If you think AJAX is a brand of abrasive household cleaner, you’re right. It’s also a powerful web development technology that can significantly improve user interfaces. With shopping cart abandonment rates near 50% on average, wouldn’t it be nice to have a simple, one-page checkout flow to give your web customers fewer opportunities to abandon the process?

I stumbled upon a company that has created a real live one-page checkout flow using AJAX. The company is Varien, and they have produced two videos to show you how the flow works [see the video: user with existing account] [see the video: user without an existing account]. Aside from being an insightful look into how an AJAX checkout process would work, this video details the user experience of the flow. While a one-page checkout flow has improved conversion rates by 50% for TJMaxx.com and HomeGoods.com, Varien doesn’t specify actual results of this AJAX checkout flow (which you can see live at BentGear.com).

At the very least, this is a look into what the checkout process of the future may look like. If you can afford to develop a process like this and run A/B tests against your current checkout flow, it could be worth the expense and learnings.

I’m all about free resources, and just recently the Official Yahoo Store blog pointed out that Wiley, publishers of the popular “Dummies” book series, made available for free a chapter from Rob Snell‚Äôs Starting a Yahoo! Business for Dummies.

I read through the chapter and while the chapter is written toward people who run Yahoo ecommerce web sites, there are some good tips for those who want to improve their conversion rates on any ecommerce platform.

Here’s a link to the free PDF of the chapter titled Converting Browsers into Buyers.

With landing pages becoming more popular with internet marketers due to a landing page’s ability to effectively convert browsers to buyers, it’s only natural for businesses to compare their results with others. So what is the industry average conversion rate for a landing page?

That’s the question I got recently from a client. The answer is that you’re not likely to find an answer, and here’s why — the term “landing page” has different definitions to different marketers.

Here are some of the different ways a marketer describes a landing page:

• A page a user gets to when clicking on my search engine advertisement
• A page a user gets when clicking on my ad banner
• A page a user gets when they click on a link in my email marketing campaign
• A page a user gets when they click an ad on my homepage
• A hidden page that people get when they click a specific link on my site.
• A hidden page that people get when they click on my link from a web directory or other web site

These are just a few definitions. Additionally, because there is no standard format for a landing page, landing pages can look significantly different. Compound that with the fact that a landing page might be doing something as complex as selling a $3,000 television or as simple as collecting an email address.

If you’re trying to improve your landing page conversion rate, make sure you test different versions of the page so see which has the highest conversion rate. Here are some more landing page conversion tips:

• Keep the page simple and uncluttered.
• Write compelling copy.
• Use color to highlight the most important area (the desired action).
• For lead generation, make the form as short as possible and make it the focal point.
• If selling a product, include a large product photo and clearly state the offer.
• Assign tracking codes to each individual version and track sales/leads from each.
• Make sure the landing page has only one subject/focus/product.
• Consider not including your site navigation on the landing page and reduce the number of links off of the page.

Small businesses understandably take the cheapest and easiest route to creating their ecommerce web sites, choosing to purchase pre-packaged ecommerce software or ecommerce software that their web hosts provide. This could be damaging to small businesses in many ways, so says the Ecommerce Times (and I agree whole-heartedly).

These “one size fits all” ecommerce software packages allow small businesses to upload their product images, set pricing, provide product descriptions and render sites using pre-defined templates. It doesn’t much take time to set up a web site using these software packages, but the software doesn’t allow you many of the functions necessary to a) ensure that you accurately translate your brand to the web and b) make the web site as effective as possible.

Translating your brand to the web

Using most of today’s ecommerce packages, you can add your logo to pages and change the color of different pages elements. But does this really help you communicate your brand online? Perhaps you want to add a custom look and feel to your top navigation bar, or maybe you want to add brand equities or different image views to a product page. Without programming knowledge, it’s difficult to add brand-related content to your web site using these “canned” software packages.

Inserting branding and customer-centric promises on your site‚Äîas well as basic customer service information‚Äîin contextual areas is of paramount importance if you want an effective ecommmerce site. Many “canned” ecommerce software systems have one page template that cannot easily be changed without intense programming knowledge, leaving you with a “cookie cutter” web site that lacks brand appeal.

Making your web site as effective as possible is nearly impossible with “one size fits all” ecommerce software packages

The ecommerce software systems I have reviewed rarely give you the flexibility you need to make your web site effective. Some software makes it difficult to add web analytics to your pages. Perhaps the software tool provides its own web analytics, but these metrics will usually tell you nothing more that what pages are visited and how many people are coming to your site.

