Vaught Usability Group, LLC
By Nina Vaught, CUA
Certified Human Factors Usability Analyst

6 Tips to Boost Online Sales

Without Redesigning your whole site

In spite of the economic downturn online sales figures are phenomenal.  According to the US Census Bureau, online sales just the first quarter of 2009 were at $909.6 billion.

With more online shoppers comes more online stores, making competition for site traffic hotter than ever. At the same time, its easier than ever for potential customers to find your competition.  Is your site ready to capture site traffic and convert them into buyers?  Or is it just a click stop on the way to a competitor, whose website meets their needs better than yours?

Good usability and persuasion tactics are key components in monetizing site traffic. Yet often, even the basics are overlooked.  Following are six easy-to-implement steps toward increasing the conversion rate of site traffic into revenue on your website.

#1 – Create an informative tagline

You only have 4-10 seconds to get first-time site visitors interested enough not to click away. How to capture their interest quickly? One element in the equation is to provide at-a-glance information about the purpose and value of your website with an informative and compelling tagline.

A tagline is a slogan, mantra, or succinct company statement that sums up the purpose of your website and the value it offers to visitors. Clever taglines that work for print media often need to be supplemented on websites.  If your tagline is cute and catchy, but doesn’t provide helpful information, add an additional tagline so visitors ‘get the point’ right away.

Your tagline or supplemental tagline should:

  • Be placed prominently on the homepage, close in proximity to your logo
  • Imply or specifically state benefits valuable from users’ perspective
  • Identify your target market if applicable
  • Be brief and succinct – one or two sentences

Here’s an example of a good tagline that used to be presented on Quickloans.com.

‘Americas Home Loan Experts®.  Expert Advice. Great Rates. Fast Process.’

This tagline  identifies the wide target market (homeowners and home buyers in America); emphasizes what it does that is valuable to customers (Expert advice. Great rates. Fast process.) and it is brief.

Here’s another good tagline from www.Toonaday.com which clearly spells out their proposition.

Original cartoon clipart, you won’t find anywhere else!

For optimal visibility, your tagline should be located close in proximity to your logo. In your masthead, just below your logo is an ideal place.  Other locations near the top of the page also work if designed to be visually prominent – without a lot of competing elements.

When included in your masthead, the tagline is easy to keep on every page, so even users clicking on a keyword search to an internal landing page will know they’re in the right place to do what they came to do.

#2 – Make navigational elements intuitive

Naming of navigation elements should be descriptive enough to set expectations correctly as to what will happen when a link is clicked.  Surprise endings are not appreciated on the Web.

Use vocabulary familiar to your users for your site navigation and follow Web convention for what they expect and readily recognize. This refers to your global site navigation categories and subcategories as well as for text links in body copy.

If you have out done yourself with clever or cute naming of category and subcategory navigation, you are putting roadbloacks in front of your users.  Rename all navigational elements with descriptive, easy-to-understand language. This will increase the likelihood that site visitors will get where they want to go, so they can do what you want them to do.

Users scan underlined body text links quickly (especially when they are blue) and use them to derive the meaning and focus of the page.  Links should be descriptive of where they lead.  A link named ‘click here’ is not a destination and gives the visitor no information about the topic.  Usability research indicates links with 7 – 10 words are the most effective. Both usability and search experts agree that, for audience response and search engine optimization, naming your links descriptively is important.

#3 – Provide enough product information

Sales are made when needs are met, which includes the need for adequate information.  Many abandoned purchases and product returns are due to unanswered questions about the product.  When creating individual product pages, don’t leave holes in the information. Provide all details a prospective client may need or want in order to commit to the purchase.  Some important ways to accomplish this are:

  • Use thumbnail images for fast loading, with high quality images that enlarge enough upon clicking for users to see important details.  Provide close-ups of details that users care about.  For example, a clothing product should include a close-up image of high-quality stitching, texture and printed design.
  • Show the product at different angles if appropriate.  Example: REI doesn’t just show images of the top/side of their hiking boots.  They also show the bottom – an important detail for hikers.
  • Provide complete product details. Describe everything a shopper could find out easily if they could touch, feel and smell the product and ask questions of a knowledgeable sales person.
  • Accommodate different personality types. People differ in how they prefer to be approached, gain information and make decisions.  When writing descriptions for complex products with potential for lots of detail and long specifications, note that too much information overwhelms impulse buyers and quick decision makers (paralysis by analysis) and too little detail leaves the methodical decider with unanswered questions.

