By Jonathan Ross

According to another report “Retail Ecommerce Search - Accuracy, Relevancy and Profitability in the Age of Consumer Choice”, published last year by Aberdeen Group, average conversion rates across online retail range from 1% for the bottom 30% of ecommerce sites (based on overall performance) to 6% for the top 20% – our own research into the Top 300 ecommerce sites in Europe shows that these figures also vary widely between country from Sweden at 4.20% to Belgium with 1.45%.

The challenge for retailers now is to find ways of raising these conversion rates. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t all be aiming to achieve figures of around 6%, there are even some brands pulling in results in excess of 10%. Tackling this problem is a lot to do with catering to the needs of your own specific audience, but retailers need to look beyond prioritising features that are “showy” over those that are known to be profitable.

One of the biggest issues the ecommerce sector currently faces is poor data quality. While brands are embracing the power of search engine optimisation (SEO), and are investing in creating their content in the most search friendly way, how the actual data is structured is not being considered in any great depth. Some brands are employing college students to curate their data, but with this information now coming from so many different sources – whether that be from brands, partners, suppliers or unstructured data channels, such as Facebook and the like – having to manually go through this process every time a new product or piece of information is added to a catalogue or every time a new season catalogue is released is just not feasible.

There are now packages on the market that can do this automatically. Not only does this make cleansing the data more straightforward from a spelling perspective, it also allows retailers to automatically handle different word usage – such as differentiating between the use of “pants” and “trousers” for the US and UK markets. Importantly, on top of this an automated process allows retailers to unearth what could have previously been hidden connections between data sets, thereby allowing them to make products as easy to find as possible, and linking products in ways that may have previously been impossible or at least very difficult to spot.

For example, a fashion retailer may find that their shirts have varying sleeve lengths, which are referred to differently within the description content – sometimes by actual centimetre length and other times by attributes such as short, long or sporty. Standardising this data could be a long and complex process if done manually, but using an automated system will produce immediate results. Collating data sets in this way will ensure that visitors can locate what they want quickly and easily, as well as giving them a much more refined view of any product.

Fixing all data issues as early as possible through an automated process is much more cost-effective for retailers than finding themselves faced with having to do remedial work when problems with poor data quality and linking become obvious through site search data and analytics. Fixing these issues at the data cleansing stage also means retailers are not losing out on valuable sales conversions from the moment they go live.

Once issues with data have been corrected then there are other key areas retailers need to focus on to increase usability and boost their conversion rates. These range from the positioning and size of the search box, to how recommendation and search results are displayed.

FACT-Finder has done extensive research into how search results are presented. The two most popular are in a list view or in a grid view. The grid view works best with products that require big picture displays, such as fashion, jewellery or luxury items. List view on the other hand, is best used to focus more on technical products that need more data and specification detail such as consumer electronics.

With product recommendations, retailers will already know, for example, when previous customers bought a specific pair of trouser and then went on to buy a particular belt, and this can then be presented as a recommendation to future customers buying the same trousers. They can also show other items in ranges that go together, which can help to get shoppers more involved with the brand, as well as being a good way to push people towards either trending or high margin items.

Another powerful tool for conversion is product landing pages. These can be based around special offers or around trending themes. For example, a fashion retailer may discover that a large number of people are searching for red high-heeled shoes. By creating a specific landing page for “red high heeled shoes”, they can draw together the most popular products. Of the top 300 online retailers, very few are investing in this area, instead choosing to continue to push money into recommendations and driving more traffic to their site.

Using landing pages can act as a key trigger for converting site visitors to customers by underlining that the person searching has come to the right products or offers and they can also carry prominent calls to action to directly drive sales. With customers being presented with so many options these days in online shops, and with the web making it so much easier to check other sites and compare them, creating the best possible experience for your customers is essential.

Landing pages can be an important tool in this process, for example if someone searching for Adidas items is presented with a fully branded Adidas page rather than just a list of Adidas products they are likely to build a stronger bond with your shop as they will perceive that it is catering much more to their needs, this can also engender a greater sense of trust.

These are all simple but effective methods to boost conversion rates on sites and somewhere retailers would do well to put their money. After all, driving traffic to a site is only going to be successful if the quality of data and user experience is good enough to keep people on the site and direct them to what they are looking for as quickly as possible.

About the author

Jonathan Ross is UK Business Development Manager for FACT-Finder.

http://www.fact-finder.com/