Hi everyone, I wanted to share some info with you that has surprised me in the hope that one or two of you may be able to confirm this from past experience or apply it to try it, (if it proves to be correct) for yourselves to benefit your sales if you currently display the following on your site.
Last week I worked on a whole stack of improvements for my web site glasses2you.co.uk which included some home page improvements, securing the checkout pages (prior to going to HSBC) with an SSL cert, applying some new security graphics to back this up along with several more nicey nicey encourage to buy elements throughout the site.
Once I published the changes, we had the worst 2 days of sales we have experienced for about 18 months. Sales literally halved!!! The first day I put down to bad luck, the second I just started to panic. Once we were sure that the cause was one of the new updates, we started to go through an elimination process to see exactly what the cause was.
Surprisingly (and I still can't quite believe this), the offending item appears to have been the HSBC bank logo. I had included this in my 'this is how secure this site is' graphics. A subsequent email received from a customer who ended up clicking off the site revealed that he thought you had to have an HSBC bank account to buy from us and as he didn't, he left!!!
It sounds crazy and I still can't believe that this could have caused the drop, but since removing it, our sales have not only gone back up, but have increased by 20% to what they were before the improvements which shows that all the other stuff I did has had a positive impact. Now......., I can only tell you the facts as I have them and this is my experience. This recent experience has made us uncomfortable enough that we are going to pull out all the stops to upgrade to Version 9 so that we can implement the Actinic Payment solution as I understand that this will be more easily manipulated to look like the user isn't leaving our site and will hopefully lead to less abandonments.
As I say, if any of you have also experienced this or can discount it as rubbish and therefore totally coincidental, I would be really interested to know. Cheers, Ian
Last week I worked on a whole stack of improvements for my web site glasses2you.co.uk which included some home page improvements, securing the checkout pages (prior to going to HSBC) with an SSL cert, applying some new security graphics to back this up along with several more nicey nicey encourage to buy elements throughout the site.
Once I published the changes, we had the worst 2 days of sales we have experienced for about 18 months. Sales literally halved!!! The first day I put down to bad luck, the second I just started to panic. Once we were sure that the cause was one of the new updates, we started to go through an elimination process to see exactly what the cause was.
Surprisingly (and I still can't quite believe this), the offending item appears to have been the HSBC bank logo. I had included this in my 'this is how secure this site is' graphics. A subsequent email received from a customer who ended up clicking off the site revealed that he thought you had to have an HSBC bank account to buy from us and as he didn't, he left!!!
It sounds crazy and I still can't believe that this could have caused the drop, but since removing it, our sales have not only gone back up, but have increased by 20% to what they were before the improvements which shows that all the other stuff I did has had a positive impact. Now......., I can only tell you the facts as I have them and this is my experience. This recent experience has made us uncomfortable enough that we are going to pull out all the stops to upgrade to Version 9 so that we can implement the Actinic Payment solution as I understand that this will be more easily manipulated to look like the user isn't leaving our site and will hopefully lead to less abandonments.
As I say, if any of you have also experienced this or can discount it as rubbish and therefore totally coincidental, I would be really interested to know. Cheers, Ian
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