[Presentation] Optimizing conversion in eCommerce

Below are slides from our talk we gave on conversion optimization in eCommerce in Oulu. You can download slides here.

How to loose a customer online

There are a lot of companies who invest a lot of money into their websites. Some like Ernst & Young probably invest tens of thousands into their multilingual Internet portals. They do many things right: optimizing content, integrating social media, optimizing navigation path and so on.  Still they all this investment might be worthless if there is not conversion possibility.

Right on their front page there is a “Contact us” section which allows potential customers to get in touch quickly. Only problem is when you try and get their content information by selecting a country from their drop down menu you’re greeted with an error message.

We’re not saying that your site should run perfectly all the time and there is not room for error, but rather saying that don’t cheap out on the monitoring system in order to protect your investment.

There are many open source monitoring solutions and web test frameworks which coupled together can make sure you site doesn’t loose customers.

P.S. Putting a phone number on the front page is also another cheap alternative.

EDIT: As pointed out in our comment on Reddit we’re not saying that they failed horribly; not at all. Ernst & Young have a good site, but some additional attention should be paid to crucial part of the site which brings conversion. There are ways to automatically check website to make sure it’s up and running and this is really a worthy investment. People make judgements online in a few seconds and thus you might not have a second chance.