Internet Marketing Services

Looking for a laptop support today, I reached ikea.ca’s page and added 3 of them to the cart.

Surprise, for a $4.99 item the shipping fee is $34.55. Would you buy online from someone who’s charging that much? Hell, no!

$4.99 for the product , $34.99 for shipping? Good by IKEA!

You can do all the remarketing in the world, I am not going to buy this product … Continue Reading » Who Wouldn’t Abandon This Shopping Cart?

If you want to build links naturally (and also have a usable website), you should allow your visitors to easily share/publish links. Sharing can be social or a simple copy link text field. Such functionality is especially important for websites which don’t change the URL when altering data on the page (AJAX based pages).

canpages.ca allows users to zoom into specific areas of the map, but if they want to share the outcome with someone, there’s no way to do it:

Sometimes is not easy to change your checkout process to go from registration required to guest checkout. This article describes how you could forecast how much you’re losing if you don’t offer a guest checkout option. The method is an approximate but can help you with the number$ needed when making the case for the guest checkout to your boss. The concept behind it is to forecast how many people will not proceed further to the next pages from the shopping cart page, … Continue Reading » Guest Checkouts and Opportunity Cost Analysis – Part 3 of 3

A while back, after this Staples business store failed to provide the service they charged me for for more than one month, I decided to buy and install the broken laptop keyboard by myself.

After clicking several AdWords ads (most of them with a poor destination URL) I found this website selling what I needed:

Sunvalley's Product Description Page

The layout itself is pretty neat, to the point, but the availability info … Continue Reading » Handling Out of Stock Items and PPC

So, we know that Google does mistakes when it comes to SEO – you can take a look at their own score card here.

But, they also have some usability issues on their product detail pages on Google Products website. Take a look at the screenshot below. What is  Not Specified supposed to mean? The size, the shape or the color of the product?

This is the second part on the monetary opportunity cost analysis for guest checkouts series (read the first part here).

For the next two parts I will describe a couple of methods that can be used to derive the opportunity loss due to “locked checkouts” – I don’t like to coin terms, but I couldn’t find a suitable replacement for the term “non-guest checkouts”. To cut a long story short, a locked checkout is a checkout that require visitors to login or create accounts … Continue Reading » Guest Checkouts and Opportunity Cost Analysis – Part 2 of 3

This article is about the optimization of, what I consider to be one of the lowest hanging fruits for ecommerce websites, the checkout process. It can also relate to other types of web site, i.e. sites that require customers to pass through an online checkout process to purchase products or services.

Definitions:

- a locked checkout (a term coined by the author) is an checkout process that requires visitors to create an account in order to complete a purchase. Usually they require users to provide a … Continue Reading » Guest Checkouts and Opportunity Cost Analysis – Part 1 of 3

Warning: if you’re going to implement the technique described below, it’s at your own risk!

You can use Google’s own tool, Google Website Optimizer, to implement a nice gray-hat SEO cloaking (not cloaking per se, as described by search engines, but with the same results). And the interesting part is that at the same time you get to test your site to conversion optimization :)

So what does SEO cloaking mean? Simply put, you display different content to search engine bots and to humans, with the purpose of manipulating … Continue Reading » Legitimate (Gray) SEO Cloaking Technique with Google’s Help

Usually we place call to action on buttons like add to cart, checkout now or add to whishlist. That’s a good idea. What’s not a good idea is to make those buttons work only with Javascript.

According to this link as many as 5% of Internet users don’t have the Javascript on when browsing. Yahoo! points out that almost 1% of the Yahoo! sites don’t activate Javascript. In our case that number is almost 14%. Check your web analytics tool … Continue Reading » Javascript Call to Action Buttons

Search engine optimization should be a real concern to anyone involved in A/B/n or multivariate testing. Why? Because when you test something, you alter the information architecture on the tested page, and this could affect your previous SEO efforts.

If you don’t set up and configure your tests correctly – and I don’t mean how you set up your testing platform, but the technicalities of how you implement the test on your web server – you can encounter two major problems:

1. Duplicate content issues with … Continue Reading » Minimize the Impact of Website Testing on SEO