SmallBusinessNewz

You can't close a sale through your website if you can't keep the customer there.

The Bounce Rates

Caroline Melberg at Small Business Mavericks asks a good question: "Is your bounce rate too high?"

She talks about seeing what pages on your site have the highest amount of bounces and fixing what is wrong with them to keep visitors around.

They're Not Getting Away That Easily

Alexandria K. Brown (aka The Ezine Queen) talks about the concept of using pop-ups as attempts to still make money off the ones that leave, but while I respect Brown (we have published some of her work in the past), I'm not sure this is the best idea because pop-ups like Brown admits can be quite annoying. If you have been reading my articles for very long, I believe you know my stance on customer annoyance. However, Brown is right in not wanting the customers to get away so easily.

You do want to give them a reason to come back to your site. I just don't think pop-ups are the way to leave a good impression.

As Long as They're Still There

While they are still at your site, you need to make it as easy as possible for customers to find your checkout pages for one. It's all about usability. Categorizing products correctly certainly helps as Stoney deGeyter discusses.

Offering a variety of payment options is another concept your eCommerce site may be missing. If you give the customer more options, it only makes sense that you will get more sales, because what if you don't offer the option they prefer? They may break down and go with an option that you do offer, but they are just as likely to go to one of your competitors that does offer that option. Why take the chance?

As Melberg's post suggests though, you should really be looking at your site's stats to try to pinpoint the pages your customers are leaving your site from. You can then evaluate the pages themselves and make the proper adjustments to optimize them for the sale.

What are your suggestions for keeping customers at your site?