Increase Sales in 2016 by Optimizing Your Store for Conversion

By Phil Grier
Aabaco Small Business Product Support

This article is the first in a 3-part series on optimizing your online store to improve sales. We are reposting this series with minor updates as the content is very relevant, particularly as we enter the holidays.

It happens every holiday season. We’ve grown accustomed to the house being in whatever state it happens to be, and then we learn friends or family are coming over. Suddenly, everything that’s wrong with each room is striking. Look at this trash, how did that get there? Is there toilet paper in all the bathrooms? Are there enough chairs out? We all go through this effect to some degree and it happens because we are shifting our perspective from how we use our house to how our visitors will. What might be OK on a random workday might not work with the in-laws in town.

It’s the same way when looking at your site for opportunities to boost conversion. You are really familiar with your site. It’s just your environment, and it’s easy to not notice obstacles have in the way of getting orders. So for this exercise try to look at your site from a different perspective, like someone who has never seen it, or like you are getting ready for an inspection. This will put you in the right headspace to optimize for conversion. It may help to get friends or family to give you some honest feedback.

Each area of the site, like rooms of a house, serves a purpose. People visiting should have a primary focus on each page, and conversion optimization is mostly done by looking at the purchase funnel from the perspective of your visitor’s intent on each page, and how easy those goals are to achieve. To do a review of your site, let’s start at the top and follow the visitor all the way through purchase. This is by no means a comprehensive checklist, but will put you in the right headspace to look at your site through new eyes and increase sales.

In the header, the goal is trust: your logo, search, customer service contact info, trust marks, and perhaps a tagline. The header is your first impression and if it’s not attractive you will lose people this early in the funnel. To help, have a logo, a phone number or email to reach you, and try to keep it clean and uncluttered. Just south of the header, most sites then have some kind of navigation menu. The goal of navigation is to allow shoppers to quickly get to any product page within 2 to 3 clicks, but it’s easy to overwhelm people with options too. Consider your average visitor, your most popular sections, and let logic dictate the order of pages in your navigation. It’s tempting to put things in alphabetical order sometimes, and that’s better than chaos, but often it’s optimal to put the most searched pages within easy grasp. You probably wouldn’t like going to a grocery store that put the flour on a shelf 6 feet off the ground, after all. Your navigation should serve your customers and meet their needs, and for that you must know your customers.

Now what do you do about the home page as a whole? Watch for next week’s post when we’ll talk about maximizing “curb appeal” for visitors.

A bit about Phil:

Phil Grier is a 8-year veteran of the Aabaco Small Business team, he has spent much of this time working with our retailers to improve their online stores and increase their sales.

ShipIt!: Team ASB codes new, innovative features during 24-hour programming event

We like to stay technically nimble and functionally creative here at Aabaco Small Business and challenge ourselves to constantly innovate. Our team recently organized and participated in a small-business focused event called “ShipIt”, a marathon coding event with the goal of resolving particular customer and productivity issues in only 24 hours.

To kick off the event, we spent a few hours brainstorming ideas for projects, taking into account customer feedback on highly requested features. We bounced ideas off each other and categorized final ideas into different themes such as ‘Enhancing User Experience’ and ‘Improving Productivity Tools.’ Only ideas that could be put into production, or ‘shipped’ quickly were kept – hence the name ShipIt!

Folks from Aabaco Small Business’ Hillsboro, OR team enjoying some sunshine after being heads down for the event.

Separated into small teams, we went to work! The conference rooms in our offices were filled with folks dedicated to working on ShipIt. Engineers worked well into the night, stopping only for periodic snacks and an occasional game of foosball. As dawn approached and the 24-hour period was coming to a close, a few die hard warriors remained, furiously working to finish their projects.

That afternoon each team presented their finished project to a panel of cross-functional judges from Engineering, Design, Product Management, and Customer Care. The panel evaluated the projects to see which ones were ready to ship and would be most impactful to our customers. The top projects were selected and the winning teams were given kudos and prizes. Which projects won? Well, we don’t want to ruin the surprise, but as new features are released, we’ll be making the announcement right here on our Tumblr, so stay tuned!

The Aabaco Small Business Sunnyvale team is all smiles after the final project presentations.

On the road again with Aabaco Small Business

It’s been an action-packed few months, and what better way to spend the summer than getting to meet and hear from our merchants in-person? We kicked off our summer by visiting Chicago for IRCE, as well as to to host the first of our three regional roadshows. Next we were on to NYC, where we held a customer appreciation dinner, and we rounded out the summer with two more Merchant Roadshows, hitting both coasts in just one week!

Thanks to all of you who took the time to come out - meeting and hearing directly from our merchants is invaluable. Check out a recap of our Merchant Roadshows below, and we look forward to seeing you at our next event!

Silicon Valley Merchant Roadshow

For our West Coast event, we held the annual Silicon Valley Merchant Roadshow right here at Yahoo’s Headquarters on September 20. We spent the first half of the day presenting a summary of recent product releases and an overview of what’s to come. The primary themes this year were to improve operational efficiencies for retailers on our platform and to enhance the end buyer’s experience. We’re thrilled that so many attendees were excited about what we plan to roll out in the coming months. (Be sure to check back here for new feature and product announcements).

The audience listens intently to John He, Head of Engineering and Iravati Hinge, Senior Product Manager.

The highlight of the event was the Hot Topics session. With active involvement from our Developer Network, successful online retailers, and Yahoo staff, we gathered the best advice for competing online and improving conversion rates. Everyone contributed great ideas to this collective brainstorm. Curious? We’ve summarized all of them into one easy-to-read document.

Merchants received valuable insights on how to increase their conversion and sales, and they also had dedicated time during the event to directly meet with developers and partners in person. We received such great feedback from participants on the agenda that we’re planning on rolling out more events like this in other parts of the country. If you want us to come to a city near you, send us a tweet @aabacosb with hashtag #ASBEvents.

Retailers, partners, and Yahoos enjoying an impromptu dinner after a day of lively conversations and exchanging ideas during the Silicon Valley Merchant Roadshow.

New York Merchant Roadshow

Our East Coast Roadshow had a special focus on technical training since we had already provided customers in the region an overview of our product roadmap earlier in the summer. We had received several customer requests for more training on RTML, the code on which our Merchant Solutions ecommerce platform is built. We partnered with RTML expert, Istvan Siposs of Y-Times Publications, LLC, to lead a hands-on training session for our retailers.

The training was a huge success with attendees learning techniques that they could immediately apply to their stores. We recorded the event and will share the video recaps and course material right here on our blog.

New shipping options for Stores

The ability to customize your store’s shipping options has been a highly requested feature for the Stores platform, and we’re excited to share that you now have the ability to choose where your products will be shipped.

Whether you only want to ship to a particular state within the U.S., or target your orders to specific countries, the Foreign Orders page now lets you set shipping rules to accept orders from specific states, the entire list of allowed countries, or anywhere in between. Learn more.

We’re updating our logo

We’re excited to introduce a fresh, new look for Aabaco Small Business from Yahoo. This updated logo more vividly represents the Yahoo brand and that our team is powered by Yahoos, each committed to your success.

We continue to operate under the Aabaco Small Business name, and no action is required from you. Over the next few months, you’ll see our logo updated across our sites, social media, emails, and more.

We’re still the same team and remain dedicated to supporting your business. Thank you for your business and continued loyalty.