Miva's known usability and conversion barriers

[NinaLeon]

Re: Miva's known usability and conversion barriers

This definitely answers my main question. Which was what it seemed like, that the consultants did not know Miva and were trying to make us switch to a platform they were familiar with. Although, the main people we have spoken to weren't even web developers, which made me surprised that they wouldn't just hire or work with someone like one of you who were Miva experts. Have any of you ever been hired by conversion specialists?

We have Google Analytics set up, but not conversion tracking.

We know we need to do A/B testing. We know every store is different and you need to test everything. I'm making changes all the time and it makes me nuts that we're not doing A/B testing.

Pretty much everything in Steve Strickland's post we're looking for help with. Either with a conversion expert (which I'm still not convinced exists and I'm not sure how to tell who is legit other than they're showing me A/B test results) or ideally someone who can train us and hold our hand through the beginning of A/B testing because we know its a forever kind of thing.

For those interested, the site is www.SkyeSterling.com

We already know our search is bad and we are looking at Nextopia and it sounds like Sebenza may have a new search solution coming out as well. We're using power search which is by far better than built in search, but because it searches parts of words, it doesn't work for us. A search for "ring" returns "earrings", "daring", and "rings". Bad search, and I know that's a key element to a site. On our site it fluctuates with the home page as the most visited page.

Sebenza's customer reviews are also at the top of our list to add and to have Order Manager automatically generate an email two or three weeks after a purchase ships with links back to products purchased requesting reviews. Eventually have a 5 star review category...

My (I realize very big) goal is to get up to a 6% coversion (which I count as sale) rate. I know we need help doing that. I know that's really hard.

Thank you all for your passionate responses. I figured the responses would either go the consultant doesn't know what their doing or yeah, Miva sucks. Because we had heard it from more than one consultant, I wasn't sure where the truth was. The more I've learned about Miva the more I've seen that it can do what I want it to, it's just hard to find documentation on how and I wish I had found this forum a few months ago.

Thank you
Nina

[wcw]

Re: Miva's known usability and conversion barriers

I believe Amazon claims a patent for the process of sending a follow on email to solicit a rating/review.

[Biffy]

Re: Miva's known usability and conversion barriers

I believe Amazon claims a patent for the process of sending a follow on email to solicit a rating/review.

They better start suing folks like Netflix and ten thousand others then!

I visited the site this morning while having coffee and it does have a number of on-site issues.

Center the layout. Non-symmetrical layouts are mildly disturbing and have a bit of an amateur feel to them.

Add a dark or black surround, something with a subtle pattern in it. The coloration is a bit flat and this would add a lot of contrast. It would help the products pop-out.

Widen the layout to near-max size on 17" monitors. You're wasting some valuable real estate. You have nice positioning of the primary merchandising. You can squeeze in a tad more product merchandising "above the fold". Study some eye-movement heat maps to help position your merchandising.

Upper-right navigation is a bit crowded and cluttered looking. I'd clean it up a bit, make it more clear.

You have some very good merchandising on the landing page. The navigation is nicely arrayed, too.

Category and Product pages are fine. Use a centered layout with dark surround to make them stand out better. I like to see my quantity in cart value right next to the add to cart button.

Login screens need to be styled and laid out more professionally. Those Miva defaults are ugly!

The checkout screens are a real mess. Far too many distractions and clutter here. You're doing quite a bit that disrupts the payment process. This is where major work is needed and major gains can be had. Too many issues to bring up here.

The goal of 6% conversions is too ambitious for a jewelry store doing $1000 per day or more. Let's set an initial target of 2% conversions and make them more profitable by increasing repeat business and average order size. This is done with several methods i won't go into here. You'll have market segments exceed the 6% conversion, but new customers will probably never do 6%. So, you need a balance.

If you're using AdWords you probably need to do some very aggressive trimming and tweaking to get it profitable. Your industry is overbidding many keywords. Don't fall into that trap. First, reduce traffic and increase the ROI. Then and only then start to increase traffic. Also, many top keywords aren't generating any sales, are they? Kill 'em off now. The wrong traffic doesn't convert into sales, it just means more cost. Get rid of the deadwood in your paid traffic sources. Gross sales will go down but profit will go up.

Your highest ROI and largest average order size will come from repeat business. Put major effort into that newsletter and do your backmarketing religiously! Do it with very high quality, too. Keep the emails short and sweet with only 1 or 2 nice images. This is your most critical and valuable market segment.

Time for me to get to work now!

I apologize if I've offended with my comments. My intentions are purely helpful.

[NinaLeon]

Re: Miva's known usability and conversion barriers

I'm hard to offend. All feedback is always appreciated.

[Brandon MUS]

Re: Miva's known usability and conversion barriers

Some solid advice there, Biffy. Nina, you have a nice website, better than a lot of the Miva sites I see out there. As you start to make the changes that Biffy mentioned, make sure you track and test each change. It does NO GOOD to blindly make a change without a control in place. Sales can come in a roller coaster effect and you may get misleading data if you aren't testing properly.

[dreamingdigital]

Re: Miva's known usability and conversion barriers

Rick:
Cool, 100% customizable is exciting. I remember Miva 4 when I had to trick it to do what I wanted.

Steve:
You have it bang-on!

Nina:
Some more feedback/suggestions:
1. Move your phone number out of the utilities section and make it bigger. Put the search up there instead.
2. Where the search is you could put your phone number and a live chat support icon.
3. It looks like your site is a working wireframe. It's not pretty enough. I'd hire a graphic designer to take what you have and make it look nicer.
4. Your continue shopping button on the shopping bag page needs to be not a javascript back button. You have the post variables sent from the previous page. Use them with SMT and send the user back to the product. That way the shopping cart in the top will be updated and a checkout link will be there. It's pretty easy to do and you don't need a module.

CP