Let’s face it. There’s more to growing a successful eCommerce business than setting up a store, choosing an inventory, going live and sending tons of traffic to the site.
Granted, every one of these tasks: creating a stunning, intuitive website, selecting hot, high in-demand products to sell, promoting your store and driving tons of traffic are all necessary to the success of your online business.
But, even if you do all these without this one thing, you will struggle to make sales, and your business will ultimately fail.
What is this one thing, you asked?
Conversion.
Here’s the thing, except perhaps in peculiar cases, like if you depend on AdSense to generate revenue from your site, you will want visitors to your website to take specific action such as buy items from your store, download an eBook, subscribe to your mailing list or to complete any other action that is tied to your business objective.
For an eCommerce site, the conversion objective is usually to get visitors to either buy an item or to add products to their Wishlist or cart. Regardless of your eCommerce conversion objective, here are six time-tested ways to boost your conversion rate.
Optimize Your Online Store for Speed
Source: wp.com
With an increasingly competitive eCommerce space, you will want to stand out from other online retailers. And, an effective way to brand your business in your customers’ minds is optimizing your website for performance.
Interestingly, small changes like improving your site speed can see as much as a 40% reduction in abandonment. You see, 53% of mobile users say they will abandon a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load, and a recent Soasta report showed that 1 in 3 shoppers would leave a website if it takes more than 5 seconds to load a page.
These data indicate you are literally leaving money on the table if it takes forever for your online store to load when a customer visits. So, how do you boost your site’s load time?
First, you may want to optimize your media. For example, you can resize all product images to become smaller. Implement lazy loading to reduce the number of requests the site makes to the server when loading thereby speeding up the load time.
You can also use SEO-friendly, optimized landing page builders like the Unbounce page builder to create lightweight, fast-loading pages. Thankfully, there’s an Unbounce free trial to see how it works before finally committing.
Finally, you may want to consider using a content delivery network to get your content delivered faster to customers.
Ensure a Seamless Payment Gateway
Source: wtmakers.com
Imagine doing all the hard work moving customers through the buying process to checkout only to find out the available payment options on your store are not functional or redirected to a completely different site
To improve your conversion rate, ensure the payment process is smooth and friction-free to create a seamless user experience for visitors. And, if redirecting to a separate website is unavoidable during payment, communicate this clearly to customers and be sure to reinforce that it is a secure payment process.
Simplify the Checkout Page
Source: mediashark.co
Multiple checkout pages can hurt conversion, your customers have been through quite a journey on your site to get to that point, don’t make it any harder. Get rid of any form or question that doesn’t guide your customer towards hitting the buy button.
While at it, consider adding guest checkout to cater to those customers that don’t want to create an account. Finally, include trust signals such as social proofs and icons of security measures on the checkout page to help make buyers feel safe shopping on your store.
Offer Free Shipping
Source: shippypro.com
Believe it or not, customers are swayed to purchase if a retailer is offering to ship their item for free. When and where possible offer free shipping on your products and boldly let users know about it.
If, however, you can’t offer free shipping, make sure your shipping and return policies are clear and displayed in a part of the website where customers can easily see them.
Also Read: Successful E-Commerce Marketing Campaigns You Can Learn From
Remarket to Cart Abandoners
Install and use cart abandonment software to pinpoint the exact point in the purchasing process that is frustrating to your customers. Use the insight to optimize and get rid of the bottlenecks.
If the customer had created an account before leaving use the details to send a follow-up email and include discounts and coupons to entice them back to your store.
Clearly show You are Accessible and Available
Customers want when they land on your store to know someone is on hand to help them when they run into issues during the buying process. And that, you are always available if they need to talk.
So, be sure to use live chat apps and ensure you are always online to respond to customer queries promptly.
Wrapping up, while these tips above will help improve your eCommerce conversion rate, be ready to test, test, and test some more to understand what works for your audience.
