15 Ways to Increase E-commerce Conversion Rate

E-commerce conversions are recorded when someone takes the desired action on your website. This is usually a sale, although sometimes this can mean adding an item to your wish list, shopping cart, or subscribing to your newsletter. So, your e-commerce conversion rate is the process of optimizing your website for more purchases, cart items, etc. In addition, consumers sometimes see online shopping sites as a place to gather information rather than buy.

Even when they are in a brick-and-mortar store, shoppers often compare prices online before making a purchase. Statistics show that 72% of shoppers do online research before shopping in-store. Nearly two-thirds report checking prices on their phones while in a store. All that browsing online is a sales opportunity for your e-commerce business. Improving your conversion rates will help you take advantage of these visitors and turn browsers into buyers.

your e-commerce conversion rate is the process of optimizing your website for more purchases

This is why optimizing your website to get more sales is so important.

In this post, we will share 15 ways to help you optimize your ecommerce conversion rate.

What is an E-commerce Conversion Rate?

The conversion rate for an e-commerce site is the percentage of visitors making a purchase. Calculating your conversion rate is pretty straightforward. Simply divide the total number of transactions (or conversions) during any given period by the number of people who visited your website or landing page (i.e. interactions) during the same timeframe.:

If you have 20 sales from 1,000 website visitors:

20 ÷ 1,000 = 2% conversion rate

The truth is that for most e-commerce businesses, conversion rates can vary from industry to industry, with different benchmarks for each industry, but it is very important to know your conversion rate because that knowledge will enable you to strategically plan and implement ways to improve your business.

Typically, the average conversion rate across the entire e-commerce platform is between 1% and 4%. If you can increase your e-commerce conversion rate even by 1% or 2%, you can double your sales. So, if you want to improve your position right now, check out these 15 ways to improve your ecommerce conversion rate. Use the following tools to improve e-commerce conversion rates:

Google Analytics

You can have a great view of website visitors with Google Analytics

For most websites, you should set up Google Analytics or something similar. This gives you a great view of your website visitors including:

• How visitors find your site: This can be from keyword searches in google, referring sites or direct visits.
• How long visitors stay on your site.
• Where are the visitors coming from?
• If the visitor is returning or new.
• What browser, operating system was used and if the visitor was using a mobile device or desktop/laptop.
• The number of visitors that converted (based on goal setting) and the interactions that led to the conversion.
• Link to your Google Ad-words campaign to track paid traffic.

BigCommerce Analytics

If your store is running on BigCommerce, the platform has an Analytics section in the admin panel that shows all abandoned carts including those products that were in the cart at the time of abandonment.

It also offers an advanced set of marketing tools including SEO tools, over 70 promotions and discounts, one-page checkout, and an abandoned cart saver. All these features will help you increase conversions.

There are also Store Search analytics that will show you what customers are typing into the built-in BigCommerce search engine. This underutilized conversion optimization strategy assists you in bridging the gap between what customers are searching for and the language and content of your website.

Hot-Jar

Hot-Jar is a great tool for a high-level understanding of how your users interact with your website. As a heatmap, you have mouse click, cursor movement, and scroll depth mapping. Depending on your plan, each heatmap test will capture between 1,000 and 10,000 pageviews and generate a meta-analysis. However, that's just the beginning of Hot-Jar's capabilities. Session recording can be an extremely useful tool for evaluating customer behavior in real time.

With page targeting defined, Hot-Jar records individual user sessions, which you can view when it's convenient to understand how users interact with the UI on a completely organic level. Furthermore, you can set up an attribute-based filter based on visit duration, page views, country, device, and more.

15 Ways to Increase Your E-commerce Conversion Rate

In this highly competitive world, providing a good shopping experience for customers is very important for businesses. It doesn't help if a lot of customers visit your website and don't shop. To increase e-commerce conversion rates, every step must be analyzed, right from the landing page to testing. You need to optimize your website now to increase your conversion rate because conversion rate at the end of the day will help increase your revenue. Here's how you can improve your e-commerce conversions:

1. Use high-quality images and video on your product pages.

When you shop online, you cannot touch the product or try it on. You can only show detailed photos or videos so customers know exactly what they're getting. Therefore, we recommend using high-quality images and videos on product pages to help users better visualize products and increase conversion rates.

2. Optimize for mobile devices

Customers spend most of their time on their mobile devices. In 2018, mobile devices accounted for more than a third of retail sales. Your e-commerce store must provide customers with a great mobile experience, so you must optimize your e-commerce store for mobile devices to increase conversion rates. If your e-commerce store doesn't offer a great mobile experience, you're missing out on a huge amount of revenue.

3. Various forms of payment

Various payment methods will create better customer experience

Some people simply do not want to enter their credit card information on the internet. While you'll never please everyone, offering more than just a “pay by credit card” option is important. PayPal seems to be a popular choice with 44% of consumers saying they use it for payments as a fraud prevention measure.

PayPal or Amazon Payments are good options of payment method. Or if your customers are more tech-savvy or persuasive, you might even consider adding a cryptocurrency option like Momo,  Air-pay,  Samsung Pay,  etc.

4. Always Be Testing

The logic is straightforward: if you don't improve, you'll fall behind. And in the harsh world of e-commerce, you'll probably never go back. The best way to improve is to A/B test everything: email campaigns, landing pages, banner ads, chatbots, even the color of your CTA buttons. You can take advantage of tools like Google Optimize for free. Depending on the test, you may need help with design and development.

Come up with two versions of everything you do, then track metrics and see which converts more. If the outcome is decisive, take that approach.

