Catalog Success magazine has an interesting article on the web tools and features that can bring the most returns for your ecommerce website.

According to the article “Maximize Your Web Tools” by Larry Kavanagh, here are the tools that your website must have in order to sell more (however, the article fails to mention vendors for these tools):

1. Customer rate and review feature increases product conversion 42 percent:

• Visitors to pages with highly rated products (between 4-5 stars) are 42 percent more likely to buy the product; while visitors to low rated products are only half as likely to buy
• Drive traffic to highly rated products by featuring them in your emails, placing them on the homepage and using them as landing pages for paid search.

2. Wish list helps you acquire new customers inexpensively

• Allows you to cross sell more effectively to help customers add more items to their wish list easily
• If the wish list tool allows customers to email and share their wish list to friends, it could be a way to entice new customers into the site.
• It also increases sale as friends and family of customers who created wish lists can now find the task of gift buying easier

3. Guest checkout which makes the shopping experience faster and better by giving shoppers the option of buying without creating accounts

• By allowing people to buy without asking them first to create accounts, you can boost sales by as much as 24%

4. Triggered emails result to 3-10x the response rate of bulk emails

• There are tools that integrate browsing behavior of the user on the site with emailing that proves to be significant revenue generator
• The downside is that these tools have premier prices, which may be out of reach by small online sellers

5. Personalized recommendations

• Use your shopper’s past history to populate parts of your homepage with items the shopper may be interested in

6. Making full use of AJAX

• AJAX can make customers’ shopping easier through quick orders

The above are tools that bigger businesses employ in their online stores to increase sales and improve conversion. Alas, many of these tools may be beyond the budget of small online ecommerce owners. But nonetheless, if you can afford to splurge on a web app for your store, consider the above tools.

Read the full article at Catalog Success magazine