As expected, Varien, the makers of Magento, have announced their enterprise edition. You can see the differences between the standard and enterprise versions. This is no surprise, and I believe they’ve mentioned they would do this in time. I’ve always found Magento a bit odd. It’s always felt like more of an enterprise level product to me. Many of the features are too rich and too complex, and the hardware requirements too high for the average small shop which is the typical audience of open source products. The product has had enterprise aspirations, yet the bulk of the users have been low end who want something quicker and easier. I’m curious to see what the enterprise uptake is like. Mind you, I can’t see them hitting the really high end of town, but it’s an interesting offering for the mid range, those doing maybe $10m - $200m/year in revenue (pulling those figures off the top off my head without too much thought).

A shameless plug. My Dad had CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia) and against all odds beat it using diet. This is a blatant plug/link juice for his site on CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia).

I’m a Google Analytics junkie. I admit it. I just love the product. However, despite my desire to procreate with it, it does have some significant limitations. One of those limitations has just been removed.

Ever wanted to know keyword trends? Which keywords are having unusual spikes or dips? I sure do. You can now get a keyword trends report in Google Analytics courtesy of this groovy little greasemonkey script. I love it!

You can follow me on Twitter if you are into that Mostly talking about general online marketing stuff with an ecommerce bent.

I came across a new Zappo’s site the other day, I think it’s beta (zeta in Zappo’s terminology!). All I can say is: wow! This is a really interesting and gutsy move. I think strong scent is absolutely critical for ecommerce success, and this site has so much scent it’s crazy.

What do you think? Like it? I would love to see the conversion data on this new site vs the old one.

This is the holy grail, right? If there was a (relatively) easy, free way to make more money from your ecommerce shop, everyone would be doing it, right?

You would think so. Such a technique does exist. However, when I talk with shop owners, the vast majority of them haven’t heard of it, much less tried it. What’s up with that?

The technique is called split testing. It comes in a number of forms (which I’ll cover in another post). How it works is you come up with a theory as to how to improve your shop. The theory could be based on customer research, anayltics data or gut reaction. Let’s say for example, you have a theory that increasing the prominence of your search box will improve sales (it often will, but that’s a post for another day).

What you do is, using freely available and relatively easy to use tools, set up your shop so that half your visitors see the old search box and half of them see the new, (hopefully) improved search box. You define what the goal is - typically increasing the conversion rate of your site (the percentage of users that actually buy something - typically around 1 - 2% for small shops), but it can be other goals (more on that later as well), and sit back and wait. After a while - it could be days, weeks or months depending on a number of factors, you’ll get a report telling you exactly how much your change increased or decreased sales by.

For example, on a shop I help out with, I had a theory that changing the position of an important button in the checkout process would improve things. I followed the steps above and waited. Turns out this theory was right - sales increased 3.1%!

Some may think “3.1%, that’s hardly anything to get excited about”. Me? I’m super-excited about it! For one thing, it took me less than half an hour to set it up. Secondly, that 3.1% will keep going, year after year. Most importantly though is the cumulative effect. Sure, a 3.1% increase in sales (with no increase in marketing budget mind you!) isn’t going to make you rich. But what happens if you have 2 tests running at a time, and run each one for about 3 months? Assuming you get the same result from all of them, by the end of the year you’ve increased sales almost 25%! Now that’s something to get excited about.

Chances are some of your tests will perform worse than 3.1% - even reduce sales (so you don’t keep that change), but some might do better than 3%. Any shop I’m consulting on I try and have as many tests running at the same time as I can. I have 6 tests running on one shop as I write this. If each makes a 1% improvement, well, that’s 6%. Keep doing that, and soon you’ve got a damned profitable business.

If you want to jump into the deepend, get yourself a Google Website Optimizer account and go for it! For others, stick around and I’ll talk you through some of the details. As with most things, there’s a lot of traps for young players, I’ll help you avoid them.

Here’s a book for those interested in the subject of abandoned shopping carts. Perhaps not quite what you were expecting….

It’s fairly common knowledge that product reviews increase conversions. The problem is getting the reviews. I’d had this problem on a client’s site. We enabled product reviews about 6 months ago, and although there was a steady trickle of reviews, less than 5% of products had reviews. How to get this number up? I conceived an idea where I created a simple script triggered by cron where users were emailed 3 weeks after their purchase with a friendly “care to leave a review email?”. The kicker is the email included direct links to the review for all the products they purchased. Lots of people enjoy leaving reviews, they just never get around to it. This takes all the effort out - they have the email, it’s literally one click to leaving a review.

So far it’s an outstanding success, and the drastic increase in incoming reviews can be directly linked to purchases 3 weeks ago! It’ll be a while before we see if it increases conversions (likely), but worst case, we get enthusiastic customers (the reviewers) back on the site, and give them a greater sense of engagement and connection with the site, increasing the chances of repeat purchases.

I just came across this great article on mistakes startups make. As I was reading it, I was nodding my head a lot, thinking, yup, I’ve seen that. I was going to put a “I really agree with point number X” here, but I really strongly agree with about 7 out of 10 of them! (and the other 3 aren’t ones I disagree with, just less common in my experience). Definitely worth a read!

I was lucky enough to attend Wizards of the Web in Austin, Texas last month. This is run by the good folk at Future Now (whose blog is a must read for those in ecommerce).

While we learnt all different things, the biggest thing that I came away with - not new, but hammered in hard - was:

You are not your user.

Different people approach things with radically different motivations, approaches, goals, experiences, and expectations. The number 1 secret to a top performing site is to recognise that and to accommodate those differences as best you can. Basically, be all things to all people! And yes, it is possible. Easy, no, but possible, yes. As Bryan Eisenberg said, either you do the hard work, or your customers do the hard work, it’s up to you.