5. Offer free shipping and return

Online shoppers tend to expect a certain standard that they have become familiar with on e-commerce sites like Amazon, Lazada, Shopee, etc. If your store doesn't offer free shipping, customers will look elsewhere. Free shipping is a must-have in today's market. Increase the price of your product to cover shipping costs if that's what you need to do when you have to recommend this feature for your e-commerce site. Free returns give customers the confidence to take a chance on a purchase when they're uncertain about a discount. Make sure your policy is well-defined and easily accessible. Put a link to your return policy on the front page and in your checkout.

6. Personalization

A personalized user experience allows you to keep your desired messages and actions in users' focus across platforms. Creating a personalized experience for your customers will shorten the path to purchase and increase your conversion rates. For example, if I go to the watch site and look at sportswear, the next time I visit the Homepage, you can recommend sportswear and remove any irrelevant categories. Furthermore, people like things that are new and have a different look and feel from other websites or personalized interfaces can help attract attention and exclusivity, and even improve your chances of buying a product.

7. Recover abandoned carts

Sending a reminder a few hours or days later may help customers complete their transaction

A great way to increase conversions is an automatic reminder of an abandoned cart. Many times a customer will add items to their cart and get distracted. Hopefully sending a reminder a few hours or days later will help them complete their transaction. With the inclusion of this feature, you can contact users via email and encourage them to revisit cart items and complete their purchases.

Abandoned cart emails can also be customized to include a discount on completing their order. If the user provides us with a contact email in the first steps of the conversion funnel, this could be the start of a reinstated sales process. With email, you can reach customers to close a purchase, offer similar alternatives at a better price, or offer coupons.

8. Be competitively priced

There are countless e-commerce stores on the market and inevitably the items that many other stores offer overlap. Offering customers preferential and competitive prices is an effective strategy for attracting customers to visit the store and thereby increasing the conversion rate.

9. Live chat customer support

One of the ways to help increase conversion rate is to use live chat software if you are actually available during business hours to respond immediately to customers when there is a chat request. Don't let the software go into notification mode that you're not available and force them to leave a message. That's really not good. However, what can be done is that you build a direct line of communication from the potential customer to you. Making a real human connection will help build trust for this purchase as well as future loyalty.

10. Give detailed product descriptions

If you want potential customers to feel comfortable doing business with you, you need to keep them “informed” in many ways. Including video content in your product descriptions allows your customers to see exactly what they're actually buying and increases the likelihood of a sale. Doing this will also improve your SEO, so it's mutually beneficial. In addition to detailed product descriptions and information, you should be upfront and informative about logistics information such as payment options, delivery times, shipping, and other fees.
You know best what features are most important to your own product. Make sure your customers are aware of this.

11. Allow customers to review products

Why do so many people shop at Amazon? Because of the feedback. Remember the last time you went online to buy something? Did you read reviews before making a purchase? I bet you did.

Testimonials are more powerful than just a list of features. Start by offering your products for review to popular review sites (which provide honest reviews) and use this as a starting point for your testimonials.

You can even offer customers a coupon code or other type of incentive the next time they make a purchase as a reward for providing a review. Also, ask customers to raise any complaints with you so you have a chance to resolve any issues as this will help you get more positive reviews.

12. Highlight security

Set yourself up with a reputable website security provider and clearly display their seal on your website. SSL certificates provide immediate security and put your customers at ease as the encryption method ensures that their data is always kept safe. More than half of consumers only use SSL-secured websites when shopping online. Also, switching from HTTP to HTTPS will give a small boost to your Google rankings.

Set yourself up with a reputable website security provider

13. Page loading speed

According to Crazy Egg, a one-second delay in page load times leads to a 7% drop in conversions and 40% of visitors will skip a page that takes three seconds or more to load. One way to improve your site's speed is to pay attention to the weight of the images you include in it. It's all about finding the format that works best for images and pages, whether it's PNG, JPEG, SVG, or another. If your images are badly formatted, you can add unnecessary weight to your page.

14. Optimizing the purchasing process

That means removing any barriers to selling, such as:

• Fewer clicks: short attention span. People don't want to click more than they have to.
• Less noise: Limit pop-ups when users are about to leave your site and do your best to limit distracting third-party ads. The focus should be on your product and your customer, nothing else.
• A more direct path to payment: The e-commerce checkout process should have no more than five steps. Minimize inconvenience for customers during check out. You can use personalization in conjunction with your e-commerce platform's checkout optimization options to ensure that you don't lose customers at the crucial last step to making a purchase.

15. Limited time coupon code offer

Generate coupon codes that customers can use at checkout for a limited time and get a specific discount or percentage on purchases. When your coupon code expires, this promotes urgency, and shoppers are more likely to keep making purchases and not be distracted.

Final thought

While SEO is the highest converting traffic source for most e-commerce professionals, you can also do many things to improve your conversion rate that you may not know how to start and where to start from. If you do just a few of these ecommerce conversion hacks, you should see a positive return on investment. Start with something as simple as improving your site speed before moving on to improving your copy and images.

Ultimately, making one change per week or month will make a difference in your e-commerce conversion rate. And, it's a more manageable way to address areas that need improvement rather than trying to make many sweeping changes all at once.

Driving repeat business is extremely valuable, both in terms of revenue and brand engagement. That's how you build your brand – not just a flash sales page. However, before you can start on the value scale, it's essential to make sure that your site is converting at a baseline of 1-2%.

These 15 ways mentioned here will help you do that and not waste your investment.

Have a few questions? Contact us now at Groove Technology for answers and helpful tips to increase your store's conversion rate!