Additionally, you may sell products that require multiple product photos or need to communicate special information about your products to make the customer confident of their purchase.

Since you can’t easily change the page template of a web site running “canned” ecommerce software, it makes search engine optimization very difficult.

Very few “canned” ecommerce software systems allow you to change / add / delete steps in the checkout process. This is problematic as you need the flexibility of changing pages in checkout to raise your conversion rates.

What’s a small business to do?

Some pre-packaged ecommerce systems are flexible enough to be customized by a professional. I’m currently using a fully-customizable version of Storefront.net for a client’s web site. This system lets me customize and add functions to any page on the web site, giving me complete control over the look and feel, navigation and checkout process.

I highly recommend contacting a seasoned ecommerce professional if:

• your business is using “one size fits all” ecommerce software and the web site is not generating the revenue it should
• you are considering a redesign of your existing site
• you are considering building your own ecommerce web site

The cost to hire a professional should always be offset with higher revenue from your web site, and the project should pay for itself in under 6-12 months. The expertise an ecommerce professional will bring to the project will increase your conversion rates, set up actionable web analytics, make it easy for you to maintain your site and work with you over time to ensure your web site is as effective as possible.

My last article involved using Google Analytics to create a conversion funnel so you could measure drop-offs during the steps in checkout. With these statistics, you can track your checkout conversion rate. You can also calculate your overall site conversion rate if you know the number of visitors to your site and the number of orders you’ve gotten (Orders divided by Visitors).

So you know your conversion rate, but how do you know if your conversion rate is as high as it should be? Enter the Fireclick index, a free web analytics benchmark index. The Fireclick index tracks 12 key metrics and includes breakdowns by 6 market segments. You can use the Fireclick index to compare your site to others in your industry.

Metrics measured include:

• Conversion Rate: Global
• Conversion Rate: First Time Visitors
• Conversion Rate: Repeat Visitors
• Cart Abandonment Rate
• Conversion Rate: Keywords (paid search like Google Adwords)
• Conversion Rate: Emails
• Conversion Rate: Affiliates
• Average Session Length (pages)
• Average Session Duration (min)
• Average Page Display Time (s)
• Average Page Read Time (s)
• Average Connection Speed (Kbps)

The site even graphs out the metrics so you can see trends. You can compare these graphs to your own to see how closely your site compares to the industry average.

How do you stack up?

For the smaller retailer without extra funds to spend on analytics, the advent of Google Analytics is a godsend. Google Analytics allows you to set up analytics for your site for free. Now, even the smallest retailer can afford a powerful statistics package.

It’s a fact that roughly half of all online retailers don’t know what their conversion rates are. Conversion rates are easy enough to calculate (customers/orders), but cart conversion can be a different story. Until now, only retailers with a complex tracking system could measure cart conversion.

Cart conversion is the percentage of customers that complete an order after visiting the shopping cart. It defines how many people start and finish the checkout process.

Cart conversion is important because it measures how effective your checkout process is at getting the sale. Google Analytics gives you a visual representation of your checkout conversion, one step at a time.

Enter the concept of a checkout funnel. A funnel is wide at the top and narrows as you go down, and an online checkout process tends to work the same way. The top of the “funnel” is the shopping cart (there’s some controversy as to whether the cart is part of the checkout process, but we’ll assume it is for this example). Only a subset of the people that hit the shopping cart will proceed to the shipping screen, and only a subset of those people will reach the billing page. At the end of the process is the order confirmation screen, which typically sees an even smaller number of people.

The ultimate goal, of course, is for 100% of your customers to drop through the funnel and purchase, but that doesn’t happen realistically for a number of reasons we won’t go into here. In a perfect world, the funnel would appear like a cylinder.

As long as you’ve added your Google Analytics code snippet in your pages to allow for tracking, you can create a checkout funnel. Google Analytics allows you to set up “goals,” so you’ll want to set up a goal called “Cart conversion” and paste in the URL for each step in your checkout process.

After you’ve set this goal up, you’ll find the report under Content Optimization > Goals & Funnel Process > Defined Funnel Navigation. Once you have received data for the goal you’ve set up, you’ll see the number of visitors that have hit each step and the success rate.

What you do with this information is up to you. Obviously, you want to reduce dropoff from one step to another. I’ve completed many checkout optimization studies, so if you’re interested in how to use this information, drop me an e-mail.