The Shopping Cart Junkie

When I was going to college, I took a night job as a telemarketer. I worked hard to develop a good pitch, and to engage my prospects in pleasant conversation. I guessed that this would be an effective method for selling over the telephone, and I was right.

In the cubicle next to me was a big, loud and obnoxious fellow by the name of Jim. Jim incorporated his offensive and pushy personality right into his sales technique. I would often listen in absolute horror as Jim would outright demand that his prospect make a purchase, and refused to take no as an answer. I found myself wondering when they would fire Jim.

A couple of weeks into this job, I found out an amazing thing.

Jim, with all of his rudeness, obnoxiousness and offensiveness, was selling just as much as me.

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that Jim’s technique appealed to some people, and my technique also appealed to a certain number of people. Jim made sells to the people who his techniques appealed to, and so did I. The people who bought from me would most likely not buy from Jim, and vice-versa.

That being the case, my job, as a sales person, is to find those people who are receptive to my personality and style. These are my people. I speak their language and will be most effective trying to sell to them.

In order to find them, I have to search through a sufficient number of people.

It’s all in the numbers.

Let’s apply this to our online sales effort.

Let’s suppose that I set up an online store to sell widgets. Being an intelligent person who is committed to success, I set up a 123 eCart storefront. I put in some time to make the store attractive, add articles and content, and display my widgets in a very attractive and enticing way.

A certain percentage of the people who visit my website will like what I’ve done with the site, and will be receptive to the notion of buying from me. Let’s arbitrarily say that this number is 20%. Of those who are receptive, I’m able to actually persuade half of them to make a sale.

This tells me that out of 100 people who visit my widget store, 10 of those people will purchase widgets. If I want to sale 100 widgets a day, I need to get 1000 visitors to my store each day. It’s all in the numbers. If only ten people visit, I’ll only sell one widget. This is what we call a conversion rate. If you’re talking to an Internet Marketing guru, and they ask what your conversion rate is, In this case you would answer that it’s ten percent.

There are ways to increase your conversion rate, and we’ll get into that a little later, but for now, I just want you to realize that with even a poor conversion rate, if you get sufficient numbers of people to your store front, you’ll still make sales.

That’s why it’s extremely important to promote your site as much as possible, and important to rank well in the search engines.

123 eCart will help you to do well in the search engines, because we’ve built features into the software which produce stores that typically show up higher in search results. The higher you show up in the search engines, the more traffic you’ll get. The more traffic - the more sales. It’s that easy.

Believe it or not, most online store owners pass up a chance to substantially increase their sales.

Studies estimate that up to 75% of online transactions are abandoned before they are completed. That’s a lot of potential sales leads for someone who is willing to do a little follow up.

Online shoppers abandon carts for several reasons, and understanding those reasons will help you to recover some of those sales.

Many shopping carts are abandoned because the buyer got nervous, or had second thoughts. Maybe they decided to think about things for a while.

If you use a shopping cart which requires the shopper to sign up for an account before adding an item to their cart, you’re in luck. You should have the shoppers telephone number. Give them a call.

It might just be that a friendly phone call with a sincere effort to help complete the sale will calm any fears or give you an opportunity to answer any objections.

Having mentioned this, I want to point out that a shopping cart which forces a shopper to set up an account before adding an item to the cart can deter a fair number of shoppers as well.

If your cart allows a shopper to add items to a cart before giving contact info, you might think that there’s no way to contact the shopper, but that may not be the case. There is a company named Second Bite which contacts your shoppers who abandon carts, and use some pretty advanced technology to try to identify the shopper.

Another reason why orders are not completed is because of failed credit cart transactions. You might think it would be fruitless to follow up on these leads, but the truth is that providing a credit card number online confuses the heck out of some people. A lot of rejections are because they give the wrong address, or don’t understand how to find their security code. A friendly call from you might resolve the situation.

Even a declined transaction might be converted to a sale with a simple phone call. After all, just because the shopper doesn’t have funds today, this doesn’t mean he or she won’t have sufficient funds tomorrow.

Give it a try! You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Larry Dozier is the Development Manager for 123 eCart - an online shopping cart service - and the owner of http://ecommerce-tutorials.com