Its true! Lets hazard a guess, that at about 90% (give or take) of software developers who build e-commerce stores have never actually sold a product online themselves… EVER! Pretty pathetic statistic I’m sure you’ll agree.

They can talk about cross sells and up sells and usability, blah, blah, blah. All sounds professional but when the reality hits the new store owner when 12 months have passed and they are stuck with a “white elephant” of a website that on average delivers less than 1 buyer in every 100 visitors. And they still haven’t even paid for the website costs.

Incidentally in my testing across your average e-commerce store about 1 in 125-150 will buy.

So what about 1-Page checkouts? Amazing Results! Well they can produce amazing results, IF split testing is carried out. Starting with a basic A-B (normal checkout and 1-Page checkout), then its about multivariate testing on the winner and the winner has to be clear cut before multivariate even begins.

See here’s the thing and one of my favourite e-commerce philosophies: The 3 F’s. Your website and each component of it, has to be: Fast, Functional and Familiar. The main point here I’d like to touch on is Familiar.

If your buyer is used to a 3 or even 5 page checkout process and then they land on your site and BANG… 1 Page! What could happen? Confusion, Fear, Frustration, the emotive list could be very long.

I started testing my first 1-Page checkout in 2005, way before many of the big boys’ employees could even say “cart abandonment”. What I learned is that 1-Page checkouts are great for a younger audience, the linear thinkers (typically older people) such as the process of clicking through a simple to follow pattern, 1 page after the next.

So in essence that’s why testing is imperative, because surprises continually pop up. And from this intensive testing you gain experience, and from this if your radar is calibrated, you gain an enormous amount of intuition.

I’d like to finish with this, to confuse you even more. Refined Intuition can often deliver better results than actual data. This finishes nicely were I started. Its for the guys that build software and have never even sold 1 product online… EVER! Think about that one!

Keep Testing
Ian

This is similar in terms to the captioned article: if your ecommerce solution is doing its full job, it will help you be more profitable!

There is yet another way to ask the question: You will work hard today no matter what. You will also work hard four months from now, no matter what. Shouldn’t the hard work you do today not only pay off for you tomorrow, but shouldn’t the hard work you do today leverage you so that your work tomorrow – and your work four months from today – is more efficient and makes you more sales?

Disclosure: I work for a cart sfwr company, 800cart.com. When we designed the new sfwr we released in April, we’d spend 2 years researching how to make a shopping cart solution work for you every day and every night to make sure that you build major page rank *right* with the search engines, especially Google.

It’s not very hard: Google has published lots of pages and content telling you exactly how to do it. We read all that stuff and incorporated it into our new sfwr.

The results were beyond anything we ever dreamed. The test store that we used to test our software ended up not just #1 on Google, it had 7 of the first 10 links. For a test store that doesn’t really sell anything and says it’s a test storte, that is pretty good.

So yes, the question is pertinent – not only that, but we think there is an answer and for us, that answer is ‘YES: BOTH”

Ron Robinson
http://www.800cart.com