Did you know that 99 percent of people who visit your eCommerce store won’t buy on their first visit and that many won’t return again after that? Or did you know that for every $92 spent on attracting visitors, the average online business spends just $1 on converting them? These statistics and people’s ignorance on how to boost conversions, explain why many eCommerce businesses struggle.

You don’t need specialized knowledge to boost sales on your eCommerce store. Likewise, you don’t need to fork out money to pay conversion experts. Instead, these simple — really, super simple — tips that are grounded in research, will boost sales on your eCommerce store significantly.

Attune Your Usage of Color to Your Demographics

From a design perspective, we tend to underestimate the role that color plays on conversion rates. For many people, the choice of what color to use in their products and design is left to personal preference and desire, when in reality using the right color combinations can boost sales.

According to a study that analyzed 100 brands and studied 450 non-color blind participants, it has been proven that color can influence the likability and familiarity of people to feel toward a brand. Another study that observed the role that color played in marketing and decision-making found that people make up their minds within 90 seconds of interacting with people or products, and that up to 90 percent of their assessment is influenced by colors.

What’s more important to note, however, is that the colors that work best for men might not be welcomed by women — so it is important to attune your colors to your demographics. Colors can also influence how your brand is perceived, and as a result boost sales — a good example of a company that gets color right is Cadbury, who successfully uses the purple color to communicate luxury. You can use the color blue to communicate trust and integrity; Facebook and Twitter are major examples of companies that use this color.

Research has shown that both male and female are more likely to prefer the color blue, but while women largely favor the color purple, it won’t work with an audience of men. The graph below shows color preference for both men and women.

Image credit: Helpscout

Anchor Your Offer for Easy Comparison

Often times you try to shop on Amazon and see something like this:

To the untrained eye, there’s nothing special about the above listing. However, take a look at the “List Price” and the “Price” and you’ll notice a difference — including a “list price” creates the impression that you’re getting a bargain, because the main price is automatically anchored to it. What’s especially surprising is that the very same laptop costs $179.99 on Target.com (Yes, it’s cheaper!), yet research points to the fact that the Amazon listing is likely to result in more sales. Why? Anchoring!

Often times, when we want to make a decision, we try to look for a reference point — an anchor — that we can use to judge our decision. In this case, by showing people a list price of “$199.99” and an actual price of “$184.86,” people feel that they are getting a discount and rush to buy — in reality, however, the product is much cheaper elsewhere. By introducing the “list price” option, Amazon is making it the “anchor” instead of having people anchor the product based on the price of their competitors.

Anchoring is a very powerful technique, and if used correctly, it can powerfully boost your ecommerce sales.

Use Security and Trust Seals

Often, the decision of many people not to buy from you has nothing to do with the quality of your products or the persuasiveness of your copy. It’s a trust issue, and this often poses a serious problem compared to others.

If people don’t trust you, they will never buy from you. There’s nothing you can do about that.

According to a study conducted by Econsultancy/Toluna, 48 percent of people are wary of performing online transactions on sites without a trust seal. This makes sense, especially when you consider how often major websites are hacked these days.

If you have no trust seal on your website, add one and you’ll notice a dramatic increase in sales.

Besides using a trust seal, you can also make people trust you more by using testimonials, featuring customer reviews (both positive and negative), having an about page and having your phone number displayed prominently on your website.

Start a Blog

I’m actively involved in the Website Setup project, where we teach people how to set up a blog (for good reasons!), so I can’t resist including this. And this is for two key reasons:

1. 99 percent of people won’t buy on their first visit to your site. Blogging serves as a means to educate, inform and keep your products in the mind of people who choose not to buy immediately.
2. Businesses that blog generate 67 percent more leads than businesses that do not blog. They also experience better search engine rankings, better bonding with users, and are able to more easily inform users about the benefit of their products — all these contribute to more sales.

