The Master List of Conversion Tools for Merchants

Conversions are like puzzles, because in order to obtain a sale, merchants must first put all of the right "pieces" into place.

These pieces include anything that directly affects the user-experience or a prospect's perception of a brand, from product image features to customer service tools. After all, getting a consumer's attention is only half the battle. It's up to a merchant's marketing tools and website features to convert browsers into buyers. In order to optimize your ecommerce initiatives, check out the master list of conversion tools below:

Customer Service Tools

Merchants need to bridge the gap between brick-and-mortar stores and ecommerce experiences, which is why it is a best practice to include customer service tools on your site. Tools like live chat or virtual assistants can help prospects not only find items, but also answer their questions to close sales.

CodeBaby - CodeBaby is a virtual assistant platform that helps direct the user experience to meet a brand's KPIs. In addition, the customer service tool aims to create more up-sell opportunities, improve prospect's product education and navigate visitors through the website.

Nuance's Nina - This multi-channel virtual assistant focuses on guiding customers to complete transactions with the least amount of user effort on both mobile and traditional websites.

Needle - This service combines two influential ecommerce features - live chat and social recommendations. The platform leverages a brand's current audience base to recruit influential and knowledgeable fans to help sell products or services. These influential fans (experts) are trained and rewarded to share their product knowledge with prospects via live chat. Experts tend to increase conversion rates and average order value (AOV) because prospects are more likely to purchase from someone they can relate to over an automated sales rep.

Olark - This live chat solution works with a user's IM client (such as iChat or Gtalk) to enable merchants to interact with their site visitors.

LivePerson Keyword-Based Targeting - This tool automatically analyzes search campaign data to identify keywords with the greatest potential to boost the user's ROI. Selected visitors (who are chosen based on the keywords they use) are engaged at the optimal time in order to increase conversion rates.

Product Page Tools

Your product pages can make or break a sale, which is why it is important to make these pages user-friendly and unique, while also providing as much detail as possible. Consider the options below to make your product pages outshine the competition:

Fluid's Visual Product Customization - Nothing makes consumers feel as special as a personalized item, so why not give them the opportunity and technology to create one themselves? Fluid's product configurator allows consumers to create customized products directly from an ecommerce website. Not only does this type of functionality increase sales, but it also helps retailers obtain higher time-on-site metrics.

KSCKreate Non-Flash Video Player - Sometimes it is not enough to just have product images, so add video that is playable on both traditional and mobile screens to your product page with KSCKreate's Non-Flash Video Player.

Virtusize - Avoid returns and increase conversions with Virtusize, a tool that visually illustrates the size and fit of clothing to help online shoppers purchase clothes that fit. Cool fact: This solution has even been leveraged to help furry friends find clothes that fit!

Bravo - Videos are engaging and user-generated reviews can greatly impact a prospect's purchasing decision, so why not combine the two and feature video reviews on your site? You can, with Bravo.

Yotpo - User-generated reviews are influential, so obtain as many as possible with Yotpo. This social review solution automatically emails shoppers to encourage them to leave reviews, and even allows them to do so directly from the email message. In addition, the platform encourages users to share their reviews on social channels, provides reviewer credibility ratings and more.

User-Experience Tools

It is important to offer site visitors the best experience possible. This means providing effortless navigation, intuitive search features and fast-loading pages, among other things. Check out some tools to make your site more user-friendly below:

Monetate Visual Search - Help your customers find exactly what they are looking for quickly, by including visual search in your internal search results.

Search Spring IntelliSuggest - If you don't go with Monetate for your site's search functionality, check out Search Spring IntelliSuggest, which is a tool that monitors every site visitor and analyzes their behavior to turn up the most relevant product results for shoppers in real-time.

Virtual Piggy - Does your brand target the youth market (which, by the way, spends $50 billion a year)? If so, consider integrating Virtual Piggy into your site as a way to accept payments from young customers directly. Virtual Piggy allows parents to create an account for their kids and set up purchasing controls so that kids can make parent-approved purchases using the "Checkout with VirtualPiggy" button.

Gigya Social Login - Please, don't make your customers remember another password. Instead, try Gigya's social login solution, which reduces the barriers for visitors to register to your site, provides rich user insights and can increase conversions rates, as consumers aren't forced to complete a lengthy registration form (or remember their password) before making a purchase.

