Does a more attractive website get more sales?

Regular readers will probably know that I have a little online eCommerce business “on the side”. It’s a part-time thing; I spend maybe an hour or so on it most days, answering emails and packing and sending orders, etc.

I’ve had the same website design since I began online retailing in 2001. Honestly, even though it looked dreadful, it worked really well and I was too scared to touch it.

Owning an online store is actually what got me into the online marketing and SEO industry and is something I’m really passionate about. I reckon having my own retail store also allows me to empathise with our eCommerce customers and help them achieve the results they want. Big or small, the principles are always the same: traffic, conversions and average order value being the three things you have in your control.

For the last six months I’ve been working with a friend and colleague to redesign the website. I decided to go with Magento as the platform, mainly because quite a few of our clients use it, and although it’s nowhere near as easy to use as the aptly named (and fine Australian-built product) Ezimerchant, I thought it time for a change.

It also means I can test things from an online marketing and conversion optimisation perspective. Magento has features which enable you easily to run split tests, etc, as well as add hundreds of third party plug-ins.

One of the plug-ins I purchased for the new website was One Step Checkout. As its name suggests, this $350 plug-in enables you to reduce the checkout steps from around five or so, down to two.

I figured if its claims were correct in terms of conversion rate improvements, the investment would pay for itself pretty quickly.

So far their claims appear to be true! But more on that in a minute…

Since the new site soft-launched on the weekend, every metric has been positive (except for traffic as I broke a cardinal rule of setting up 301 redirects from old pages to new ones!). Practice what you preach and all that.

I also turned off AdWords traffic during launch in case something went wrong – it’s not a good idea to send paid traffic to a page that no longer exists.

There are still lots of little things to sort out, but on first flush, it’s working well. Bounce rate is down 15% from 65% to about 50%. Pages per visit metric are up 50% (a reflection on the bounce rate) as is time on site, up from an average of one to two minutes.

The cart funnel is where it’s really interesting.

The first screen shot is a funnel from one of our best performing customer’s online store using a fairly common three step checkout.

The funnel success rate (the percentage of people who start at the cart page) to the Transaction Completion step is a healthy 47%. The data is for the last week or so.

You can see there are quite a few exits at each step, nothing too serious as a percentage but annoying nonetheless.

Then there’s the One Step Check Out funnel which frankly, has me really impressed.

You can see the funnel steps are reduced but where it’s winning is in the funnel conversion rate, sitting at 74% – almost double. Now, it’s still early days here and there’s nowhere near the statistical sample size from my transactions compared to the multi-step checkout, but early signs are very encouraging.

Overall site conversion rate so far is sitting at 6.9%, which is almost double that of the previous site.

So to answer the question I raised in the title of this post is, yep, I reckon a more attractive, visually aesthetic site will improve your online sales.

And a One Step Checkout process probably won’t hurt either!

For more Online Sales expert advice, click here.

Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.