If you don’t have a blog for your ecommerce store yet, starting one will most certainly boost sales. However, your approach needs to be a bit different from the traditional “blogging” approach. Here are some tips:

• Capitalize on product reviews: due to a blog’s ability to easily rank in the search engines, creating product reviews and publishing them on your blog will ensure better rankings for your product reviews, eventually generating more sales.
• Do comparisons: Do you have an eCommerce store that sells computers? If yes, a simple comparison of “Apple vs Mac computers” on your eCommerce blog can be a great sales driver. People will tend to refer to these comparisons, and it will also rank in search engines. By linking to the products you compare in your store, you’re more likely to experience a sales boost.
• Publish more content: Statistics show that businesses that publish 16 or more blog posts monthly get the most results from blogging — in fact, they get 3.5 times more traffic, and as a result, a lot more sales than businesses that publish less than four blog posts monthly. As an e-commerce store, the volume of content published could be one of your biggest assets.

Limit Choices

As an eCommerce store with hundreds or even thousands of products, it sounds like the best thing to do is showcase relevant products to people at every stage of the buying process. However, research shows that this isn’t effective. In a study conducted at an upscale supermarket, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper found that limiting choices displayed to people from 24 varieties of items to just six varieties was able to boost sales by up to 10 times.

If you have a store with a lot of different variety of products, where it is virtually impossible to limit choices, you can still capitalize on the fact that limited choices boost sales by doing the following:

• Feature your most popular products: What are the five most purchased product in a particular category on your eCommerce store? Showcase these products in a special section and make it easy for users to find them; instead of being confused with possibly thousands of products, they easily see what resonates with others.
• Feature products with the most reviews: By featuring products with the most reviews, you let users decide. Even if there are a thousand products in a certain category, reviews show people which ones people like best. This allows you to use a combo of social proof and limited choices (in terms of what other people think is best) to boost sales.

Showcase your top picks: Sometimes, maybe you feel certain products will do better than others due to some other information you have. Showcase these products in a special section for every category; include no more than three to six products as top picks.

Conclusion

There are many ways to boost eCommerce sales – whether it is through the right use of color to communicate a message about your brand or by using elements of trust to get more people to buy from you. Hopefully, the above tips help you boost eCommerce sales.

Read More at Boost eCommerce Sales Using These 5 Research-Backed Principles

In this tutorial, we’re going to learn how to add titles and transitions in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Download Adobe Premiere Pro.

Read More at Titles and Transitions Premiere Pro Tutorial

The SVG we know and love today is “SVG 1.1 2nd edition”. SVG 2 is in Editor’s Draft status at the W3C, and it’s at serious risk of never getting past that, as it’s charter may not be renewed before it reaches recommendation status.

Tavmjong Bah on part of the reason:

While shocking and unexpected, it didn’t come out of left field. The active participation in the working group has dropped to just a handful of people, none representing any of the browser vendors. In fact, the last two “face-to-face” meetings had attendance of just three regular participants, one from Canon (which is dropping membership in the W3C as the end of the year) and two invited experts who are working for free.

Like Tavmjong, I also spoke with Doug Schepers recently about SVG 2. He ran through most of the major new features for me. This is a good page to see a list of those, along with their status. My hot take after that:

• There isn’t very many killer features for the layman web developer, and it’s not overly surprising to me interest all around is waning.
• Several of the really useful things that are technically SVG 2 are already supported decently (e.g. non-scaling-stroke).
• I’m usually wrong about stuff. There is a good chance SVG 2 features unlock amazing things that I can’t even comprehend right now.

There are a few features that are fairly obviously useful. Here’s one: z-index. Right now there is no way to control stacking order of SVG elements other than source order. SVG 2 supports z-index and it will just work and that will be useful. No browser is supporting it yet and it’s considered “at risk”.

