PayPal recently announced a streamlining of its payment flow process that doesn’t require a PayPal account to use. In other words, you can “check out” via PayPal, reap the security benefits of the merchant store not knowing your financial details, and pay for your item without having created any long-term relationship with PayPal (although they wouldn’t mind).

Adding PayPal to an e-commerce site can sometimes result in lower conversions — which makes sense because you’re being taken away from the experience you were…

...continue to read "PayPal Should Go Undercover"

Everyone wants to optimize. If you’re like most companies, you have a laundry list of things you’d like to do with your site. You know instinctively that all the items on the list are of equal value. You know some might have more impact than others. You also know these items require different amounts of effort and resources. So the obvious question is, “Where do I begin?”

You’re likely familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which states that human beings must…

...continue to read "How to Prioritize Your Optimization"

“Best Value” can be a useful label, but it’s a lousy claim if you can’t back it up.

“Best value” makes a bold promise. It says to your website’s visitors, “I’ll prove to you that my product/service/whatever is worth far more than the asking price.” If you’re going to make this claim, you’d better have the proof waiting for them on the product- or service-description page.

Don’t be shy, though. If you can prove the “best value” claim, it’s a great way…

...continue to read "The 7th Deadly Claim — “Best Value”"

In the past few months, we’ve received emails and comments from people who want to know the secret. They’ve read a few posts on website optimization testing, but they’re disillusioned. Their tests haven’t been effective — meanwhile, Future Now keeps yammering about how…

“Lead generation went up 5,000%!” (Tumbleweed rolls.)

“They doubled their conversion rate!” (Crickets chirp in disbelief.)*

Don’t think you can do it? Bryan Eisenberg and Google’s Tom Leung disagree. Join them for a free webinar on March 11th.

*Please Note: Case studies not boring when about…

...continue to read "“What Should I Test?” Free Google + Future Now Webinar"

Who: Google Website Optimizer’s Product Manager, Tom Leung, and Future Now co-founder Bryan Eisenberg.

What: Want to improve your website’s performance? Interested in learning how to get the most out of Google’s free A/B and multivariate testing tool, Website Optimizer? This one’s for you.

In previous webinars (”Introduction to Website Optimizer” and “Creating and Launching Experiments“), the Google Analytics and Google AdWords teams have shown how to use the tool. But this time around, they’ll be delving into a more fundamental question: “What…

...continue to read "Webinar: Getting Results with Google Website Optimizer"

Approximately 76 million people have purchased from Amazon.com.

Chances are, many of you click this “Add to Shopping Cart” button several times throughout the year.

So, why does it always stump audiences of online marketers when I ask them where in the checkout process Amazon has us select a quantity for the item(s) we’re adding-to-cart?

Before you scroll down for the answer, let me give you some popular Add-to-Cart methods to choose from:

#1 — A form field that defaults to “1″ or “0″…

...continue to read "Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart"

An e-tailing group study commissioned by PowerReviews has further revealed the necessity for customer-generated product reviews on e-commerce sites.

It seems the majority of online shoppers want to hear what people like them have to say about the product they’re researching. Almost 70% of customers looked at more than 4 reviews before making a purchase.

The study also gives a sense of how long visitors spend reading reviews before their purchase (50% spend over 10 minutes) and found that most people read reviews once…

...continue to read "70% of Online Shoppers Read Multiple Product Reviews"

Chris Anderson, editor in-chief of Wired and author of the bestselling book-turned-Web 2.0-buzz-phrase, The Long Tail, launched a juicy cover story today.

In “Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business” — which, as one might expect, is available for free at Wired.com* — Anderson argues that, across industries, businesses are baiting new customers with free stuff.

Of course, that’s nothing revolutionary. But it is evolutionary in the sense that we’ve come to expect some level of “free” something. In fact, we’re…

...continue to read "WIRED Sees a Future in “The ROI of Free”"

NINE OUT OF TEN PEOPLE WOULD RATHER NOT READ THIS SENTENCE IN ALL CAPS.

That may or may not be true. At the moment, this statement is merely a guess, an assumption — but it’s testable. It’s a hypothesis.

People love to insist that your website is made of magical ones and zeros. “It’s HTML,” they’ll say. “It lives on triple-redundant co-located servers,” they’ll argue. Yet the truth is much simpler, and scarier, than that.

Your website is a tower of assumptions. Everyone’s…

...continue to read "Website Optimization Starts With a Hypothesis"

As any multi-tasker/easily-distracted-person knows, this happens all the time. We click on an a link sent via email, a few scrap letters get cut off the end, and OUCH… 404 error.

It really frosts my monocle.

Last year, Smashing Magazine offered plenty of example fodder for how to flip the 404 pancake. Those ones were great, but now I’ve got a new personal favorite.

Although it may not be the talk of the town just yet, The New Yorker’s error message ought to be.…

...continue to read "A New Contender for Best 404 Error Message"