To satisfy them all, consider the needs of your target customers and include complete information about your products to answer any possible questions your users might have. If your product has lengthy or complicated specifications, only show basic information on the product page next to the product image and description. Provide a link or tab to more in-depth product details (or specifications) in a new window, new page, or below the fold on the same page.

  • Be consistent.  Provide consistent information for like products in a consistent format so users can easily browse and compare products.  For example: With sportswear, if you provide temperature rating and moisture wicking capability for one clothing article, also provide it for other products in the same category.  A comparison table works well for some products, like electronics.
  • Use common names for colors and provide visual examples. Describe a sweater as green to 25 people and 25 different flavors of green will be imagined. Call it bamboo or cypress, and who knows what will be imagined.   So there’s two principles here – first of all, use common names for colors and secondly, show swatches of the colors next to their written color names.  If possible also show the product in the selected color.
  • Check that images match the product description.  It’s a common error that destroys sales when the product the user is looking at doesn’t match its written description.  Users can’t tell for sure if the product is what they see or what they read.

#4 – Offer free shipping

Other factors being equal, consumers often report that free shipping is the strongest deciding factor when choosing between vendors for online purchases.  Free shipping overcomes one of the biggest objections to shopping on the Web over shopping at the mall.

For more sales and higher average dollars per sale, offer free shipping at a particular price point.  Use it as a differentiator and advertise ‘Free Shipping’ prominently on the homepage and throughout the shopping cart and checkout.

High shipping fees are a sore subject for online buyers.  If you are unable to offer free shipping, keep your fee structure reasonable and show shipping charges in the shopping cart or sooner – before you ask for personal information.  If some products require higher shipping fees, clearly explain why.

# 5 – Remove mandatory registration

Do not require user registration as a condition of entry into your website or require users to register before they purchase.  If a buyer is ready to shop on your website or give you their money, don’t make it difficult for them to do so!  Stopping the momentum of a potential buyer or successful sale simply doesn’t make sense.

Users report resentment at being required to fill out personal information at the point of sale.  A high percent of user’s report they either abandon the purchase or provide false information.  ‘Don’t they want my money?’ is a comment we frequently hear in usability testing when users are confronted with the requirement to register on a site.

If there is value for the customer to register on your site, make the request after the purchase is complete.  Make registration optional and explain what’s in it for the them.  If you are asking for more information than name and email for registration, make provision of the additional information optional and offer adequate value in return. Typical items offered are free white papers (not available elsewhere for free), free shipping, or a discount coupon.

I recently received a solicitation in the mail requesting that I fill out their company survey.  The letter went over-board on how much they valued my input and my time, and then said ‘as a thank you please accept the enclosed gift’.   The thank you gift was an ugly refrigerator magnet with their advertisement on it.  Moral of that story – don’t insult your users.  Make your incentive valuable and free to the customer.  By being considerate and respectful of users, you’ll get more sales as well as more reliable customer information.

# 6 – Foster credibility and trust

In this era of rampant identity theft, storefront scams, and exploitation of users’ personal information, the basic necessity for an e-commerce website is to make users feel comfortable doing business on the site.  A number of factors affect users’ perception of your credibility and trustworthiness – positively when done right, negatively when done wrong.  Among the top are:

  • A professional looking website
  • A strong guarantee
  • Assurance of a secure transaction
  • A customer-focused privacy policy
  • Prominent telephone number and business physical address


Implement these six steps and you’ll be on your way to a more compelling, user-friendly and successful website that converts more visitors into customers.

Nina Vaught is the Founder and Principle Consultant at Vaught Usability Group where she aids clients in achieving higher website conversion rates by showing them how to make their sites more persuasive and easy for visitors to use.  Contact Nina at nina@vaughtusability.com.