Unraveling the mystery of online conversion rates

As an online marketing professional or entrepreneur, have you ever wondered what influence the choice for contacting customer service method has on online conversion rates? In addition, how do these relations change for either corporate customers or private customers? Why do companies such as IKEA.com, Dell.com and Amazon.com differentiate their websites for these customer types? The author of this book formulates seven hypotheses regarding these and other issues while accounting for the effect of customer type. Using clickstream data on over 10.000 orders in the online retailing environment, support is found for five of the seven hypotheses. These findings offer insights into online shopping behavior and into the differences between corporate and private browsing behavior. The author discusses issues such as the differences in conversion rates between paid referrals - for example Google AdWords traffic - and unpaid traffic. Extensive theoretical and managerial implications are discussed to offer the reader different perspectives on the researches'' conclusions.