Your Website, Creating Pathways to Purchase

By:Nick Wood

You have products to sell, a website to sell them through, but the sales are patchy or simply not coming? Perhaps your customers are there, but find it hard to buy from you. Let us explore how to fix this.

I know this sounds a bit odd, but sometimes it is a forgotten part of your business. A good close look at your websites pathways to purchase can really pep up those flagging sales.

As soon as you have finished reading this article, I would ask you to do this. Jot down three or four of the products or services that you offer for sale on your website. Now go to your site and deliberately take the most direct and quickest path possible to buy them. For the moment, (and ONLY for the moment please), dont seek out supplementary information, descriptions etc, just plough straight through and commit to buy the items. Ok, now jot down beside each product or service how many clicks got you,

(A) from your home page to their their first mention, including price and opportunity to purchase, and then

(B) from that page to the first buying commitment page.

Look at each of these counts separately and add them together. By the way, what do I mean by a buying commitment page? I mean for example a page showing the item set aside for specific purchase, eg in an electronic shopping trolley. I know there will be further steps after this one, but this is where the pedal hit the metal as it is where your customer first commits to buy.

So how did you go? Well I dont pretend that each of the millions of products out there have the same needs in regards pathway steps. For example if you are asking someone to buy a car, then you will quite reasonably have more steps in the process than someone selling say a short E book. I would suggest that the best way to quantify what is a reasonable number of steps, is to visualise your website as a bricks and mortar store, and your browsing customer as a moderately interested shopper passing by.

Let's look at the A and B sections above. Your homepage is your welcome mat, and a vital first impression of your site. So how many clicks from this page, got you to a description and price of the product or service on your list, a page that also allows the customer to order them? Do you know that one of the largest online book sellers on the net, takes a customer from their homepage to any single product they sell in two clicks. Two clicks! How do you match up beside that? Well, as you can see, it is possible to clear the clutter from your customers pathway, to let them see and choose your product or service with maximum ease.

Ok, so now the B step, from that page, to the first buying commitment page. Again using the example of the huge online bookseller, it can be achieved in one step. If you offer customisation of a product, say color or size options, consider having your customer commit to the product first by putting it in their basket. Then once that is achieved, offer them all the options you have. Do you see the advantage here? Well, let us refer back to the bricks and mortar store visualisation. What would you prefer, a customer to occupy your store for hours trying on shoes, only to reveal that they were simply killing time before their bus arrived, or a customer who committed to buy, and then went about choosing the details of their purchase? Yes, a no brainer right?

So how did you go? Are you exhausting, boring and exasperating your customers by cluttering their path to your cash register? Make your site an easy place to shop at, and you have gone a big step forward to optimising your profit potential.

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