Say you run a fairly successful small niche Web site but notice over and over again that you're losing a lot of customers just as they get to the checkout page.
Xtremez.com, a Vancouver, WA company that sells paintballs and similar recreational equipment to the 12 to 25-year-old set was having those problems and went through a several-months-long process to correct it.
In so doing, Xtremez (which stands for extreme sports) and its operation www.paintballonline.com has raised its return-on-investment ratio nearly 400% over the past year and a half thanks to a site optimization program.
The gain in ROI began last year after the approximately $2 million firm improved its visitor-to-buyer site conversions by 19.4%, increased total orders by 20.8% -- and actually gained a 1.2% increase in traffic.
What did they do?
One of the first things was to rework the checkout process. According to Adam Stites, president of the company, this process had previously been fairly cumbersome and involved, leading some users to just give up. Xtremez was able to cut it down to a simple one-two-three process, enabled by consolidating data fields.
In addition, Xtremez restructured its home and product pages to display products on the tops of the screens. And, products with natural cross-sell potential were placed near each other in such a way that users might be more inclined to buy several products – like paintballs and paintball gun barrels at one go-round, says Stites.
Another key change came when Xtremez substituted the word "save" with "deal," says Adrian Chiu, client services head for Atlas Solutions, which helped Xtremez upgrade its site. So now, all over the site one can find links to "clearance deals," a phrase that sounds attractive to the site's customers.
Right now, Xtremez is testing other potential copy changes on its site, says Stites.
Xtremez was able to find out about all its issues over an eight-day period when Atlas tracked more than 38,000 user sessions through JavaScript tags that reportedly saved Xtremez from having to put its own information technology people on this project.
Xtremez, which offers thousands of products, has about 200,000 customers from all over country mostly male age 12 to 25, says Stites.
Even with this makeover of Xtremez and its results, Stites still isn't satisfied.
"The conversion rate is never good enough," he says.