The Three Way Dance

Usually I think of new features on the web as a three way dance between:

• Developers. They use the features. They are the voice of what is wanted. They are the measuring stick of what actually get used.
• Browsers. They do the implementing of features. They are the gatekeepers. They have their own ideas on what is needed. They are businesses.
• Specs. They document how features should work. Browsers look to them to see how to implement features, because the incentive is there to implement features interoperability. They are middlemen. They also have their own ideas of what is needed.

Any one of them can exert force and push features along, although ultimately everyone has to agree. Developers can be really loud about a need, which may excite browsers into wanting to deliver for them, or spec authors to jump in and define how it would work. Spec authors may have a serious desire to refine and evolve a language and it’s APIs and move things along themselves. A browser might feel strongly that their customers want something (or it makes good business sense to provide something) and move forward with an early implementation.

There is plenty of crossover as well. Browser vendor people can work as spec people. Developers are sprinkled everywhere.

SVG 2 feels mostly like a spec-driven endeavour. There is a decent amount of interest in SVG right now amongst developers, but perhaps not very much chanting about SVG shortcomings. I find developers are mostly just trying to wrap their heads around what is already there. But this newfound enthusiasm is perhaps what has driven long-time SVG spec-involved people to move forward on SVG 2.

As a spec-driven endeavour, it’s on them to excite the other parties into action. That’s the part that isn’t going well so far. From the developer angle, I see it as that lack of killer features. From the browser angle, here’s Bah again:

There are only two browser implementations of importance: Blink (Chrome/Opera) and Gecko (Firefox). Of these, only Blink has the resources to fully implement new features quickly although Gecko has implemented more of SVG 2. Chrome commands a huge lead in browser market share (almost 75%). Google has a habit of unilaterally removing features it doesn’t like from Blink, basically dictating that those features are removed from specifications.

Two other significant browser implementations, WebKit (Safari) and Edge, are more followers than leaders and have relatively little market share (5% and 4% respectively). For example, Microsoft explicitly stated that they would not even look at SVG 2 until the specification was a Candidate Recommendation.

Read: Blink does whatever it wants; Gecko is slow; Edge won’t touch it; WebKit is gonna wait it out.

It gets a little worse.

The Three Four Way Dance

For SVG 2, there is a major fourth player involved: Software.

In my estimation, the vast majority of SVG in use on the web wasn’t authored directly by developers, but output by software. Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator, Sketch, Affinity Designer… there is loads of software that exports SVG.

Let’s take another SVG 2 feature, the b or B command as part of the path syntax. It looks like it it will allow for more efficient path output by allowing you to change the angle of trajectory for subsequent path commands.

That’s great and all, but why would a company like Adobe touch that? If they implement it, they risk outputting SVG that no browser supports, which isn’t useful and would certainly irk customers. They almost certainly need to wait for browser support to be very solid before moving on something like that. Which starts a vicious circle: why would browsers implement something no one is ready to take advantage of?

So even if the spec gets to some state of finished, and the browsers bite on it, we’re still at the mercy of software also taking advantage of it.

From The Gut

Without knowing more, I lean toward agreeing with the browser vendors. Bah reports:

The general consensus from the browser vendors is that SVG 2 should be finished but that it should be restricted to fixing the problems with SVG 1.1 2nd edition along with a few choice selected new features (like ‘paint-order’) which have already been implemented by multiple browsers. New features (meshes, hatches, etc.) should be removed.

Sounds like the removing of new features is pretty painful, but might be the chest of gold you have to toss off the wagon to make it through the pass.

The SVG 2 Conundrum is a post from CSS-Tricks

Cool little lib from Atif Azam that allows you to wrap a name in a span and it puts a little ? button to hear the pronunciation. The audio comes from NameShouts. You can’t contribute your own pronunciations to NameShouts, best I can tell, but the lib allows you to provide an alternate source.

I made a demo based on the screenshot in the README:

See the Pen Demo of Vocalizer by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

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Vocalizer is a post from CSS-Tricks

Crank it Up With the Professional 8-Track Font Pack from Font Diner – only $16!

