The world of online merchandising can be expensive and sometimes confusing. Any cutting edge ecommerce software developer will be able to speak for a long time about the sophistication of their merchandising capabilities and may even try to invent new words such as “searchandising” to dazzle you and persuade you that they know what they’re doing.

But don’t be fooled! The rules haven’t changed. In fact the rules never really change, online merchandising is just like offline merchandising – that is to say once you have the customer’s attention how do you get them to buy. Whether you’re the owner of a high street shop or an ecommerce website you will probably have had exactly the same thoughts.

This is not to say that the cutting edge ecommerce software developers are wrong. Quite the opposite in fact. There are some dynamic features available on the market today that really do tailor content for the user and this undoubtedly will have a positive effect on your bottom line. Whilst evaluating this type of software for our clients we have sat in meetings and said “Wow, that’s what we’ve always wanted”, or even better “Wow, I’d never even thought of that”!

I don’t want to talk about the wonders of very expensive ecommerce software right now though, maybe another time. What I want to talk about is how to evaluate your existing site, look for areas that are performing badly and for areas that are performing well.

The first point of call when you want to examine your performance is your analytical software. We use the free software provided by Google, called Google Analytics – mainly because it is free and integrates with Google Adwords software. It’s based on cookies and therefore has its limits in terms of accuracy – especially when tracking transactions but we find it accurate enough to base decisions on.

If you’re not running analytics software this would be a good starting point. All it requires is some code inserted into each page and off you go. And, as always, if you get stuck you can find the answers on Google!

So, back to the analytics software, I find two of the most important statistics for online marketeers such as myself are bounce rate and ecommerce conversion rates. OK so visitor numbers, sales and a whole host of other stats should be used in conjunction, but I find these two can paint a very quick and accurate picture.

Let me give you an example, I analysed data for one of our clients. In particular I was looking at bounce rates for category pages over the past month and whilst most were between 5-25% one page was running at over 40%. The page in question looked OK at first glance but on closer inspection I found that there wasn’t a good cross section of products featured. There were lots of similar products and little variety. So I worked with their product manager to get a good cross section of products on the page whilst also making the page aesthetically more pleasing. Once done I examined the figures and found the bounce rate falling and, more importantly, the ecommerce conversion rate rising! All this is based on science and facts, rather than guesswork.

So there’s some simple advice to improve the way your existing site converts – use the free tools available to maximise the return from the traffic already coming to your site.