Significant challenges confront Ecommerce vendors and online sellers and marketers, but the compensating opportunities for those with vision, commitment and perseverance must be almost incalculable? Global B2C and B2B online revenues continue to grow and traditional obstacles to doing business globally are lying in the dust; who wouldn’t be excited?

This article should be a short read, but a long think.

One of the challenges faced by the ecommerce/online marketer’ community is the growth of the industry itself. How do you read the trends in order to implement campaigns based upon data that reliably predicts buying behavior and shopping patterns in your industry?

While there is plenty written on this subject of online buying patterns, and I do not wish to address it here, there are some other questions that can be asked on a regular basis by every online marketer and ecommerce vendor, the responses to which can have great significance for improving online business, no matter how successful your organization is at present. I wish to focus on one simple question?

Do you know what your online selling ratios are?

(If you do not then you do not have a ‘handle’ on your business, relatively speaking, no matter how successful you are currently.)

A very simple example is the ratio of visitors to orders placed. Let us say for every 5 visitors there is 1 order placed. A ratio of 5:1 or 1:5, how ever you wish to represent it.

Remaining simple in our analysis, you believe that it is possible by implementing certain modifications to your ecommerce/online marketing strategy, that this ratio can be improved to a 4:1 result, an improvement of 20%. How this might be achieved is not important to this example, or the point of this article.

Allow me to further assume that you have good site activity analysis and that you also know the following:

• You average 1000 visitors per week
• Every visitor spends on average 30 seconds on your site
• You average 200 orders per week
• Of the 1000 visitors, 120 spend 3 minutes or more on your site
• 40 of these visitors place an order as part of that visit

(Allow me to assume, again for the sake of simplicity, that we are dealing with a single product organization so there is no need to discuss landing pages in this example?)

You could still describe your selling ratio as 5:1 (1000 visitors-200 orders). In reality you now have at least two ratios:

880 visitors for 160 orders*………5.5:1
120 visitors for 40 orders…………3:1

The issue now is what could you do to increase the number of visitors that spend three minutes or more on your site? You are not concerned with increasing the numbers of visitors to your site in this example.

I know that this is a very simple, if not very simplistic, example. The purpose is to get you to think about and analyze relationships and ratios that you may not have considered, in order to plan strategies to maximize your ecommerce/online marketing results on current traffic.

When you start to think about, and analyze, relationships and ratios, you can more creatively strategize effective campaigns, perhaps in conjunction with your search engine optimization (seo) partner and online marketing consultant. You will also know what to monitor.

With initiative and creativity you can increase your ecommerce/online marketing results.

* For ‘orders’ also read as the action that your website asks a visitor to take.

• Why People Buy (Your product solves a problem) - By Leo Talbot
• Why people buy - The lifestyle factor - By Leo Talbot
• Your Customer’s Customer (Productive research for Ecommerce and Online Marketers) by Leo Talbot

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005 at 8:05 pm and is filed under Ecommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.