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These days, I’ve been pondering what purpose we as developers have in our world. I’m not able to provide you with an answer here, but instead want to encourage you to think about it, too. Do you have an opinion on this? Are we just pleasing other people’s demands? Or are we in charge of advising the people who demand solutions from us if we think they’re wrong? A challenging question, and the answer will be different for everyone here. If you want to let me know your thoughts, I’d be happy to hear them.

Bear with me, this week’s list is a large one. Too many good resources popped up, explaining technical and design concepts, how to use new JavaScript methods to write smarter applications, and sharing lessons learned from CSS Grid Layouts and tips to take care of your happiness.

The post Web Development Reading List #158: Form Usability, Vue.js, And Unfolding Critical CSS appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Every developer knows that just because a website looks like and does what it’s meant to on the latest iPhone, doesn’t mean it will work across every mobile device. In this article, we’ll highlight some of the many open device labs out there — fantastic and helpful initiatives by the community that deserves support and attention.

Open device labs (ODLs) are a response to the myriad of operating systems, browsers and devices that litter our technical landscape. They offer developers a (usually) free space to go to test their web systems, websites and apps on a range of software and hardware. This premise forms the core of the OpenDeviceLab.com initiative, which is a community movement to help people locate the right ODL for the job and to drum up further support for these testing centers.

The post Where Are The World’s Best Open Device Labs? appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Are you a Windows user? Then you should definitely download the free-to-use beta version of Affinity Photo. Now, the designated Photoshop killer is not only available for macOS anymore, but also for the operating system out of Redmond.

Affinity Photo: Free to Use During the Beta Stage

In June, Serif, the developers behind the Affinity series, announced that they were working on making the photo editing tool available to Windows users as well. Now, that time has come. Just as it was done for their Illustrator rival Affinity Designer, the launch of Affinity Photo is done via public beta, which is free to register for anyone.

The download link is immediately sent via mail. All you have to do is load and execute the 277 MB large installation file. During the beta stage, using Affinity Photo is free. Even after the beta, Photo won’t rip a deep hole into your wallet, though. The full version will be accessible for a reasonable one-time payment of 49,99 USD. There’s no subscription plan like there is for its competitor Photoshop. According to Serif, all future updates will be made available for free after the one-time purchase.

Affinity Photo: Feature Identity of the Platform Versions

According to Ashley Hewson, head of Serif, Affinity products have always been developed in a way that the code base is practically platform independent, at least when it comes to the core features. This not only allowed the feature set to stay identical throughout platforms, but it also granted 100% file compatibility. Even the user interface is only different in places where it is impossible to avoid due to system differences.

Speaking about user interface; Affinity Photo knows English, German, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese. Personally, I’m not missing anything when it comes to my personal language range 😉

In my short test, Affinity Photo not only started very quickly, but it was also very responsive overall. Even opening moderately heavy PSD files was done almost immediately, and, above all else, without any errors. Those that know how to work Photoshop, won’t have any problems when handling Photo. The interfaces are very similar, and the toolbar doesn’t hide any surprises either.

Affinity Photo for Windows With Feature Advantage

Although I said that the Windows and Mac version were identical, this is only true in perspective. Right now, the Windows beta offers even more functionality than the Mac product. The Windows beta already represents version 1.5, which has yet to be released for macOS.

The temporarily exclusive features include extended features for the creation of HDR compositions, the so-called focus stacking, which connects multiple images with different focus to one, the introduction of batch processing, as well as the option to edit 360° panoramas. Photoshoppers will smile at this list. Of course, the Adobe bolide has been offering similar functions for a while now, except for the editing function for spheric panoramas. However, this shouldn’t have widespread impact.

The following video introduces you to the functions of Affinity Photo for Windows:

Conclusion: Windows users shouldn’t let this opportunity pass. Go ahead and download the free beta. Adobe customers could at least take a look at what the competition has to offer. When it comes to the price, Affinity is the only option, but in the professional environment, I don’t see Affinity Photo putting Adobe into a predicament shortly. Either way, Affinity Photo makes photo editing available to a wider audience. And this is a lot already.

