Its regularly updated – The last thing you want is to build out your store and find out the software is rarely updated with important fixes and patches.  With Magento, they are constantly updating, correcting any known bugs and launching new and better features. Magento also boasts a huge online community with a huge, ever growing knowledge-base.

Custom –   It has a incredibly rich administrative area, which gives you the options to tailor everything to suit your ever changing needs – such as product features, reviews and categories or content targeted at different customer groups.  Magento Specializes in very detailed conversion options and because its open source… if you need to get even more custom, a web developer can easily assist you in whatever you can possibly think of to further improve your site.

Big Data – Even if you are new to marketing online you most likely know that having a store requires accurate data and lots of it.  No matter what industry you are in, you need to build databases and analyze them for insight.  You need to know who your visitors are, where they came from and what they are doing when they reach your site. Magento offers Enhanced E-commerce as a extension, which allows you to collect huge amounts of detailed data about your customers and their shopping behavior.  You also receive comprehensive reports about the your website performance, what areas you can improve and what is potentially causing failures.

Certainly there are other options out there that are free and simpler to use.  However if you have a very clear business outline and you know exactly what you are selling and who you are selling it to…Magento truly is the most flexible Ecommerce program out there.  A system that allows you to tailor it to your needs, not the other way around.

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So to begin, what exactly IS a conversion rate?

To keep it simple, a conversion is your stores ability to get customers to purchase from it.  It can also mean other customer actions such as signing up for contact/email newsletters, creating a account and saving a wish list or simply starting a trial of your services.  Most of the time conversion reflects how many people came to your site that actually BUY from it.

Your conversion rate is calculated as below:

Number of purchases or goals divided by actual site visits = your conversion rate

Why are Conversion rates important to Ecommerce websites?

There is definitely more to it than just how many actual sales you get.  It is also a measure of well your Magneto Ecommerce website is meeting your customers needs.

Lets look at your website itself:

How fast is your website?

Does it load quickly?

Are you using Magento hosting specifically for Magento websites? It is critically important to look at your website loading speeds.  After all, you are working hard to drive this traffic in and engage your customers, the last thing you want is to lose sales due to not investigating the hosting you have for your Magento site.

Do images take a long time to display?

Is your checkout easy and uncomplicated for a user?

Is your checkout secure?

Do you offer multiple ways to pay?

Lets look at the actual traffic you are getting to your website

Looking at the analytics of your Magento website, how is the quality of the traffic you are getting?

Are people staying on the site awhile or are they immediately bouncing off?

Are these your target clients and where are they coming from?

Are you using SEO, social media and different types of promotions to your full advantage?

Looking deeper into your Magneto website analytics:

As we know there can be many factors as to what influences someone to purchase or not.  That said they are clues within your analytics that will give you an idea of what may be happening:

Are you losing people at checkout?  If you are perhaps you may have security, pricing or payment issues on your website. Or maybe your customers are finding your checkout to difficult or time consuming.

Are you losing people right on your product pages?  Perhaps you aren’t giving your customers enough detail (or the kind of detail they want).

Assist your customers in finding exactly what they want

When a potential customer cant locate a specific item on your site you run the very high risk of them going to a competitors site. There are two ways you can help your customer find exactly what they want quickly and easily.

Search – Improving your Magento website search abilities is one the absolute best things you can do.  Make sure your “Search bar” is easily accessible and very visible on every page of your site.  Allowing “Auto complete” for different search phrases helps minimize typing for your customer and gives them a multitude of search choices.

Faceted search – You can use faceted search options to assist your customers in drilling down their search’s based on product attributes such as item category, color and size.  Also be sure to include common spelling errors and similar type names to increase the correct results.

Make your product pages sell your product:

Once your customer locates a product, now you have the opportunity to sell the item.  Make sure you are doing everything you can to detail product information. This would include clear and informative product description, multiple images, customer reviews, social shares, etc.

Clear and straightforward Call to Actions:

Make sure its easy to “Add this item to cart”, check or “View their cart”, “Keep shopping” or simply “Checkout”.

