E-commerce conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that completes the checkout process and purchases from your online store. This metric is how you measure the success of your business. To run a successful e-commerce store, you must increase your conversion rate.
If you are wondering how you can increase your e-commerce conversion rate, look no further. In this article, we will discuss ten actionable strategies that will help you improve your conversion rate.
In this article:
Make Your E-Commerce Website Easy to Navigate
Allow Customers to Shop via Social Media
Show Social Proof
Optimize the E-Commerce Checkout Process
Offer Detailed Product Descriptions
Offer Amazing Discounts (and Where Possible, Free Shipping)
Combat Shopping Cart Abandonment
Make It Easy for Customers to Contact You
Optimize Your Call to Actions (CTAs)
A/B Test Regularly
The primary goals of your e-commerce store are to boost conversions and increase sales. Your website plays a crucial role in converting customers. If your website is challenging to navigate, most customers will bounce.
It's crucial that you give your customers the best user experience possible. Your e-commerce website is usually the first point of contact before a sale, so users should be able to move from one page to another on your site with ease. If customers find it difficult to navigate your site, they will readily move on to your competitors.
Here are two easy tips that will help improve navigation on your e-commerce website:
When customers land on your website, they don't want to spend hours searching for products. Most of them will go straight to the search tab. 43% of customers on your retail website will go directly to the search tab. So if you don't have a search tab on your website, you are losing a ton of conversions. The research also showed that visitors who use the search tab are more likely to convert than visitors who do not.
Why?
Visitors who use the search tab already have clear buyer intent. They are not just browsing through the site.
Pro tip: Adding a search tab to your website is not enough. It would help if you had a smart search tab — meaning, if the visitor is typing into the search bar, a list of suggestions should appear. This will help improve their user experience. Adding the autocomplete feature to your search tab will also help increase your conversion rate.
Your website design plays a vital role in determining your e-commerce conversion rate. Avoid a website design that is cluttered and unattractive. Too many things happening on your site will only distract the customers. Avoid adding too many texts, loud colors, and ads on your website.
Here's an excellent example from bliss on a beautifully designed website:
Image: Bliss
When you land on their website, you get easy access to products. The colors on the website are also very soothing to the eyes. There are no distracting ads or huge bulks of text on the web page. The search tab at the top of the page also lends to easy navigation.
To increase your e-commerce conversion rate, you need to reduce the steps in the buyer's journey. Many e-commerce merchants place too much importance on selling only via their website. To run a successful online business, there are two key things you need:
Your target customers should be able to make their purchase where they are most active.
So, if your customers are active on social media, they should be able to purchase directly from there. Research also supports social commerce. 30% of online shoppers say they will readily buy from social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Redirecting your customers from social media to your website only elongates the customer journey and increases the chances of abandoning the purchase. With the help of chatbot checkouts and inbuilt shopping features on social media platforms (like Facebook Marketplace), your customers will be able to buy directly from social media.
The fewer steps that the customer takes before reaching checkout, the higher your e-commerce conversion rate.
According to research, 27% of customers regularly use online reviews when deciding where to shop. In contrast, only 24% of customers say they don't bother to check online reviews before making purchase decisions.
There are a ton of choices available to customers today. Customers use online reviews to help them make purchase decisions. A positive review from a customer can help convince a potential customer on the fence.
When customers leave positive reviews about your business, it increases your brand's trustworthiness. New shoppers will be happy to purchase from you if they know that other customers have bought from you. It signifies that you deliver quality.
Social proof for your e-commerce business can come from online reviews, testimonials, blog posts, social media user-generated content, case studies, and news articles.
Here are some simple ways you can show social proof:
Include testimonials on your website's homepage. Customers will be more confident to make purchases when they see positive testimonials on your website (like below):
Image: feefo
Showcase the number of people that have already purchased a product on the product page (like below):
Image: Booking.com
Display customer testimonials directly under the product (like below):
Image: Booking.com
The checkout page is one of the most critical areas on your website. If your e-commerce checkout page is not optimized for conversions, you will be losing a ton of potential sales.
Optimizing your checkout page will help you increase conversions and drive sales.
Here are some simple strategies you can use in optimizing your e-commerce checkout process.
Offer a mobile-friendly checkout process: 50% of online shopping is done on mobile, so it is essential to optimize your e-commerce website for mobile. (You will see how to do this later in this article)
Allow for guest checkout: Not all of your visitors will want to register to your website before making their purchase. You don't want to discourage them by asking them to subscribe to your site before making their purchase. Add a guest checkout option to make it easy for visitors to make one-time purchases.
Image: Nike
Offer multiple payment options: Your goal should be to offer the customer the best user experience. Offering multiple payment options will make it easy for customers to make purchases. A customer will readily leave your site if they don't see their preferred payment method.
Image: bellroy
Write detailed product descriptions so that your customers will know what they are buying.
Your product descriptions can either make or break the sale. A product description should provide the customer with enough detail about the product.
Detailed product descriptions will also help you with SEO, and your product pages will rank higher on search engines.
