Evaluation of Factors That Increase Ecommerce Website Conversion Rates

Majority of ecommerce websites today are making loss. Investors are scared to pump in capital post Dot Com Crash unless they see a solid valuation for the ecommerce company. Among the most important metric to measure a ecommerce website profitability is conversion rate. It’s the ratio of number of sales to unique visitor a website receives. The higher this number, the better it is for the websites. However, not many ecommerce websites are paying attention to this metric, most of them build their website just basing on their intuitions with no proper guidelines to design the best converting website. Hence, not surprisingly average ecommerce websites are actually losing money, only a small number are making profits. This project focus on factors that affect conversion rates and try to find out whether Online Video Spokesperson (OVS) may increase a website conversion rate. OVS is a video of the seller or its representative with a transparent background highlighting important area of the websites or special promotions that currently take place at the merchant website. This project put a special interest on OVS due to the nature of the video that is more appealing to the viewers than traditional web media such as texts and pictures. In this project, a website prototype and an OVS prototype is created. A survey was then conducted where the respondents is presented with two versions of the website prototype, one with OVS and one without OVS. From the surveys, it can be concluded that a properly designed website which adhere to elements that can increase conversion rate may result in higher conversion rates then normal website. It is also concluded that website with OVS implemented could see higher conversion rates than website without OVS.