If we’re selling online we want more visitors. It’s just a fact. We ideally want visitors who are looking to buy exactly what we are selling.

We agonize over keywords to try to attract the right target audience... let’s remember that a picture paints a thousand words. If visitors see an image, clicks it and arrives at your store, imagine what a great chance you have of closing a sale.

Our next webinar shows you how to broadcast more than just keywords – how to broadcast your actual products. Also, you’ll learn what to do when the visitors arrive at your store. The attraction and the conversion. This will be a really popular and informative session.

Register now to be sure of a seat! Thursday October 15^th at 9:00 AM PDT

I (and right alongside me, everyone at Vortx and AspDotNetStorefront) am on a mission. I try really hard to always listen to our client base, and the word "abandonment" comes up just about every day of the week, especially as we begin the inevitable countdown to the holiday season and its spending frenzy. 

Many store owners agonize (rightly) about conversion rates. How many visitors can we persuade to sell? Every single sale is a gem. A nugget of gold and we are all searching for those nuggets. We all study our checkout process and invest time, and sometimes money, trying to recover the lost shoppers who entered the checkout process but didn't complete.

Think about the visitors to your store. They "abandon" in at least four different ways:

1) They land on your store and "bounce". They just come and whooosh .... they leave.

2) They land on your store and click. Navigate to at least one different page. Maybe they browse a little, but then CLICK - the window is closed and there they are - GONE!

3) They land on your store and start moving around. They browse and put at least one thing into their virtual shopping cart. They are thinking about buying. But, no, they don't push that cart through into the checkout process. They leave.

4) They land, browse, drop one or more things into their cart and yes! they enter that precious checkout aisle. They reach for their credit card and ....... something goes wrong. You don't collect their money and they don't make their purchase.

As an industry we are beginning to take the fourth category seriously. This is called "checkout abandonment" and there are definitely things we can all do to reduce the level of abandonment in the checkout. After all, these shoppers have logged in and we know who they are. We just have to reach out, smartly and respectfully, and hope to find out what went wrong. 

The first three categories are pretty much neglected and we want to help you do something about that. We have some very real innovation going on behind the scenes so that before September kicks in, we can be inviting you to come and study with us for the rest of the year. We will tell you more as we think everything through (it's a strong company value - we try never to open our mouths before we fully engage our brains) and we will communicate via this blog, via the forum, via vortx.com and via aspdotnetstorefront.com. Please look forward with excitement.

It's Sunday morning and I have just a moment's calm to take a look at the blog ...... I'll be honest and say that there is a good chance that we will start afresh this week with a whole new blog. I find some blog postings at this address that I can't stand alongside and I'd love to avoid confusion.

Let me be clear - many of these blog posts were written with the best of intent, and the content was true at the time of writing, but isn't now. See Gretchen's article of 2nd August, for example. She does a fabulous job of supporting a policy that we, the new owners, will not be prolonging. In case you haven't heard it on the street, we have revived support on version 8. We will also help anyone on earlier versions - and we'd love to be getting into debate on why we think it's probably a good idea to come a little closer to the current versions.

While we are still making key decisions about the quality and standing of all the available versions, please know that we are simply here to help. We are incredibly busy, so if you have questions that will wait a week or two, then it would be great for us to sink into the new place a little, but for all of you with burning issues, then we want to do our very best to help, so reach out. 

On Thursday 19th August (noon, Eastern) we will be hosting a webinar to talk about our immediate plans for the product, and about the energy we are bringing to our takeover. Try to listen, but if the timing is bad for you, then we will be recording and posting a copy on both the production site and the forum.

This is all I have time for today, but watch out for news of our blog plans. Once we know that we've been smart enough about a decision, then we'll share the future with you all.

Jo