Expert Tips For Tweaking An Ecommerce Website

[mandy]

For help in tweaking the website, we tapped Gretchen Howard, online sales and operations manager for Google in Mountain View, Calif. Like Kittredge, Howard urges the Zanders to get better acquainted with their customers. She recommends that they devise questionnaires for both store and online shoppers. "Dive deep into your online accounts - compare the repeat customers to the non-repeats and look for trends and demographic differences," she says. "You might learn that New Yorkers are more unhappy with you than Chicagoans, and you'd want to know why." She suggests they try Survey Monkey (surveymonkey.com), a service that hosts online polls, to collect data from customers who visit their website.

Howard, 34, also wants them to study how customers find and use the site so they can fine-tune it. She suggests they use one of the analytics programs available to online advertisers from software companies and from search-engine services. (Google's version is Google Analytics. A top competitor is Yahoo's Full Analytics.) These tools will show the Zanders which pages on their site are getting traffic and which are ignored...

full article: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_a...100123036/

[amy]

She suggests they try Survey Monkey (surveymonkey.com), a service that hosts online polls, to collect data from customers who visit their website.

I'd suggest BizRate/Shopzilla's free surveys