shopping cart abandonment part 2, Trust Marks | E-comm Solution.

part II of the gripping series

Yahoo! Merchant Summit | E-comm Solution.

The merchant summit yahoo is running following the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in Chicago this June 11th at McCormick Place is an excellent opportunity to meet other merchants and engage with the Yahoo Store Community.  If you are interested (and i know i am), sign up by going to ysummit.com It is in June so it might be too close to get plane tickets now but there is one in September in California coming too, and there is information on the site regarding that one as well.

Here is a great post about cart abandonment, and some tips for reducing it using Yahoo! Store:

http://e-commsolution.com/shopping-cart-abandonment/

Yahoo! Web Analytics is designed to enable you to view, in near real-time, the experiences of visitors to your website. With Yahoo! Web Analytics you can understand how visitors get to your site, what they do while there, how many and which ones take different kinds of actions and, where possible, the benefit and cost of each lead. Yahoo! Web Analytics helps you identify the ads, campaigns, keywords and referrals that contribute the most to your bottom line. It helps you understand what pages, content and products perform better than others, thereby helping you maximize customer engagement and product merchandising on your site, as well as structure your site to optimize task completion rates. And by providing valuable metrics about customers’ experiences on your website, Yahoo! Web Analytics can help you allocate time and budget better, increase visitor engagement and satisfaction, convert more visitors into customers, and transform existing customers into loyal fans.

To enable Yahoo! Web Analytics, follow these simple steps:

1) Click the “Get Started with Yahoo! Web Analytics” link in your store manager

2) Continue to the setup page

3) the system will ask you what pages you would like to track – in order to ensure full tracking of visits and conversion it is best to enable tracking on both those pages built in Store Editor as well as the checkout pages

4) The only other step that is required, other than publishing, is to copy and paste the provided text to your privacy policy page and provide a link to that page in the box provided.

5) Submit the page

6) Publish your Store Editor and your Order Settings

For more information on Yahoo! Web Analytics, check out the following sites:

http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ywa/index.html

The ability to process payments through PayPal is an excellent addition to most online stores. Not only does it provide yet another option for customers to pay for their orders, but it welcomes the millions of PayPal users to your store. Many PayPal users have what they consider “discretionary” funds in their PayPal accounts and are more apt to spend from these reserves than their credit cards. By accepting PayPal, you allow customers to use those discretionary funds to purchase from your store. It’s easy to setup and you’ll only pay for it when a customer actually submits their payment through PayPal. If you already have a PayPal account, configuring your store to use it to process payments is a snap. If you don’t have a PayPal account, you can sign up for free at http://www.PayPal.com.

Configuring your Yahoo! Store to process payments through PayPal:

1) Go to your Store Control Panel
2) Click “Payment Center” in the Order Settings column
3) Click “Add New Processor”
4) Select “Use your existing payment processor,” then “I want to accept payments using my PayPal account”
5) Click “Configure PayPal Account”
6) Sign in to PayPal
7) Click “I Agree”
Click “Return to Merchant Solutions”
9) Click “Publish Order Settings” and on the ensuing page, click “Publish”

This post is the first in a series on My favorite reports in Yahoo! Web Analytics

My absolute favorite report in YWA is the Search Phrases report. This report can be found under Marketing > Search Engines and Referrers > Search Phrases. The default report will give you a sense of what keyphrases visitors to your site used to find your store in a search engine. This is handy, but we can improve the report drastically by customizing it a little bit. To do so, click “Customize Report” at the top of the screen. In the Custom Report Wizard that launches, look for the “Metrics” tab in the upper left. From there, click Marketing, then Conversion. Now we want to click and drag “SALE Conversion Rate” to the “Drag Metrics Here” box and click “Show Report” in the upper left.

The report that is generated will then show you not only which keyphrases visitors searched for to find your store, but the rate at which visitors who used a given keyphrase actually ended up buying something from your store! What I would recommend is to change the number of results per page to 100, then sort by page views. This will ensure that those keyphrases which are used most frequently are listed first, and you can then analyze their respective conversion rates to determine which keyphrases perform the best for your website. This information is useful for many things, in particular the optimization of your home, section and product pages for search engines, and the optimization of Pay-Per-Click advertising campaigns.

as you may have noticed, there have been some big changes around here as I get the ball rolling on the new blog and redesign the store. I successfully implemented my first RTML edit, and then another. I installed a lightbox for the store. I installed a contact form in my store using the provided cgi script available in my yahoo store, and today I added jquery validation to the form.

Check out the form here: http://benpollak.com/contact.html

checkout the RTML edit here (it’s a quantity box): http://benpollak.com/checkers.html

the lightbox and the quantity box were done using tutorials from http://e-commsolution.com

so back in january, I upgraded my wordpress blog. it crashed. this is its replacement. and no, none of my content was backed up properly because I relied on a plugin I will never use again, wp-backup