SiteSpect AMPS - No one has time for a slow site, so speed up yours (both traditional and mobile) with SiteSpect AMPS.

Customer Insight Tools

There is no better way to increase conversions than to figure out exactly what your prospects want. Find out what your customers desire with customer insight tools, like the ones featured below:

Usabilla Live - Put the Usabilla Live feedback button on your website so that your visitors can tell you what they think about it. Visitors have the ability to rate sites with "emotions" (which are depicted with smiley faces), as well as share their thoughts via text on the feedback form.

Google Consumer Surveys - Start collecting feedback from site visitors by implementing a snippet of code on your site with Google Consumer Surveys. The best part of this tool is that the first 500 responses are free (although limited to four questions) and the survey runs until the full amount of replies have been collected. Plus, the survey starts over again each month, which makes it possible to track user satisfaction over time.

iPerceptions - iPerceptions is one of the most recognized names in customer feedback. The company offers four different plans for businesses looking to leverage its platform, including a free plan that comes with unlimited data collection, 32 supported languages, custom questions and the ability for brands to add their own logo to surveys.

UserTesting - See exactly why consumers are leaving your site without converting by conducting a test with UserTesting.com. This on-demand usability-testing platform allows businesses to create tests and receive feedback within an hour from a targeted audience.  

Uservoice - This software-as-a-service provides a variety of customer support tools, including feedback forums, a support ticket system and a knowledge base that can help to answer common questions and assist prospects in finding the information they are searching for.

Promotion Tools

Sometimes the best way to get customers into your store and through the checkout process is with a promotion. That said, promotions come in many different shapes and sizes, so use the list below to decide if you want to launch a deal that is too good to refuse or simply grow your subscriber list with a social contest.

EA Rainmaker - Use the weather to increase your conversions. The EA Rainmaker feature from Email Aptitude is ideal for retailers, as it allows marketers on any ESP to create targeted, weather-based email triggers. A shoe retailer, for instance, could launch a campaign for snow boots once the first snowfall of the year arrives.

ShortStack - Launching contests or giveaways can help retailers grow their subscription base, which gives them the opportunity to nurture new leads and turn them into conversions. ShortStack provides retailers with an easy way to create Facebook apps in order to launch promotions and contests. In fact, the self-serving tool has served up more than a half million custom Facebook apps since its launch in 2010.

AddShopppers - Merchants can leverage this platform for a variety of social apps that aim to increase conversions. Apps include retail-specific social sharing buttons (for example, a "want" button), reward buttons that provide coupons to consumers who share products, a discovery wall that displays a retailer's most shared products and more.

Listrak Ratings and Reviews - Insert your influential user-generated content directly into your email messages to persuade customers on your email list to take action.

ReferralCandy - Word-of-mouth is a valuable advertising mechanism and ReferralCandy has increased its impact. This platform enables retailers to invite customers to a referral program. Once they opt in, they can share a special coupon code with their friends. If the friends use the coupon, the original customer receives a reward that is set by the retailer.

Visibility Tools

It is difficult to acquire conversions if your brand and products can't be found on the Web. Increase your brand's visibility by considering these tools:

Feedvisor - Featuring your products on Amazon not only influences your products' visibility, but also impacts conversion rates. Feedvisor helps merchants grow their sales by automatically checking hundreds of competitive prices every hour in order to set prices based on what consumers are willing to spend.

Single Platform - Constant Contact's Single Platform helps local businesses publish and update business information across hundreds of websites and mobile apps, including Yelp, Facebook, Foursquare, YellowPages and TripAdvisor.

Whitespark Local Citation Finder - Leverage this tool to find and build local citations for your business on the Web.

BrightLocal Local Search Rank Checker - You must know where your rank in the local search results before you can improve, which is why this BrightLocal tool comes in handy. Not only does it track your brand's results on all of the major search engines, but it also tracks both organic and local rankings, as well as compares current versus past rankings.

Yext - Similar to SinglePlatform, Yext can be leveraged to update business listings on numerous websites, apps and maps. Users can even add details to listings like descriptions, promotions and images through the Yext platform.