Optimizing Conversion Rate On Your eCommerce Store

Home eCommerce Optimizing Conversion Rate On Your eCommerce Store

January 11, 2021 January 11, 2021 / By Tooba Nadeem

Let’s get it straight: A lot of hard work goes into building and launching an eCommerce store.

First things first, you need to decide what you’re going to sell in your store.

Once you’ve determined your product resources, you need to set up your store, and market your products by sending advertisements to your visitors.

You may think that’s it, you’re off to the races.

Well, not so fast!

The eCommerce sector is progressing across the globe and it has become an integral part of our lives. In an increasingly competitive eCommerce business world, improving conversion rate is pretty challenging.

Encouraging customers to purchase products or services from your eCommerce store calls for a lot of effort.

This act of encouraging customers to buy from you is called conversion.

What is an eCommerce Conversion?

An eCommerce conversion takes place when a customer takes a desired action on your eCommerce store.

Typically this action is called a sale but this metric is definitely not the only way to measure the success of your eCommerce store.

Below we’ve enlisted typical eCommerce store conversions:

Online sale
Users adding product(s) to their shopping carts
Users adding item(s) in their wishlists
Newsletter signups
Sharing on social media
Any KPI(s) that aligns with your business goals

‘Conversion’ is a Broad Topic Because it is Directly Impacted by User Experience on Your eCommerce Site.

Conversion rate optimization is the process of improving your customer’s shopping experience to increase the sales conversion rate on your eCommerce store.

CRO is usually conducted on landing pages or product/services pages.

According to BigCommerce, the average conversion rate of an eCommerce store is 1% – 2%.

Even if you’re doing everything accurately still you can hit around 2% conversion rate.

In this eCommerce CRO guide, we’ll discuss 9 steps you can take to increase the eCommerce conversion on your online store.

So let’s begin. Shall we?

Ways to Increase the Conversion Rate of Your eCommerce Store

1. Using High-Quality Images and Videos on Product Pages

When you’re shopping online you can’t touch or feel the product neither can you try it on.

That’s a sort of drawback of online shopping. However if you want your customers to buy products from your online store the best thing we can suggest is to add high-quality detailed images or videos of every product.

Alejandro Rioja states, “A detailed image or video helps customers visualize your product better that increases the probability of conversion.”

It helps customers to visualize the product to understand it in a better way and thus it increases sales conversion rates.

2. Offering Free Shipping

Since online shoppers have become accustomed to Amazon, they expect the same customer experience from other eCommerce stores.

If you’re not offering free shipping on your eCommerce store, sorry pals, you’re losing sales, period.

In the digital market, offering free-shipping to customers is an absolute must.

Thinking you can’t afford free-shipping? Relax, this is just a psychological phenomena.

Simply increase the prices of your products/services to cover shipping charges.

That’s all and you’re good to go.

3. Providing Coupon Codes/Discount Vouchers for a Limited Time

Create coupon codes or discount vouchers which customers can use at checkout but for a limited time period.

But why for a limited time? Well, when the code or discount voucher is about to expire it will drive urgency and customers are more likely to make purchases from your store without being distracted.

4. Being Competitively Priced

If you’re selling a product then remember thousands of other stores are selling that too.

Let’s take an example, if you’re selling LED light bulbs for $4 and your competitor is selling the same product for $3.5. It’s obvious customers will buy that particular product from your competitor.

For the above reason you need to price your product below or at the average price of product to compete in the market and win sales.

Also the pricing of products fluctuates so make sure to adjust prices of products frequently.

On the other hand, if you and your competitor are selling the same product at the same price then who will win the sale?

Honestly it totally depends upon the quality of your imagery and marketing. Both elements heavily influence your customer’s actions. The quality of imagery and marketing must be top-notch to convince customers to buy from you.

Just make sure you’re targeting the right audience with the right marketing strategy and imagery, and the sales will come in automatically.

5. Using Cart Abandonment Software

All eCommerce marketers complain about abandoned carts – i.e a customer lands on your store, adds a product(s) in the shopping cart and then leaves without completing the checkout process.

