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If your business runs the Online Store formula, average order value (AOV) is probably a critical metric. Here are many ways to increase average order value categorized into four types.

Bryan Eisenberg is a great teacher and is one of the fathers of conversion science. In this post, he asks his audience to make recommendations on pricing tables, those pages that ostensibly help us to choose the right product for us.

Here are my suggestions.

The main purpose of a page like this is "Help me choose." Choice, as it turns out, is a conversion killer, so these pages can be very helpful. This page needs to tell me which is "The best value." A badge would be helpful, probably on the most expensive item.

The little "signal bars" are unique and may be helpful, but don't really tell me at a glance what I want to know.

The copy is unhelpful. Instead of "Essential productivity..." how about "Great system for a tight budget." Instead of "Yield better results..." how about "Good value ready for your network." Instead of "2nd Generation Processor..." how about "This system has the power to do heavy number crunching, video editing and graphics."

There are too many prices here -- four to be exact. I say, pick two: Savings and total price. Crossing out "Starting price" is a proven way to communicate value.

Finally, put the coupon code near the "Customize & Buy" buttons to give those transactional shoppers an extra push.

What do you find frustrating about this page?

 @peeplaja has given us another great post, full of examples and destined to change your fortune if you put it to work on your site.

The primary barrier to speaking clearly about our business is that we must choose to communicate with someone other than everyone. In other words, we must risk being uninteresting to some portion of our audience in exchange for really knocking our value prop out of the park for others.

Read carefully. Then choose.

 @conversion_team It's easy to cut prices.It's hard to build up the value of what you offer in words and images. If you can occupy the high-price category in your niche, life gets much easier.

So, I was pleased to find this article which makes a bold statement: "Avoid Best Practice Conversion Rate Optimization"

What?

While your competitors are testing button color, you can be comparing yourself to the competition, being open about your profits, and doing the math for your visitors.

Best practices only get you so far. Here are some alternatives for online success.

 @peeplaja has given us another great post, full of examples and destined to change your fortune if you put it to work on your site.

The primary barrier to speaking clearly about our business is that we must choose to communicate with someone other than everyone. In other words, we must risk being uninteresting to some portion of our audience in exchange for really knocking our value prop out of the park for others.

Read carefully. Then choose.

How you phrase a discount is a powerful way to increase conversions. Some visitors do not like to do math, or will do it wrong. Therefore, offering 20% off is less effective than save $18. However, high discounts (50%, 90%) may draw buyers more powerfully than the dollar value.

You have to find out for yourself.

Karon offers a nice list of alternatives and some links to research for your enjoyment.

My advice to my clients is to put as much (or more) effort into your images as you put into your copy on a web page. Here are some great tips on how to craft images that work with your copy to advance your value proposition.

@101babich When we isolate the visitors to a website that use site search, we often find a significantly higher conversion rate and average order value. Searchers are great customers.

This does not imply cause and effect.

However, after running tests that improve the visibility of search, we have found that we can increase the number of searchers, and that these new searchers are more likely to buy.

It doesn't work every time, but it is certainly worth a try.

The lesson? Follow Nick's advice here.

 @peeplaja - This is about as complete a summary of home page best practices that I've ever seen. Peep could have made this an eBook. There are some great examples, specific recommendations and tons of links to other resources. This ambitious post covers:Map out buyer personasCraft a value propositionBuild a connectionUse proper visualsDefine most wanted actionCreate call to actionWrite user oriented copyAdd trust elementsTest lengthCheck load speed

@fusionmex via @TheGrok I"ve been working with a number of e-commerce clients over the past few months. Conversion optimization has the potential to increase their conversion rates, increase their average order value and put more money in their pockets. However, Conversion Strategy is the tide that floats all pages. If you are selling online, consider some of these features requested by consumers.

@fusionmex via @TheGrok I"ve been working with a number of e-commerce clients over the past few months. Conversion optimization has the potential to increase their conversion rates, increase their average order value and put more money in their pockets. However, Conversion Strategy is the tide that floats all pages. If you are selling online, consider some of these features requested by consumers.

"Enclose" the checkout process.

