SeeWhy: Death Watch for Conventional Wisdom on Website Conversion?

April 8, 2010 - PRLog -- SeeWhy, Inc., the company that boosts website conversion with real-time remarketing, today announced research results that suggest the conventional wisdom on website conversion may be completely wrong and on its death bed. Recent polling and research reveal that the top 10 converting websites basically ignore the best practices for conversion being touted and used by the majority of ecommerce teams. A free eBook, “Lessons Learned from the Top 10 Converting Websites,” will be published on April 11, 2010, and users may pre-register to have the eBook emailed to them upon publication.

“Most websites convert 2 or 3 percent of their visitors to purchase in the same session,” said Charles Nicholls, founder and chief strategy officer of SeeWhy. “The top 10 converting websites range between 18 and 42 percent. What do the top 10 do differently? When it comes to conversion, they don’t focus on conversion optimization that conventional wisdom suggests. And their double-digit conversion rates suggest that more ecommerce teams might benefit from doing the same.”

Countering Conventional Wisdom

In February 2010, SeeWhy polled 663 ecommerce marketers and asked what they thought the top 10 converting websites would do to optimize their conversion rates. The marketers’ answers below reflect commonly assumed best practices for website conversion. (Note each participant was allowed multiple answers, so percentages total more than 100.)

•   Free shipping – 60 percent
•   Guest checkout (no forced account creation) – 52 percent
•   Simple, intuitive process – 46 percent
•   Short checkout – 40 percent
•   Other – 4 percent

As detailed in the forthcoming eBook, the top 10 converting websites have an average conversion rate of 23 percent. In light of the above best practices, however, the top 10 put little value on conventional wisdom. For instance, the top 10 favor:

•   Paid shipping – Only one of the top 10 offers free shipping, but only on a few categories.
•   No guest checkout (forced account creation) – Four of the top five — and six of the top 10 — require users to create a full account before they can make their first purchase.
•   Complicated process – Some of the top 10 websites are far from intuitive and lack clear calls to action.
•   Lengthy checkout – Some of the top 10 have lengthy shopping cart processes that can run up to six pages with 36 different options and fields to enter.

For information on SeeWhy, visit www.seewhy.com. For additional perspectives, please visit and subscribe to the SeeWhy RSS blog feed at http://www.seewhy.com/blog, and follow SeeWhy on Twitter at @seewhyinc.

About SeeWhy

SeeWhy is the industry’s only real-time shopping cart recovery service to follow up in real time via email and social networks. SeeWhy’s services (SaaS) deliver the highest ROI in ecommerce by responding immediately to shopping cart and web form abandonment with behaviorally triggered 1-to-1, real-time messages.

Powered by a unique “in-memory” event processing engine, the SeeWhy suite of real-time web analytics is delivered “on-demand.” Remarketing to abandoned visitors using the SeeWhy Conversion Manager service converts up to 50 percent of visitors that had abandoned their shopping carts, online forms, applications and registrations.

SeeWhy is a Red Herring Top 100 Company, was selected by AlwaysOn as an OnMedia 100 company in 2010 and was highlighted as a cool company by Gartner, Inc. SeeWhy has also been featured in publications such as The New York Times; Inc. Magazine; and TechCrunch. SeeWhy was incorporated in 2003 and is headquartered in Andover, MA. More information can be found at http://www.seewhy.com/.