In this scenario, using cart abandonment software can help to increase store’s conversion rates. It is an amazing tool to send automated reminders to customers to encourage them to complete the purchase.

This software targets the users who have added items in their shopping carts, entered their contact details and then left the store.

It allows you to send follow-up emails to those customers who abandoned their shopping carts. You can also add a discount coupon in follow-up emails to encourage them you buy those products which they added in their shopping cart.

This strategy is pretty helpful for almost every eCommerce store and some stores even projected a 30% increase in their online store conversion rates when they started using cart abandonment software.

All in all,using a cart abandonment software can take your eCommerce store from low to at least average sale conversion rate.

Check out our article on 7 Effective Ways to Improve Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates

6. Using Live Chat Software

We believe using a live chat software can improve conversions.

Manny Hernandez of OMNI believes, “Live Chat Support helps ecommerce stores to enhance the business and gain a competitive advantage. Providing web visitors and customers with a timely and accurate answer to their concerns is a sure way to enhance your brand image and trust with your customers and that will be reflected in the conversion rate.”

If you’re choosing a live chat software we highly suggest you to be available during business hours to respond to the chats immediately.

If you’re unavailable to respond to your visitors query during business hours it will leave a negative impression on them.

Instead of sending automated replies, talk directly to your visitors. Creating a human connection is a must to build trust of your customers.

If you have a whole team of representatives to help your visitors then go ahead and get a live chat software for your eCommerce store to increase the conversion rates.

7. Let Your Customers Know Your Online Store is Secure

Building trust of customers in a short span is a challenging task. You need to build a certain level of trust that your customers can confidently enter their personal information like credit card details on your online store.

If you’re looking for ways to improve the conversion rate on your site, then don’t forget to enhance your on-site credibility and trust.

Customers only prefer to buy products and services from a legitimate online store. For this purpose you’re taking all standard industry security measures to prove your credibility to your customers.

You ensure that their personal details will be protected, you can do a few things like,

Add an SSL certificate at Checkout and show images of trusted payment methods like PayPal to tell your customers that you only use trusted-payment options.

You can also display security badges (if you have one) to add more credibility to your site.

8. Reducing Checkout Process Steps

If your eCommerce store checkout process is complicated, too long and unconventional, be ready to lose customers.

William Chin-Fook of Bumblebeelinens states, “The one tip that we have for increasing conversions is always lowering the number of steps required for adding to cart, thereby shortening your conversion funnel process.”

If you wish to improve conversions of your eCommerce store, reduce redundant steps from the checkout process. Simplify your checkout process and make it less tricky because long checkout processes drive customers away.

Keep the checkout process functional and clean. Eliminate the options which can drive customers to other pages. Also keep on testing new ways to remove elements that can distract your customers and streamline the checkout process until you discover what works best for your eCommerce store.

Optimize Your eCommerce Store Speed

Improving the speed of your eCommerce site is essential.

According to Bob Buffone of Yotta, around 57% of shoppers leave eCommerce sites that take more than three seconds to load.

In today’s fast-paced world, online brands have only a couple of seconds to capture the attention of customers before they begin to leave their site.

Speed optimization helps eCommerce sites to improve customer experience. Unfortunately many eCommerce marketers overlook this fact.

Brendan Tully of WP Speed Fix stated,“I think it goes without saying that site speed is important for conversions, but most ecommerce businesses neglect the speed of their checkout process when moving between steps in the checkout and submitting the payment on the final step of the checkout process.”

Always check the page loading speed of your homepage, product catalog page and checkout process.

Make sure every page on your digital store loads fast to increase the conversion rate of your eCommerce site.

Essential Takeaways

From images of products to page loading speed, everything affects the conversion rate of your eCommerce store. We hope this eCommerce CRO guide will help you to increase the conversion rate of your eCommerce store.

Connect with experts at CODUP for top-notch eCommerce website development services.

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Tooba Nadeem

Tooba Nadeem is an experienced technical writer with 5 years of expertise in technical writing. Her extensive research and knowledge enable her to provide comprehensive insights into various interesting topics. She excels at presenting complex information in simplified language, ensuring clarity for the audience.