4 most important eCommerce website changes you need to focus on

If you have a limited budget it is especially important to figure out the expected cost/benefit tradeoff of making the changes your research.

Lets go back to the example of a hotel, with these two recommendations emerging from testing:

1. Provide information on special accommodation for pets, and accommodation and pricing for more than two children.

2. Ensure that information that has already been entered into an online form is not lost when a site user gets an error message.

Which design changes should be your priority?

Step 1: use the research to tell you how many of your customers or target customers would be affected by each of the changes you are considering. If your target customers are families, # 1 may be the more urgent issue to fix. If yours is a hotel that is mainly aimed at busy, impatient business travelers, implementing #2 may be the higher priority.

Step 2: look to your research to find out which of these issues is actually causing significant problems, and try to estimate the increase in bookings if the problem were solved. If you discover that a lot of users begin to fill out forms but dont finish, odds are either the form is too long or many of them are getting errors, losing their data, and are too annoyed to re-enter their information. If fixing # 2 could get even an extra 10% of those who begin to fill out forms to complete them, you can easily calculate how much that would contribute to your profit margin.

How likely is it that changing issue #1 would yield a similar increase in your sales conversion rates? If your target market is families, it might be even more. They may be so thrilled by the level of detail you offered on kids and pets that theyll go to the effort of phoning you or trying again if their form data got lost due to an error message.

Step 3: Estimate how much it will cost to make each change. If you have internal IT and web design staff, ask them to work out some estimates. Otherwise, ask a few outside consultants for proposals.

Step 4: Put the cost and marketing projections together and, bingo, youll be able to project where the greatest ROI is likely to be. That gives you pretty clear direction for your website revision priorities.

I know, I know this makes it sound easier than it really is. You still have to make some assumptions. But following this process will help you make good ones so you can focus on the most important website changes first.

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