
Offer HN: Advice on how to increase sales and conversions on your website - paraschopra
I'm the founder of Visual Website Optimizer and since last year have had the privileged of studying and analyzing 100s of A/B split tests to learn what makes a particular website convert visitors into customers. If you have website (or a landing page) and you have traffic but are struggling with your conversion rate, contact me. Would love to advice how you can go about increasing sales and conversions.<p>My contact details: paras@wingify.com<p>PS: I'm loving the new phenomenon of Offer HN and in past few days actually contacted some amazing HNers for advice so thought of giving back to this awesome community. As a bonus, I expect to learn about many great HNers.
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themansion
I've worked with Paras on few occasions and cannot begin to tell you how
helpful he has been. VWO is a stellar product that if you're not using it,
confidently know you are loosing a lot of business. Our conversion ratio has
increased substantially over course of 6 weeks with all the testing and
implementations that we have done.

Thank you, amir g. | executive director the mansion group.

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pinksoda
Visual Website Optimizer is a fantastic product and Paras is a great guy. If
you run a website, you need to be using VWO. You will easily make your money
back within one use.

Pull the trigger. Buy it. You won't regret it.

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tony584
I own <http://www.chicagoteagarden.com> \- I'm using Ubercart for the checkout
page. We don't have a huge amount of cart abandonment but I'm wondering if you
see room for improvement as far as the UI goes. Thanks! My email is
tony@chicagoteagarden.com

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aresant
I'd throw in a couple of comments on this one - I'm looking specifically at
cart/checkout:

a) Including the product picture again in the "Cart Contents" overlay provides
better process continuity, and that usually results in better conversion.

b) Push all of your fields to the left side of the page in "Delivery Info" and
"Billing Info" - that will put those fields directly into the hot-zone of
attention where users spend the most time looking - the less you make your
users work the higher your conversion rate.

c) The page width is a little off in IE8 and FF creating a horizontal scroll
bar in 1024x768 at the bottom of the page, this is one of those tiny little
professionalism issues that people can subconsciously pick up on and ruins a
sale - even if you're only seeing <10% of visitors in that resolution.

d) Under payment method you have a floating radio button but no options - I'd
remove the radio button, and position the VISA / MC / etc logos into the cart
box.

e) Showing an SSL certificate and reinforcing security heavily around where
users are actually entering credit card info can result in huge gains - more
on that here [http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/proper-placement-
of...](http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/proper-placement-of-trust-
logos-can-make-a-huge-difference-in-conversion-rate/)

Good luck!

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tony584
Thanks a lot! This is really helpful. You are right, I will definitely look
into the 1024x768 scrollbar issue I did not know about that one. All of the
other issues are also now on my to-do list. Thanks for the great advice.
Cheers to better conversion rates!

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jasonc88911
I have seen Paras's posts the past year around the internet about
Visualwebsiteoptimizer. I am very impresssed with him and his company. If you
own a website and are looking to take your business to the next level greatly
consider VWO as you will not be disappointed by the results.

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mattblalock
I co-founded <http://www.myticklespot.com> \- we use Magento and have a ton of
cart abandonment... our conversion rate is 1.34% and won't budge. Where do you
see room for improvement?

Thank you so much for this offer!

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paraschopra
Well, I found in incredibly hard to find 'Add to Cart' button your site. On
your product pages, you should move it to top and make it really prominent on
the page (maybe a different color, how about red?). Plus, your product pages
lack brief one line description. Ideally, I would like to see what a product
is just below the product name. You have paragraphs and videos but not brief
description. ou should emphasize the discount given. For now, I have to
mentally calculate how much I am saving. Why can't you tell that directly on a
page? You are also underplaying 'Free Shipping' aspect. It is a big, big
advantage and should be written right next to the price.

After I add product to a basket, you should swap the order of buttons in the
popup. The checkout button should be displayed above the continue shopping
button.

