How to Build Websites that Sell: The Scientific Approach to Websites

make sure that you focus on triggering people that have the ability or motivation: If you trigger people at the right time, they will thank you. If you trigger then when they lack ability, they’ll get frustrated. If you trigger people when they don’t have motivation (e.g. asking people to shop for Christmas present in September), you’re annoying pe

Behavioral design is where psychology and technology meet—a systematic way to influence a desired behavior, one step at a time.

If you want your business to thrive and keep the sales coming in, you need to obsess about triggers!

Ability is more important than motivation. If I’m committed to eat healthy—my motivation is super high—but there’s no healthy food around when I’m hungry, it’s very difficult to take desired action and I’ll probably grab something unhealthy instead. Motivation alone is not enough.

conduct user testing on your ecommerce site to find problems with your interface you might not be aware of. Give people some tasks (e.g. find X, and buy it), and have them comment out loud while they’re browsing your site. You either watch over their shoulder or watch the screen recording of it.

A 2009 survey of 2,000 online British adults found that 50 percent of those who regularly shop online said that if their preferred payment method is not available, they will cancel the purchase.

Sometimes you want them to join the email list on their first visit, but ultimately you want to sell them a product. In those cases, you should map stacked user flows: the first one that is completed by joining the email list, and the second one that starts AFTER the first flow has been completed.

charge a flat fee (simple pricing is best) instead of per item.

Product videos Images are good, but everything indicates that video is the future. Photos have their limitations; video is the next step before actually touching and feeling the product.