Pro tip: When writing your product description, include the keywords your potential customers are searching for on search engines. This will increase your chances of ranking. You can use SEO software to choose the best keywords to target in your product descriptions.
When creating the product description, these are some questions you should answer:
These questions will serve as a template to help you write detailed product descriptions.
Research shows that 57% of online shoppers will not make the first purchase from a new store without a coupon. This means that if you are not offering discounts, you are losing almost half of your new customers.
Another study showed that 91% of customers will visit a store after receiving coupons.
These studies show the effectiveness of coupons and discounts on your e-commerce store. Here some discount types you can try out:
Dollar value discount: You can offer discounts to your customers based on how much they spend. E.g., you can give a $10 discount for every $100 spent. A study from Entrepreneur showed that offering a dollar value discount increases conversion rate by 72%.
Percentage discount: You can offer percentage discounts on fast-moving products to attract customers. Shopify recommends that you use a percentage discount on any purchase below $100 and a dollar value discount on any purchase above $100.
Pro tip: You offer discounts as much as 50% for items that are not moving fast.
BOGO strategy: BOGO stands for "Buy one, get one free." This strategy is used to entice customers. If you can't afford to give a product for free, you can offer "buy one, get a certain percentage off your next purchase."
Free gift: You can also offer your new customers a free gift after making a purchase. These gifts can be branded souvenirs or coupons.
Free shipping: High shipping costs is one of the reasons customers abandon carts. You will significantly increase your e-commerce conversion rate by offering free shipping.
Reducing cart abandonment should be your priority as an e-commerce store owner. The success of your store depends significantly on the percentage of customers that complete the checkout process. If most of your customers are abandoning their carts, you will be losing a ton of sales.
Here are some simple tips to help you reduce shopping cart abandonment on your online store:
Include security signals on your checkout page: A potential customer might abandon their cart if they don't trust your website. Most customers are wary about adding their card details on sites they don't trust. To help establish trust, include security logos on prominent areas of the checkout page.
Make navigation effortless: The more positive the user experience, the fewer chances of them abandoning their cart. When a customer finds it challenging to navigate your site, they are more likely to abandon their carts. Ensure that you make the checkout process as frictionless as possible.
Offer multiple payment options: Customers are more likely to abandon their cart when they can't find their preferred payment options, so it's best to offer them various options for making their payments.
Offer a guest checkout option: Not all customers want to create an account before making their purchase. Offering a guest checkout option will ensure that you do not lose one-time purchasers.
Make it easy for customers to save to cart: Customers shouldn't have to go through several pages before saving their products to the shopping carts. To increase your conversion rate, make it easy for customers to save to cart and return to carts in-progress.
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Customer service is an integral aspect of running a successful e-commerce business. Making it easy for customers to contact you will help increase conversions and revenue. For example, customers might need help completing transactions. If they have a hard time reaching you, they will abandon the purchase and move on to another store.
Ensure that you display your contact info on prominent areas on your web pages. It's also best practice to have a dedicated contact page on your website. You can add the contact page to the top of the navigation pane so that the customer can quickly locate it.
Pro tip: Consider offering a live chat option. Live chat allows you to service your customers in real-time. You will help your customers solve their problems without them going through the stressful process of filling out a form. Customers are more likely to revisit your store when you offer excellent customer service.
Your CTA buttons, to a large extent, affect your e-commerce conversion rate. A properly optimized CTA button will urge the customer to take the desired action.
Here are some tips to help you optimize your CTA buttons:
Use e-commerce CTA phrases that are proven to drive clicks: The best part of running an online business is that there are already templates that work that you can follow. A/B tests these phrases on your website to see which of them brings the highest conversions. Some of these phrases include: "Learn more," "Join free," "Buy now (with one click), "Add to cart," etc.
Optimize your CTAs for mobile devices: Since most of your potential customers will be using mobile devices to make purchases from your store, it's important to optimize your CTAs for mobile devices. Make sure that your CTAs on mobile devices pass the thumb test. This means that your mobile CTAs should fill the width of the screen.
Your CTA buttons should always appear above the fold: Only 20% of customers will scroll down to see a CTA below the fold. To increase your conversions, ensure that you place your CTA above the fold. Customers want to be able to add items to their cart without having to scroll down their feed. Remember that the more seamless the user experience, the higher your conversions.
Image: eBay
Reduce clutter on the product page: The focus of your product page should be the product and CTA button. Remove any other thing that would serve as a distraction.
Pro tip: Your CTA buttons should pop. Customers should not have a hard time locating your CTA buttons. Your CTA should have a unique color that contrasts the background of the page.
Be sure to regularly run A/B tests so you can identify which pages on your sites have the best performance. As you implement new strategies on your e-commerce store, run A/B tests to see if they are working. Test your landing pages, CTA buttons, product descriptions, etc.
Pro tip: Make sure you run split tests on your website. By comparing several versions of your web pages, you will be able to identify which one has the highest conversion rate. To perform this, you will need split testing software. You can use a free tool called Google Optimize to run split A/B tests for your website.
Read more for a list of free e-commerce tools to grow your brand.
Last updated on January 12th, 2024.
