Homepage design #1

Note: I wasn't able to get screenshots of these two first designs. Sorry about that; these rough sketches will have to do.

One of the keys to keeping your bounce rate down is to provide the information that your visitors want most at the top. It needs to boldly display itself. When a visitor comes to your website and right away finds what he is looking for he ain't gona bounce!

This first design actually wasn't too far off. The thing I missed was what the visitors were looking for. I was expecting them to be looking for threads! So we made a really cool, easy to use thread finder and advertised it on the front page. It turns out that stitchers don't buy threads, they buy patterns and anything they need to do the pattern (such as threads). So that was the biggest mistake I made on this first design.

This is very important. Make sure you know what your visitors are looking for. Sometimes you may think it's obvious, but you had better double check and look a little deeper. Because I go this one thing wrong I threw out a perfectly good design (we're not talking about color schemes here). Thankfull I discovered this later as you'll see.

Homepage design #2

I need you to imagine this design looking very very cool; because it did.

But anyway, this second design was a step in the wrong direction. Sure it looked better, but it didn't work better. My bounce rate went up! That wasn't very encouraging. But I did learn one thing that did not work!

Why didn't it work? Well, the biggest reason was that it wassn't immediately obvious that we sell stitching supplies. You had to look one third of the way down the page to see that. You have to grab people when they come; they have only a slightly longer attention span for your website than they do for a TV commercial.

There was the text because stitching matters on the top of some really fancy graphics - And I bet most of them thought, "oh, that's nice... <close>." People really don't care what you think, and they can't read your mind ether about what you are providing. That statement tells them nothing about what we can do for them. Well, there's always the featured pattern, right? Wrong! There was nothing on that featured pattern that would imply that we are selling it! That one really surprised me.

Homepage design #3

This brings us up to the current design.

This design really works well. In a way it is a combination of #1 and #2. Only this time we had figured out that stitchers buy patterns. That is what they want, so that is what we'll show them! The first two links are for patterns, and according to crazzyegg's heat maps about %65 of the visitors click on one of those two links!

Not only was the bounce rate much lower than #2 but it was also lower than the first design (by exactly how much I can't remember, somewhere around 20% I think)!

In this third design I also put that "There are real people here" section. I did this because I had found out that that was one of the concerns that potential customers were having. They wanted to make sure that there were real people behind the website that they were giving their creditcard to. Even though it is at the bottom of the page quite a few people clicked on it. Perhaps this was because the page isn't very long and there aren't very many words to read through.

One last thing I want to point out. After putting the free shipping on orders of $40 or more, most of the orders coming in were ether exactly $40 or just a little over. I found that quite interesting. I wonder what would happen if I moved that up to $50... :)

Summary

To decrease you bounce rate on your e-comrice store, you should:

• First make sure you know what your targeted audience wants, and then give it to them at the top of your home page.
• Choose obviousness over good looks. It's OK to make your website took nice, just make sure it doesn't get in the way of catching your visitors.
• Answer your visitors questions and concerns (especially when it's about their money) without them having to ask (because most all of them wont, they'll just leave).

These can also apply to any website.

Or at least some of the things you can do. There is plenty more you can do to decrease your bounce rate but these are things I have experienced for a fact that make a big difference.

Getting your visitors to not bounce is just the first step, next you have to keep them at your site... then you have to get them to decide to buy and lastly you have to make sure they don't get lost in the checkout! All of which I hope to write about someday. So for now, you can subscribe to my RSS feeds so you get them when I do write them! ;)