An E-Commerce CEO

I have a big conversion rate mover that is repeatable that I can share with you.

Go to Karate Depot.

Clear your KarateDepot.com cookies, then google MMA Gear and click on the link to the KarateDepot.com front page.

Notice the targeted banners and products. (If you do not see the MMA banners, you probably still have karatedepot.com cookies set).

The different front page being served has resulted in a 69% improvement in conversion rate among those who searched for “MMA Gear” and clicked through to our front page.

Excited, we followed up with a test for terms including “Karate” and “Karate Uniforms” and more than doubled our conversion rate for those searches.
There are thousands of terms that lead to our front page but we don’t want to have thousands of customizations for our front page. Our tech isn’t customizable enough to be able to efficiently manage that many different front pages. I can envision a system that would, but for now we’re grouping those terms and creating customized pages for those groups.

Implementation

We set different front page items and banners for different buyer segment in Mercado.

If the entrance keywords match certain rules, we assign the session to the appropriate buyer segment. If the term doesn’t match any of the rules, or if the visitor wasn’t referred by search, we assign the visitor the default buyer segment or add the visitor to an A/B test that we’re running. To determine whether the user came from a search engine we simply look for certain referring urls and then inspect the term the user searched for. For example, a search for “karate” coming from Google will contain “q=karate” in the referring url.
We pass the selected buyer segment to Mercado.

Mercado gives the visitor their customized front page. That front page remains the customized front page throughout the visitors session, to maintain continuity.

Is this for me?

If you have a high volume of visitors to your front page via organic search and some of the keywords are converting poorly, it’s for you.

But my software?!

There’s e-commerce software that has exactly this functionality built-in. We did it with buyer segments and Mercado made it easy. If your software doesn’t have that functionality, ask if they have or can provide a method for creating custom landing pages.

From Here

We’re showing the customer what he wants more often that we were. Therefore we’re selling more product. We will see if we can do the same for visitors to other pages of the site where the page they’re landing on doesn’t have the exact product selection they may be seeking.

We can also take the buyer segment that the customer is assigned for the session and change other elements of the website - such as our related items and others bought sections - to show items the customer might be interested in. Additionally, we can splash MMA branding across the website for our MMA buyer segment and see if we can convince our visitor that for MMA we’re the place to shop for MMA. While of course showing Karate branding across the website for our Karate buyer segment, because for Karate as well, we are of course the place to shop.

Technorati Tags: Ecommerce, Conversion Rate, Mercado, E-commerce

We used LivePerson for a few months, now we’re using SupportTrio.

Why we switched and what we’ve found with both solutions coming soon.

Wordpress defaults to NoFollow on comments.

I vet my comments. I love my posters. I frequently link to my commenters’ anyway. Why NoFollow them? So I battled my inner deeply lazy self and installed DoFollow. It took about 3 minutes.

Side Note: Anyone notice a Halloween Hangover this year? From Halloween day until the following Monday sales were significantly slower across all our stores and then worked their way back to normal.

Technorati Tags: NoFollow, DoFollow, WordPress

On Variable Markup Michael Julson links to this excellent interview with Jeff Bezos on Harvard Business Review. Read it. Here’s what I learned.

“Every new employee, no matter how senior or junior, has to go spend time in our fulfillment centers within the first year of employment. Every two years they do two days of customer service. Everyone has to be able to work in a call center.”

A graphic designer doesn’t need the skills to work in the fulfillment center and doesn’t have the knowledge to do customer service. So why do it?

People can contribute ideas far better with a more complete picture of the industry and your existing process.

Working on the front lines and serving the customer on a one-to-one level builds your relationship with the company and builds the loyalty from the bottom up.
I’m not going to require my fulfillment personnel to work in the contact center. Many on the staff don’t have the language or computer skills. As for the rest of our employees, this might be a management strategy worth stealing.

“we did auctions, but we didn’t like the results. Next we created zShops, which was fixed-price selling… We still didn’t like the results we got. It was when we went to the single-detail-page model that our third-party business really took off.”

For Amazon Auctions and zShops were huge failures. It was about 3 years between they first tried to integrate third party sellers with auctions and when they first succeeded in integrating third party sellers with the apparel and sporting goods stores. If you believe in a concept but fail, dissect the technique, determine the flaw, and try a different technique. That Amazon was able to get the internal buy-in to try a third technique to implement their initial strategy is very impressive. We should all be so persistent.

And everyone in business talks about passion. Tell me if you think Jeff Bezos was passionate about books or even e-commerce? If you see an opportunity and believe in that opportunity, go for it. The passion for success does very well in the face of passion for the field you will be working in.

Technorati Tags: Business, Management, Strategy, Passion