Friends, Windows enthusiasts, and people generally just stuck with Windows… rejoice! Rejoice, for some real competition to Adobe has finally hit our platform. Affinity Photo is here in Beta form, and it is looking mighty fine. I’ve had a chance to play around with it, and I have to say that I am duly impressed.

Well, it is a beta, so expect some bugs. But hey, if you want to give it a try without dropping fifty bucks, now is the time.

Now, if you’ve only given the marketing materials a cursory glance (that was my mistake) you might think of this as a cheaper alternative to Lightroom. You wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but… okay yeah, still pretty wrong. Affinity Photo is not a photo management/batch editing solution. It has a RAW editing environment, yes, but that’s about it.

Affinity Photo is much, much closer to Photoshop than I previously imagined, with extensive capabilities for editing and enhancing photos, compositing photos, digital painting, and so much more. As we web designers tend to make heavy use of photos and other graphics of this kind, this is good news.

Now, because it’s such a multifaceted piece of software, the true genius of the way Affinity apps’ Personas feature comes into play. While working with Affinity designer, I always thought it was kinda cool, but editing photos comes with way more complexity. Splitting that complexity up into manageable chunks makes the Affinity Photo interface way easier to work with.

But hey, see it for yourself:

The Photo persona

Look at my cat. My cat is amazing.

This is where you’ll find all of the most familiar photo editing tools, like selection tools, painting tools, and so on. It’s also where you can add vector objects, text layers, and basically do most of your compositing work. On those rare occasions when you need a full photo-editing suite, Affinity photo can do it.

Here’s a video, courtesy of Gelner Photography, showing off what kinds of stuff you can do:

The Develop persona

This is your Lightroom section. When you first import a RAW file, you’ll be taken here first, to make any and all initial adjustments. It comes with every feature you might expect from a RAW editing software solution, except for image library management.

The Liquify persona

This is the part of the app I’d use if I wanted to make myself look like Eva Longoria. Or make my cat look like Eva… you get the point. Where other apps handle this sort of functionality with a plugin, or maybe one or two integrated tools, Affinity Photo has dedicated a whole Persona to just this sort of thing.

The Tone Mapping persona

You can run tone mapping on a single photo (RAW files tend to work better), or as the last step of putting together a composite HDR image (Affinity Photo does have an HDR merging funtcion). Either way, the tone mapping options are supremely customizable, and there are plenty of options to choose from.

This is obviously not a complete list of features, as there are too many to properly list. We have adjustment layers, whatever the non-trademarked version of Smart Objects is called, the usual filters and layer styles, and so many more.

In conclusion

I’m quite excited about the possibilities inherent in having a low-cost professional photo editing app available on both major creative platforms. I mean, as an open source fan, I still love the GIMP, but I feel that Affinity Photo is, like its sister app, in a much better position to offer real competition in terms of functionality, marketing, and enterprise-level support.

Performance is going to be an issue for a little while, but again, this is just a beta. The Affinity Designer beta (which is now on Release Candidate 9) has improved exponentially over time, and I expect the same to happen here. This is definitely a project to keep your eye on.

When paired with Affinity Designer, I could easily see this app powering a design studio.

LAST DAY: 50 Premium T-Shirt Designs with Extended License – only $27!

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Over 4,400 companies are using Hired to find their next team member and with transparency into each company, you’re empowered to make the right decision about what opportunities you’d like to pursue. Say goodbye to pushy recruiters trying to sell you on roles you don’t actually want. Life’s too short to waste time with companies that are a bad fit, or to find out after months of interviewing that the offer is no good.

Try Hired and let companies apply to you. The best part: it’s always free.

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The Best Tech Jobs in the World is a post from CSS-Tricks