BigCommerce and MadWire Media had a nice blog post and video over on the BigCommerce blog that walked through a website and talked about the features and design decisions that can increase your web site’s conversion rate.

Some great high-level objectives they mention:

Trust: The web is a wild place – you need to build trust with your users.  This can be done with about pages, money back guarantees, secure credit card transaction information, showing your phone number, and more.

Free shipping and offers: It’s not earth-shattering news that people love sales and discounts.  Here’s an area where Spring Metrics really shines – do you only have Free shipping in the US for example?  We can target offers by geolocation.  Do you want to give an instant coupon to people for signing up for your newsletter – but only if they have never purchased before?  We can do that too.  The combination of visitor segmenting and offers has a lot of power to bring your conversion rate up.

Colors: They talk a lot about picking the right colors for your calls to action (for example, the buy button). We have seen this dynamic many times with Spring Metrics offers. An orange offer might perform twice as well as a red one.  Our A/B testing features help you figure out which colors are best for your site.

As the folks at MadWire say in the video: you’re already spending money to drive visitors to your site. If you can increase the rate at which those existing visitors convert, it will substantially impact your bottom line.