A major factor in online success is testing. Your e-commerce website should be tested on a regular basis in order to ensure your clients are being given the best service and your brand is being represented in the most appropriate, professional manner.

Every aspect of your e-commerce website should be tested and re-tested. Obviously achieving the maximum number of conversions is the main objective for your website and unless it is tested regularly there are countless different ways you could be losing potential business.

The most obvious reason for testing is, of course, to make sure your e-commerce site actually works. Any issues or faults with your site will be easily picked up by the user, therefore regular testing prevents your potential clients from developing a negative image of your brand. If your website is disappointing or faulty it will give the user a negative image of your company as a whole.

The term testing can also relate to other aspects of managing your website, however. Testing out different styles and approaches with your website will allow you to work out which method works best with your targeted audience.

Cookie tracking and various web statistic packages enable you to track precisely what is happening in the site and react positively as a result.

Try rotating different images and headlines on pages within the site then tracking the number of hits and click-throughs achieved with the different styles. This will help to determine what is the most effective strategy for your site.

Calls to action are key when attempting to guide users through your site; you should try out different phrases and see how it affects your conversion rates.

Success with your website is trial and error. Your website shouldn’t be a static thing that once launched is left alone. You should be constantly updating, adding to and tweaking various parts of the site to meet the needs of your users and maximise the revenue you get from it.

To find out how Motive can help you maximise the potential of your website, please get in touch with our E-commerce team.

Ensuring that visitors have a good experience of your ecommerce website is key to online success. This experience will greatly impact on both a decision to buy from you and a visitors perception of your brand.

More and more consumers are choosing to buy their products from the internet and as a result retailers must focus the same level of attention on their ecommerce website as they would their high street stores.

A recent poll conducted by technology provider RightNow and the Loudhouse organisation found that 72% of people who shop on the internet believed that a good online user experience would be the second highest influencing factor when deciding where to buy a product.

Enabling your customers to easily find the product they want through simple and logical navigation of your website is obviously crucial but it is also highly worthwhile to display associated promotions and incentives alongside your products to increase conversion values. Without the personal interaction that occurs in the store it is important that users feel that you are informing them prior to purchase and supporting them throughout the entire sales process.

If a user doesn’t find what they are looking for early on in their visit to your website they will leave and look elsewhere online. This will drive consumers to your competitors and mean that users leave your website with a negative image of your brand.

To find out how Motive could improve the online experience of your brand, get in touch with our E-commerce Team.

In order for your e-commerce website to be found by users searching in the search engines you must ensure you have an SEO friendly website both structurally and from a content perspective.

Search engines like Google have automated programmes called bots or spiders which crawl a website, indexing pages as they work through the site. When a user types in a query the search engine crawls through its index to find the pages that are most relevant to that query and then brings them up in the Natural Listings.

In order for the spiders to pick up the pages of your site they must be fully optimised for SEO with keyword rich content and a structure that the spiders can easily follow.

Obviously the main objective of e-commerce websites is to sell products, which usually involves having pages with lists of items and little content and therefore little for the spiders to crawl. There are several strategies you can adopt to combat this problem and ensure that the various pages of your site to get indexed by the spiders.

The first strategy you should adopt is to create content rich landing pages which then feed into your individual product pages. These content based landing pages should have keyword friendly links which also feed out into the product pages.

Another method of improving your rankings in the search results is to include pages which focus on ‘selling’ your products, explaining the various qualities and benefits of the products your company has on offer. Like the landing pages, these pages can also be fully optimised with the keywords you want your site to appear for and contain keyword rich links that then link out to the product pages.

The structure of your website is also crucial. Our e-commerce platform MotiveShop™ can create SEO friendly URL’s which will enable the pages of your site to be easily picked up the search engine’s spiders. The software can also dynamically generate keyword rich meta descriptions and page titles – all working to ensure the spiders are finding and indexing the pages of your website.