This means to create a distraction-free bubble when your visitor has decided to take that bold step and buy your product.

The psychological thing you're working against here is that, when asked to let go of something of value -- like our money -- we are more than happy to delay that decision.

Maybe we'll just shop a bit more. Maybe we'll check one other place for the right price.

That is why any distraction in your checkout process can be an out for a buyer, an out that they may never return from. I've seen checkout processes that have social media icons in them.

Really? Is this the right time to remind someone that they need to check Facebook?

Go buy something on your site and just look for all of the distractions you find. You might feel a bit embarrassed.

 @richpage #CRO Checklists are very helpful when making decisions about your website. They take the immediacy and emotion out of your decisions.

I love checklists and this is a good one. It's ten things to consider when designing your checkout process.

My favorites are:10. Consistently Expose Your Value Propositions7. Offer help throughout the process5. Remove header navigation during checkout (so easy!)4. Reassure the Prospect that the Price is RightI'll let you explore the rest of the ten checklist items.

Imagine if you were given six months of identity protection by Target or Zappos or Neiman Marcus before they had an online security breach. Imagine if the identity protection was valid for any purchase you made. This is the promise of AllClearID. They are a client of ours and are at the forefront of revising the way we look at online security.

If you run an ecommerce site, this is a value proposition that will increase your conversion rates. We've done the tests.

 @richpage offers up 25 things you can do to impact your conversion rate. Not all of these are really "free" when you consider the cost of time and effort. None of them require sending money to an ad network or Google or an agency.

My favorites are: #7 State your value proposition clearly #8 Create landing pages for your PPC ads #13 Run an A/B test for the subjet line of your next email #18 Improve your webpage load time #22 Discover what your visitors are really doing using CrazyEgg

Value, Information and Trust: The three ingredients to conversion.

Retargeting Emails - Do E-commerce customers like or loathe them? March 10th, 2011Leave a commentGo to comments By Charles Nicolls, SeeWhy At SeeWhy, when we first launched our remarketing service in 2009, Randy Stross wrote a piece about email remarketing in The New York Times suggesting that while remarketing might be a great idea for ecommerce websites, it's not a great idea for consumers. He likened emails following up on abandoned shopping carts to a salesman chasing you down the street if you didn't buy from his store. There are major differences, of course. We've long argued that remarketing emails, when done well, not only drive conversions but also build brand trust. They can deliver great service and provide customers with the confidence to return to buy-either online, by phone or in store. If Randy was right and customers universally resented the intrusion, then these emails wouldn't work. In aiming to answer the question more substantively, I turned to data, and specifically email marketing benchmarks. The key metrics to look at to determine whether customers like or loathe remarketing emails are: the recovery rate the open rate the clickthrough rate the unsubscribe rate Frankly, the evidence is overwhelming: Remarketing, when done well, is appreciated by customers. Here's the evidence: (1) The recovery rate The recovery rate is the percentage of visitors that abandon shopping carts, and remarketed visitors thatthen return and purchase following remarketing. At SeeWhy, we measure recovery rates across all our customers, and currently the average is 20 percent. So, one in five shopping cart abandoners come back and buy, having being remarketed. In some cases, the recovery rate is as high as 50 percent. Moreover, when remarketed customers buy, they spend on average 55 percent more than customers who didn't abandon their shopping carts. (2) The open rate The average email open rate for remarketing emails is currently 46 percent, m

Shopping Cart abandonment is one of the first places we look when helping e-commerce sites increase their conversion rates. Why spend time and money optimizing a site if the buyers can't get through a shopping cart? Pricing and shipping offers are two issues we have to address at a strategic level. Here is a very informative article from @SeeWhyInc. I particularly like their cart value vs. abaondment rate graphs. Check them out.

Providing choice for your web visitors is not only a great way to increase conversions in your post-click marketing program, but also to increase the value of those conversions.

It might help to look at email as a social network. It is, only it is VERY large. My 91-year-old grandmother "friended" me years ago on email. We share video, pictures, posts … everything via email. So, if you have a social media strategy that ignores the biggest social network on the planet, is it a complete strategy? Not even close.