NextStage's Joseph Carrabis lets us know that the first sale on your site is getting the customer to click to the next page.

Ecommerce is a flicker in the history of commerce. It's been around maybe ten years? Commercial exchange goes back 25,000 years and hasn't changed much in all that time. We go to MegaMart, test the heft of several axes until we find the one we like best, carry it to the cashier, hand over some money and walk out. That behavior isn't too far removed from Caveman Torg bartering a bushel of wheat for a stone axe. What you and I would recognize as money has been around for 15,000 years, back to Asia Minor when Babylonian Torg gave ShopKeeper Walius Marticus three pieces of bronze with the emperor's face engraved on them in exchange for that metal axe on Marticus' rack. Archaeologists and anthropologists recognize excavated market places for what they are because they have changed so little from the shopping malls of today.

In other words, we've had a long time to get used to a certain style of doing business.
 
From caveman, to Babylonian, to you, something has remained quite constant. You, the caveman and the Babylonian could all see, hold, try, test drive and sample. Until ecommerce, you would go to your local retailer to try something out because you saw it in an ad. But purchase something sight unseen from across the globe? Never!

So you want to sell Caveman Torg that stone axe but all he can do is see it, right? Then all he's coming to you for is a better deal than he can get elsewhere and confidence he can trust you in the sale. You're now competing with every other stone axe maker on the internet and there's mil-lions of them. It's a whole new ballgame out there.

Everybody shops for the same thing differently

Torg shops a certain way for that stone axe. His concerns are heft, size, feel in his hands, and is it going to take down that mastodon that's been digging up his garden at night? Mrs. Torg's concerns are whether or not that stone axe will go well with the other stone axes hanging on the wall, will it stay sharp after cutting up the roast mastodon she's planning for Sunday dinner, and is it light enough for her to use when she's cracking pterodon eggs? Then there's Torg, Jr., and little Torgalina.

Each consumer is interested in the same product for different reasons, which means they shop for the same thing differently. Marketing research has demonstrated that women's purchasing decision strategies are greatly different from men's. There are many other elements that go into purchasing decision strategies. The major elements include age, level of education, income level, cultural background, native language, geographic location and intender status.

Your website has to satisfy the purchaser's decision strategy if they're going to purchase from you, which means your site needs to answer the decision makers' questions before they're asked. You can learn your visitors' purchasing decision strategies fairly easily, and you do it the same way any well trained salesperson does it: by gaining your visitors' comfort and trust.

Comfort and trust lead to conversions

There are three basic types of consumers: researchers, buyers and explorer-tourists.

Explorer-tourists are just looking, not sure what they're looking for. Even so, they are quite valuable to you; remember that maps are made by explorers and tourists. They might not find something immediately interesting to them, but they'll remember your site if it's interesting and tell others about it. They create the map that leads others to your products or services.

Researchers are motivated and want answers. They might not purchase from you during this visit, and if your site convinces them of your expertise, they'll be back -- even if your prices are higher than the competition -- because to them you know what you're doing.

Buyers will buy from you or a competitor, so the sale is yours to lose. Strangely enough, research has shown that buyers are also the easiest visitors to lose. Buyers came to your site with a definite goal in mind: satisfying some need. Make satisfying that goal difficult by poor navigation or confusing pages and they're gone to a site that makes the purchase easier to initiate and complete.

All three consumers will stay on your site as long as they feel comfortable being there. They will grow more comfortable on your site as their trust in your site grows from "I don't know you" to "Hello, old friend."

People make and close business deals when they trust the person they're dealing with. Likewise, people shop in stores where they feel comfortable. History is full of businesses that change hands and lose long-time clients because the new owners change the mood and feel of the business. The old comfort and trust is gone and so are all those sales.

Gaining trust and making consumers comfortable with your site is simple. All you need to remember is that the first sale is the next page.

The first sale is the next page

All three consumers are going to purchase at least one thing from you before they convert, and that one thing is the next page on your site. Conversions occur in the mind long before they occur on the site, and research shows that visitors psychologically leave a site three to four pages before they actually abandon a site. The art and act of keeping visitors psychologically engaged in the buying process is the art and act of gaining trust and maintaining comfort page by page until the final sale is made.

Are visitors dropping off after the home or landing page? Then seriously look at that page as a consumer, not as a marketer. Is that page creating a bond between the site and the visitor that encourages the visitor to continue through the buying process? In other words, look at page one and decide if there's enough reason to buy page two. How many pages are there between the visitor's entry point to the transaction point? Does each page do its job of gaining trust and providing comfort?

Find the pages that lose trust or deny comfort and you've discovered where your visitors are psychologically leaving your site -- regardless of their last page on the site. Fix the failure page, not the last page, and you've fixed a major problem with your ecommerce efforts.

Joseph Carrabis has been everything from butcher to truckdriver to Senior Knowledge Architect to Chief Research Scientist. His 22 books and 225 articles have ranged among cultural anthro-pology, mathematics, information mechanics, language acquisition, neurolinguistics, psychody-namics and psychosocial modeling - and other eclectic topics. His knowledge and data designs have been used by Caltech, Citibank, DOD, IBM, NASA, Owens-Corning and Smith-Barney among others. Carrabis is CRO and Founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Analytics, and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. He's inventor and devel-oper of Evolution Technology.