Mobile Friendly:

Remember mobile devices now represent 65% of all digital media time, with desktops/PC a close second.   If you’re not able to reach your audience through mobile search or display, or you’re not providing a satisfactory mobile experience you will miss out compared to competitors who are.

Pricing your sales and promotions:

Offering discounts and limited time sales are a great opportunity to drive in new traffic, however overusing these tactics can potentially negatively effect the way the customers see your brand. There is much more to brand loyalty than pricing alone you should also focus on stellar customer support, overall business organization and customer satisfaction as well.

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The obvious action would be to have your Ecommerce store as your main point of center for retail but then also expand to other channels.  In the past the problem with this approach has been cumbersome to take on. Managing your sales, inventory and product catalogues over the multitude of different sales venues can leave anyone frustrated and overwhelmed.

How does a retailer manage and reconcile inventory levels and sales when some sales aren’t immediately updated in a central database, leading to potential “Out of stock” situations that could easily damage a retailers reputation?  And how much time would all that really take?  Selling via Multi channel can be a very rewarding option and fortunately for Magento store owners there are now several solutions that help integrate your store with the biggest of Ecommerce channels.

SellBrite

It’s a multi-channel cloud retail platform that includes a Magento integration alongside others that include eBay, Amazon, and Etsy.  It offers many of the multi-channel features you’d expect, including the ability to create and manage listings across all channels, inventory syncing, and order fulfillment. Sellbrite is great if you want to integrate a Magento store with an existing selection of channels or use a cloud service that can control Magento along with other channels.

M2E Pro

M2E Pro gets its name from its original purpose: to form a bridge between Magento and eBay (which owns Magento). Since then its reach has expanded, and M2E Pro is now a full-featured multi-channel eCommerce solution with support for eBay, Amazon, and Rakuten. Unlike other multi-channel solutions, M2E Pro puts Magento front and center, making it an ideal choice for retailers with an existing Magento store who want to expand onto other channels. Product catalogues and inventory are controlled from within Magento’s backend and data is transferred from there to the external channels.

Orders from external channels are fed back into Magento so that each order on eBay, for example, will have a corresponding order automatically created within Magento.

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A large portion of shopping carts are abandoned mid process. Though there are many reasons why this could occur …a complicated or cumbersome check-out process is a major factor.

Your Magento Checkout

If you have a online Magento store, you have no doubt put a lot of time and energy into it.  You have also undoubtedly worked hard to drive to traffic to your website.   If you answered yes, its in your best interest to consider streamlining your checkout process.  Adding Social media logins at checkout is one newer way to accomplish this.  Social media logins are tied to your customers social media accounts online (such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter account).  No long registration forms to fill out, just a “one-click” login. This can truly make a difference in the overall shopping experience, especially for that user who may be ensure of their purchase. By making it so simple and fast, users are not tempted to change their mind or abandon their cart half-way to go check our your competitor.  Social Logins also eliminates the need for the customer to create yet another login to remember for your website, simply “Login with Facebook” …and they are in, which is time saving and encourages repeat sales.

The Mobile Experience

Mobile traffic now accounts for 50.3% of all E-commerce traffic.   That being said, have you every tried to checkout on a mobile device and were forced to fill out lengthy registration forms on a small touch screen?  Most of us have and its not fun.  Social logins will allow your customers on mobile devices to bypass the potentially frustrating experience of checkout on mobile and quickly execute their purchase.  Dont lose your mobile Ecommerce customers due to a complicated checkout!

Marketing

As mentioned above the social logins are tied directly to the users online social accounts, which supplies you with a huge amount of data available for marketing.  You can see who your clients are and market directly to them.  This is incredibly useful when personalization and segmentation come into play. You could always ask your customer to fill out forms to gather this type of data …but isn’t this exactly what puts users off to begin with? With Social logins…all of the information is there for the taking.

Magento Extensions

There are several options for implementing social media logins on an eCommerce store; Magento Social Login and Inchoo’s Social Connect are among the best.

Social logins create a speedy and more secure login process for users, and they provide much needed marketing data for eCommerce retailers. If you don’t offer social media logins on your site, why not?

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