Lastly, your checkout page: if possible, add tax in the price itself. Visitors
don't prefer surprises on the checkout page. No where it was obvious to me
that you were going to do that. Please avoid that or mention in price
something like 10% tax extra (or better still, add in the price and say all
inclusive).

Then you ask users to register with the site but you do have a express
checkout as well. I would test eliminating that step. You should be able to
detect a repeat visitor from cookie or something, so ideally should show that
step only to those visitors. Lastly, try to take all information in a single
step (that is shown to increase conversions).

Hope that helps!

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mattblalock
WOW! Thank you so much! I've never considered a single of these things, thank
you so much for the time and ideas. I've just added all of these things to my
to-do list for AB testing!

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natgordon
I've working on <http://toeflnow.com>.

The primary market is ESL (English as a Second Language) aged 17-24.

We are not converting. We actually had a much uglier out-of-the-box wordpress
site that was converting better than this website.

What's your advice about how we can improve conversions for our paid products?

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jbstevens6
I've been managing the website <http://www.lakerestoration.com> for a little
under a year now. In that time I've managed to get the conversion rate up from
1.26% to about 1.78%. Any advice you could give me on further improvements
would be awesome!

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paraschopra
I didn't realize that you were actually selling something on the site (and
that's bad if you are actually selling something). I think you need a large
headline on the homepage saying 'Buy Lake Weed Control Products' and then list
2-3 products (with images) and just below it 'See our full catalogue'.

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laed
I own an educational video site and we just launched a subscription product
for teachers that is getting traffic but no conversion. Any
thoughts?<http://www.studybeat.com/signup/instructors/> My email is
ed@studybeat.com Thanks!

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webjoe
Because of this offer, I'm signing up for Visual Website Optimizer. What a
great way to share!

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iworkforthem
I am launching www.tradesalerts.com in a few days.. would love some advice on
how I can go about increasing conversions? I will drop you an email
separately. Thanks in advance.

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paraschopra
Well, obviously, first get rid of "Just another WordPress site". Your image is
confusing (to me, at least) and I think you could use a professional designer
there. Also the subheadline (below image) sounds like you are shouting so
maybe you can decrease the size a bit.

And yes, put "$9 only for limited time. Only X spots left" right below your
'Subscribe' button.

All in all, I think the page lacks "visual appeal" which creates
trustworthiness. So, perhaps you can invest in some design.

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iworkforthem
Thank you for the advices. Once the website starts to make some form of
profit, top of the todo list is to hire a professional designer.

Other cheaper options I have explored so far include; \- Buy a theme from
ThemeForest or WooThemes and Mod it. ($40) \- Hire a designer to create the
PSD, then use PSD to HTML/WordPress service. ($200) \- Use crowd sourcing
websites such as crowdspring/99designs (min $500)

But to hire a designer at such a early stage could set me back at least $200,
for a new gig it's hard for me to justify the cost, especially when design is
so subjective. One might like it, others might now.

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danvoell
We don't have major traffic, around 25% of visitors signup for a free alert.
We would love to hear your thoughts. www.gobuzz.com.

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paraschopra
Your page is well-built and has an informative headline too. However, I think
following changes may increase conversions:

a) Removing examples and (centering) and increasing size of the main dropdowns
b) Selecting an option in dropdowns by default c) Removing 'preview' link d)
Changing the color of button to red (yes, this can really work)

Essentially, try to highlight the dropdown section in the middle of the page.
You can have all "extra" stuff as a separate section below it.

PS: You can also test a headline like "Google Alerts on Steroids" -- I am
assuming most of your visitors would know what Google Alerts is

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danvoell
Awesome, I appreciate your help. Good Luck! Let me know if I can be of
assistance in return.

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paraschopra
Wow got 6 emails already. Replying to every one of them now!

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paraschopra
Got 50+ emails by now. Will reply to all but it is already 12:30 am here :)
Will try to reply as many I can do today, rest tomorrow.

The biggest learning from looking at HNers' sites has been this: they are
text-heavy without any clear call-to-actions and usually lack a concise,
descriptive headline.

