Proudly serving the industry for which it was named for more than 50 years, Outdoor Power Equipment provides dealers who sell and service outdoor power equipment with valuable information to succeed in a competitive market.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/163851
FEATURE STORY By Brad Smith as Facebook and Twitter widgets, ad network tracking scripts and cloud-based content delivery systems. Think about it. Do you wait for a website to load for more than a few seconds before bailing out to try a different site? According to Gomez by Compuware2, every two seconds of load time on your site equals an 8-percent abandonment rate. That same study shows that if your site's load time drops from eight seconds to two seconds, your conversion rate actually jumps up 74 percent! It's no wonder load time greatly impacts your bottom line. Do you know what your website load time is? You can test it, with this cool tool from Pingdom: http://bit.ly/1ahcGJ (it's free). You may be surprised by the results. Pingdom provides you with a detailed, actionable report of the load time for every single page of your website. Armed with that information, it's up to you or your website provider to make any necessary changes to drop your load time and improve sales conversions. Based on the aforementioned statistics, you can't afford not to make sure your site is up to par. 4 common mistakes that can turn an e-commerce site into a shopping nightmare Y our online shopping experience greatly depends upon the e-commerce site you visit. As you've probably noticed, some sites load slowly or feature navigation that is nonsensical, and the shopping experience? Forget about it. If the goal of your website is to sell more product, you need to make sure that your site makes a buyer's shopping experience a joy, not a nightmare. It's time to shop your own website, as if you were the customer, and evaluate it from top to bottom. Whether you built your own website, work with a website provider, or are 30 considering launching your first site, read on to learn about four of the most common e-commerce mistakes that result in a high rate of shopping cart abandonment and lost sales. Your website loads s-l-o-w-l-y The ideal load time for a website is under three seconds. However, a recent report by Radware1 clocked the average retail website load time at more than seven seconds. The drag is attributed to the usual suspects — large images, HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. Other factors that can impact website load time include third-party plug-ins such OUTDOOR POWER EQUIPMENT Are visitors to your website having the same experience on your website regardless of which browser they use? To find out, try accessing your website using a number of web browsers, including Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox.Viewing your site this way, you'll see exactly what buyers see — Are the lawn mower images displaying properly? Is all of your content, including any how-to videos, loading correctly? And, more importantly, is the shopping cart experience flawless? Here again, it's up to you or your website provider to take control and resolve any issues you uncover. Since most of us naturally assume the entire world uses the same web browser that we do, going through this exercise is especially important. Are you still using Internet Explorer (IE)? With only 11.8 percent of the population using IE as of July 2013, then you are part of the minority. The far-andaway leader is now Google Chrome at 52.8 percent3. Check out more browser user stats at http://bit.ly/bTa0hm. Your website isn't properly secured Today's online shoppers are savvy. They're aware of the numerous fraudulent websites that exist simply to trick consumers into www.outdoorpowerequipment.com Illustration below ©istockphoto.com/retrorocket Your website doesn't work the same in all web browsers