Help for Improving Conversion Rate

Looking for a brutal critique and ideas that might improve our conversion rate.

www.homesteadharvest.com

Thanks!

Your best bet would be to ask some people (friends and family) who you think would be interested in your product to complete a number of tasks ie buy xyz product. Monitor what they do, how they do it, mistakes they make etc. and ammend your site as neccessary.

People on these forums know an awful lot about the web and web design so may overlook problems that less initiated people (ie your customers) may not.

Hi,
I just browse to your website. Just wondering,did you build up your own? Or you use some ecommerce company such store_online?

P.S. Your website is damn lovely. 2 thumbs up.

Here are a few questions that should get you on the right track.

Where are you advertising? The type of traffic you get to your site is a big factor in what your converstion rate should be.

What message do you want to get across to the user in after the first 10 seconds they come to your site?


Are you confident that if 100 people came to your site and then went to your competitor's site that a majority of them would choose you over your competitor?

Why does someone need your services from you?

What makes you better then the compeition?

If you want more help let me know.

One of the best sources for info on increasing conversion rates can be found in the grokdotcom.com newsletter. http://www.grokdotcom.com

Review all the old articles and you will get some great tips. FutureNow, the guys that own Grok also have some great free tools and resources on their site at: [link]

Hope this helps and best of luck!
Linda Buquet

[ Message was edited by: Catalyst 12/06/2004 09:24 am ]

Just a thought, but it would be handy to put a couple of tracking urls on various pages throughout your site. You need to find out if people are leaving before they even get to the shopping cart, in the middle of it or at the end. This is going to tell you quite a lot about where to start looking for trouble spots. If for example you find out that half of your customers abandon their carts at the shipping page, you know that either the information isn't clear or the shipping could be too high as an example.

A couple quick comments, I found that the 'continue shopping button wasn't immediately obvious. It should be right beside the 'check out' button. I also found that after I clicked that button that it wasn't obvious that I actually had a cart or anything in it. I think you need to have something at the top that says something along the lines of "You have X items in your cart totalling X dollars" - otherwise people forget about that neat item they just added to the cart.

When I did click on "check out" I was presented with a login screen. The login screen was a little confusing, I wasn't sure if I could actually place an order without creating an account or not or what I had to do. A sentence or two here explaining each option underneath it would help.

Ok, I found a major sticky point (for me anyways). It is my opinion that I should never have to fill out a whole account form complete with shipping & billing addresses without knowing shipping first, or at least an approximate amount. When I have to do that I pretty quickly lose interest in filling out a whole form just to find out the shipping cost.

Anyways, just a couple of thoughts. I suspect that with the nature of your cart there are a few things that you're not going to be able to change all that much. You might be able to add in the approximate weight of each item in your description though, maybe with a little table of average shipping costs on a linked page or something like that? I think even an approximate cost is still better than nothing before going to all the trouble of filling out forms.

Hope that helps a little.