Give Them a Reason to Register - Ziller Web Marketing Blog

Website accounts in shopping carts are common things these days. It is not often that you will come across a e-commerce store that does not offer an account of some type with which you can register, in order to get added benefits. In fact many e-commerce websites make registration mandatory in order to even purchase, which is a hot topic and one which I have touched on in a older post.

As I see it, if you do offer an account with your e-commerce store, the goal would be to have as many of your users register for one as possible. Users who are registered are far more likely to make a purchase, and assuming you gained permission to send them email you can use this to promote new products and or services.

One thing I see common across even some leading e-commerce stores is the poor attempt to sell registration to the user. If you offer registration, whats so good about it? What do you get if you do register and why must the user do it? All these questions should be answered on your account sign-up page.

Take pcparts.net.au as a perfect example – their login page has only a couple of lines of text to promote the creation of an account. At this point in time as a user I have no idea what I get if you sign up so I will be very declined to do so.

pcparts.net.au

If your going to ask a user to not only give up their precious time, but provide personal information such as their email address, you have to offer in return something of equal or greater value.

These days, there are many shopping carts available for purchase, and open source CMS’s that come with a set number of features available to use. These features range from product reviews, to discount pricing, wish lists, and so on.

What you will find, for example is if you take a hand full of ecommerce shopping carts, all from completely different industry’s but that use the same shopping cart, there is a good chance that they will have many of the same features. Now this may sound normal, however what I am finding more and more is that certain things work for certain industries, while other things don’t. I have found that implementing a feature on one web site can have outstanding results, but putting that same feature in a different web site wont really get results at all.

The reason for this is every industry is different, people looking to buy a house on the internet don’t really interact and behave how someone who is trying to buy a second hand couch does. When you are designing a web site or planning new features, you must do your research and find out how your customers behave. If you take the time to do this initially, you will find you will save yourself a lot of time and money in the long run.