Closing the Online Sale

How to coax Web customers to keep clicking during checkout

By Greg Brown

Ten thousands Web hits. Three thousand shopping carts filled. Four completed sales? What's wrong with this picture?

There's a lot of reasons your e-commerce site isn't exactly bringing in the bacon. Some of them have to do with your product and presentation, but some of it is because your site itself works against closing the sale.

Take some tips from the e-selling giants: Shorten the distance between looking and buying with easy tech.

Make the experience more convincing

Fear is a big reason people click away at the last second, leaving the cart behind. It's a reasonable reaction: You're asking them to put their financial identity into your hands.
Try: A recognized brand at checkout can do a lot to put people at ease. One of the biggest is Paypal. Other well-known providers include Verisign and Network Solutions. Google recently got into this business in a big way with Google Checkout.

Make your site secure

Most ordinary consumers don't really notice when Web sites suddenly encrypt data (usually, a lock appears in the lower right corner) but many will notice when it should -- and doesn't.
Try: Read up on Secure Sockets Layer encryption at providers Thawte and Verisign or this short but complete Webopedia entry on SSL.

Reconsider your site design

Too many sites are heavy on flashy imagery and light on product detail, navigability and that essential click-to-order moment. It's unfortunately very easy to make it hard for your customer to actually buy something.
Try: Michael Bloch has written an excellent long guide on e-commerce design, as has James Maguire. You can read an interesting argument for post-sale e-mail marketing at the Marketing Experiments Journal online.

Reconsider your product

Some things just probably weren't meant to be sold online, or can't be sold well except through massive e-tailers, where you are likely to face a thousand competitors with the same or similar lines.
Try: Get a good dose of the reality of online sales by looking carefully through Amazon's Top Sellers lists. Buy.com has a similar listing it calls Most Popular.

Quit trying so hard on your own

Running a full-on e-commerce operation, particularly if it's just part of your business, can be taxing. Consider opening an online store through a major e-tailer. These folks know how to close a sale.
Try: Amazon has a dozen or so flavors of this concept. Yahoo! offers something similar and simpler through its Yahoo! Small Business channel. Ebay, long known as an auction site, now does much of its business through its own Ebay Stores.

Simplicity is the key to the new world of e-commerce. If you checkout process takes too long, requires too much personal data or worse, is cranky from the tech standpoint, prepare for the worst.
Increasingly, giant Web operations are abandoning the traditional retail practice of hitting a price point by tacking on shipping and taxes afterward, instead including those costs in the first price consumers see. If you can eat the costs (within reason) you might have to follow suit.
Pasta in Plymouth? Car parts in Carolina? If your product is too narrow or regional for the Web, consider dumping a shopping cart for a simple 1-800 order line instead.