Location Location Location… Crucial for e-Commerce Conversion

Location isn’t just important when making a property decision, it’s also very important when encouraging customers to make a purchase decision online.

Confidence boosting measures are powerful – but only if you know where to put them. Recent research has revealed just how much influence the position of icons can have on consumer behaviour.

Using statistical fixation data the heat maps below have been enriched to show how quickly and for how long visual contact to a point is established.

The faster and longer a user visually perceives an element, the more intensive the effect the element has. Can you detect from the maps below what the trend is?

You’ll see that placing an icon on the upper left hand-side attracts the most attention. Therefore the trustmark placed in the 4th picture will attract the customers’ eye most out of each option. Of course this is true not just for trust building measures. Whatever is placed in the top left hand corner of the page is likely to interest the shopper because we are generally used to reading from the top left.

For example a retailer could choose to include an add-on sale, a loyalty scheme or an 0800 support number – it really comes down to the priorities of the retailer.

This research does not include follow up sales data and it’s likely that different retailers will experience different results depending on the type of products that are sold. The best option for retailers is to conduct their own A and B testing to ascertain where the most successful location is for different images and links.

CRO agency WebArts, carried out the research, analysing shopping baskets and positioning trust boosting measures in 4 different places (these are highlighted in red on the maps)

Header: On all templates in the header across the page

Below: Below the call-to-action in combination with a benefit-Box

Call-to-Action: To the left of the primary call-to-action

Left Side: On the left side of the shopping basket

Generally online retailers exclusively promote trustmarks, customer reviews and payment systems on the homepage only…Big mistake.

According to WebArts: “Integration of trust elements on shopping basket pages often provides very good results.”

It’s also vital to remember that shoppers will not always come through the website’s homepage. Consumers may go straight to the product page through a Google search or link.

While this research looks at the website as being completely flat or two dimensional, that’s no longer the case. There are other areas of a browser interface that can be used – like overlays (where a small non-intrusive mark sits on the bottom right hand corner of a site regardless of where the shopper is in the site) or fly-out (a smaller logo that gets larger and reveals more details when the mouse cursor hovers over it).

Trust must be conveyed throughout the shopping process and location really does matter. It’s clear that customers fixate on the upper left-hand side –making it one of the key pieces of real estate on your website. There are a number of different ways to use this knowledge and each retailer will have its own priorities.

So, start thinking about how to apply these methods to your online store.

Let us know if you make any changes – do you think you might now you’ve seen the evidence? Let us know

@TrustedShopsUK