media
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When social shopping can really work

There are various ways that social media is slowly being adopted by online retailers. It’s becoming increasingly common to find facebook, twitter & blogs on ecommerce sites, and “share this’ bookmarking & product reviews seem fairly standard now on product pages.

Apart from product reviews where there’s a proven link to increasing conversion rate (79% of online UK retailers surveyed reported that the main benefit of consumer-generated rating and reviews was that they improved site conversion rates), it’s hard to demonstrate a direct sales benefit, although of course it all helps in terms of brand building, customer loyalty and rich content for SEO.

In my experience the most effective social shopping sites (and the most effective form of online marketing!) are www.hotukdeals.com and www.moneysavingexpert.com. A post such as this

http://www.hotukdeals.com/item/452300/viners-alaska-32-piece-stainless-st

would typically boost daily sales by 500% – 1000% i.e a spike in sales normally over a couple of days driven by sales of one particular product, with customers discussing and rushing to get the bargain. A product that would normally sell less than 5 a day would sell 500 in one day, with zero cost per conversion, and adding 100s of new potential repeat customers!

Of course success stories like this are unlikely to happen all day everyday, and despite my efforts at influencing the system will be quite random events (be careful – it’s easy to get blacklisted for self promotion)!

The key thing is to be aware of the potential, and keep an eye out for the start of a spike in traffic from one particular source, sales of one particular product, or use of a voucher code.

Then make sure stock levels are available, check the margin on the product, use a popular landing page to up-sell/ cross-sell, monitor what people are saying about your brand and website. And watch the sales roll in!

No Comments by on January 29, 2010
filed in Ecommerce strategy, Social media
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© 2011 Helen Coupland