Holy Grail of eCommerce Conversion Optimization - 91 Point Checklist and Infographic | SEOmoz

Whether you're selling pajamas, concert tickets, shoes or shaving blades; e-commerce today has evolved and humanized beyond just convenience shopping . It is therefore imperative that you stop seeing people who land on your store as 'traffic'; but as real human visitors. People come to your store and engage at various levels (let’s call these levels 'touch points'). With each word that visitors read and with each media pixel they view at these touch points, they form a picture of your business in their minds. And based on whether or not they like the final picture, they make a decision about buying from your store or your competitor’s.

Here are the areas of e-commerce touch point optimization that we're going to cover in this article:

Know your Customers

1.  Use Qualaroo to Survey Visitors
2. Enable Olark for Direct Chat Interactions
3. Survey your Existing Customers

Home Page Optimization

4. Show your Top-Selling Products on your Home Page
5. Offer More Ways to Order from your Store
6. Show videos on your home page (below the fold)
7. Localize your store to specific countries

Navigation Optimization

8. Avoid vague category structures
9. Sort category structure by popularity
10. Use CrazyEgg to create focused category navigation
11. Create categories based on what people are searching
12. Use a Compelling Business Tagline
13. Avoid writing vague ‘Unique Selling Points’

Product Search Optimization

14. Test your search for accuracy
15. Implement an Intelligent search to cover singular, plurals, mis-spells etc.
16. Implement Auto-Suggestions to help user search for relevant keywords
17. Enable Category Search
18. Let the user know what they searched

Product Page Optimization

19. Get high quality product images
20. Pay attention to your product’s description
21. Show Product Videos (for your top selling products at least)
22. Don’t let Price be a Surprise
23. Empower visitors with creative calculators
24. Clearly show the Product’s delivery time
25. Allow them to select delivery date
26. Enable Out Of Stock Notification
27. Encourage users to leave reviews

Checkout Optimization

28. Offer Persistent Shopping Cart
29. Don’t make users enter the same information twice
30. Pre-fill information where ever you can
31. Preserve Information on a validation error
32. Clearly mark the fields as optional or mandatory
33. Give input example against each field
34. Offer a unified single ‘Name’ field
35. Automatically pre-fill city & state field as soon as user enters a zip code
36. Keep the form field labels visible at all times
37. Keep the form linear
38. Form field length should match the expected length of the input
39. Use FaceBook Connect
40. Be specific with your button’s text
41. Display validation errors in close proximity to the input field
42. Display validation checks against each field
43. Make 'Account Registration' an Optional Step of Checkout Process
44. Don’t complicate Password Selection
45. Make the ‘Guest Checkout’ option more prominent than Registration
46. Make your primary button most prominent among rest all call to actions
47. Avoid unnecessary buttons on the checkout page
48. Primary button placement
49. Limit the navigation and exit points on the checkout page
50. Use Intelligent defaults
51. Let users force-proceed on potentially wrong validation
52. Process steps should function as navigational links for the checkout process
53. Don’t surprise users by adding extra cost abruptly
54. During registration, make the Newsletter sign-up an opt-in by default, not opt-out.
55. Offer Brave Guarantees

Touch Point Optimization

56. Write crisp & enticing Meta Tags
57. Enable Open graphs
58. Check your Auto-responder Emails
59. Registration Emails
60. Pay attention to your password Reset Emails
61. Get your Order Confirmation Emails right
62. Enable Order Shipped Emails
63. Optimize the thank you messages on your store
64. Make user friendly 404 Error Page
65. No Results Found (Product / Page)
66. Validation Error Messages
67. Offer them multiple payment options: It’s a no-brainer but this checklist will look incomplete without it.
68. Show Social Media Proofs
69. Sign-up with Google Trusted Stores

Information Touch Points

70. Show product close-up videos
71. Educate the visitors and enable them to make an informed decision
72. Create an impressive about page
73. Support/Contact Page
74. Get a thorough usability testing done

Load Speed Optimization

75. Leverage browser caching
76. Defer parsing of JavaScript
77. Optimize images
78. Serve scaled images
79. Combine images into CSS sprites
80. Minimize redirects
81. Enable compression
82. Minify JavaScript
83. Minimize request size

Shipping and Returns

84. Get your Shipping Policies right
85. Offer Free Shipping
86. Display the Free Shipping Threshold Order Value Prominently
87. Offer a good returns policy

Customer Re-Targeting

88. Use Ad-Roll
89. Use Adwords Remarketing
90. Clean your Email Subscribers’ List from time to time
91. Offer Cashbacks

Before diving into the technical aspects of conversion rate optimization, we feel it makes sense that we talk a little bit about user experience first. However, there's already enough written already about 'user experience', so here let's first define it and talk about one of the very often overlooked but biggest roadblock in the way of improving a store's user experience (or perhaps any website).

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