Wanna know how to Increase your e-Commerce Conversion rate, e-commerce store sales without increasing traffic? Well, the key is in increasing your e-commerce conversion rate, which is exactly what we’re gonna look at in this blog.
So in this blog, we’re gonna share 10 tips to improve your e-commerce conversion rate.
We’re gonna be looking at some well-known examples and also some lesser known example. So whatever your store sells on whichever platform you use, buckle up and let’s go.
So before we get into this, let’s talk about the importance of e-commerce conversion rate. It can be very tempting when you’re building your e-commerce business to focus purely on driving more traffic to it.
Let’s say that you want to double sales from where you are now, and you’re getting a thousand visits to your e-commerce store per day. Well, you could increase that number to 2000 by say, driving paid traffic or increasing your organic visibility, but you could also focus on improving your conversion rate.
This is gonna generate you more sales without having to generate more traffic, which is good news because driving traffic usually takes time and/or money, but improving your conversion rate also means that any ads you are running are more productive and more profitable for you.
This lowers your cost per acquisition, which means you can be more aggressive with your advertising and capture more customers for the same amount of money, which sounds like a pretty good deal, right?
Before we start, make sure you have two things in place. Number one is the conversion tracking setup. If you’re using Google Analytics, you want to make sure that your conversions are being tracked properly through analytics. That’s gonna allow you to measure the performance of any changes that you’re making.
The second thing that you’re gonna want to do is have some kind of heat mapping and user recording software in place, you can use Hotjar. But any of those systems that allow you to actually see what people are doing on your site are really important. How are you gonna spy on your visitors if you can’t watch what they’re doing, like little creatures in your game.
10 Practical Ways to Increase Your e-Commerce Conversion Rate
1. SPEED OPTIMIZATION
Tip number one, speed optimization. You’ve heard the saying speed kills. Well, never has it been more true than in the world of e-commerce and particularly slow loading sites can be devastating for your conversion rate.
Now, of course, when you’re building an e-commerce store, you don’t always have full control over every single aspect that’s adding to slow load times, but you’ve got to do what you can with what you’ve got.
Basic stuff like crushing your image sizes down, using something like ShortPixel, which doesn’t damage the resolution, whether it’s removing unnecessary plugins and extensions to improve load time, improving any server response time, you have to do what you can.
There are loads of tools out there to analyse your speed. Page speed insights from Google is a gr eat one and also shows you how you stack up against core web vitals, which is pretty vital, but not a hundred percent vital.
2. IMPROVE PRODUCT PHOTOGRAPHY
The next thing that you’re gonna want to do is improve your product photography. This is obviously more important for some products than other products, for example, if you’re selling bubble wrap, then people don’t need to see this like high-resolution images. But if you’re selling something that people in a store would pick up and examine, we need to be able to replicate that experience as much as we can on your website.
One of the best examples of this is on Apple’s website and they’ve had amazing product photography for forever. Take a look at how many different images they show of the products. They show it in context that you can see how big it is relating to things around it. They’re always careful to highlight the particular detail that they’ve put a lot of attention into.
Now there are even some products out there where a lack of detailed product photography is actually a conversion blocker, for example, let’s say that you’re gonna buy an item of clothing, well you’re probably gonna want to see that item of clothing up in detail. You’re gonna want to see the little details on it like fabric, stitching, pattern, etc. You’re gonna want to see it worn by someone with your particular body shape before you can make a purchase.
And if the store doesn’t have that sort of product photography, a good percentage of people are actually not gonna convert on the site because they haven’t had the fundamental questions answered.
You also need to make sure that you show your products in every different variant that you sell.
3. ADD A CLEAR POSITIONING STATEMENT
Tip three is to add a clear positioning statement and explanation for what your store is all about. Check the storefront look below for example and you can see the headline there, it says “Modern Cat Furniture – A healthy cat is a happy cat..” And then it has a bit of a kind of mission statement for the brand.
This is really important for a new brand that actually customers might not be that familiar with. It’s a great way of setting the scene and explaining very clearly to your customer exactly what it is that you sell.
4. ADD A BENEFIT BAR
Tip four is to add a benefits bar. Now benefits bar is the name given to this group of benefits shown just below the menu. So you can see the image below, it emphasises the price match promise, free hundred day returns, rated excellent in Trustpilot, next day delivery, seven days a week and pay with AO Finance.
So some good things to include on the benefit spot is stuff like this, availability, how long delivery takes, different payment options.
What you’re really trying to do with your benefits bar is give people an extra reason to buy from your store rather than any of the other stores that they might have open in their tabs.
5. FULL WIDTH PAGES
Tip five is to consider your product category layouts and showing people as many products as you possibly can. See the site below.
Shows your products side by side, in slides, product grid, etc. This is most important for businesses that have browsing customers, for example, people that come into a clothing store and browse around to find the right product for them, now in that sorts of case it’s important to show people as many products as you possibly can on the screen to give them as many options as possible.
This means that they can show you double as many products on the screen as if it was one wide, on desktop, they expand this and make it full screen, which is a great way of showing as many things as possible. Now, the goal of this obviously, is that something catches your eye and you’re clicking through into the product page.
6. ADD PRODUCT VIDEO
Tip six is to add a product Video. Video is a great way to really enhance someone’s experience of a product before they buy, here again on the PrettyBuyers site, you can see they’ve got a product video for this particular top. Now it’s great because it shows it in detail. It shows it in action. It shows how the material falls and it shows it in typical use.
Product video is fantastic. Particularly if this is a riskier purchase where you want to remove any objections and give people a demonstration. Now if you’re selling other people’s products, often they will come with a video.
For example, on Amazon, you can see the video that Sony has provided for these headphones.
But if you don’t have product video from the manufacturer, this is actually a really good opportunity to stand your business apart from anybody else that might be selling this, maybe this is a way that you can build personality behind the business and add a bit of credibility by giving a demonstration of the product, talking about why people like certain elements of it.
7. ENCOURAGE CUSTOMERS TO WRITE REVIEWS
Okay, let’s talk about customer reviews. Obviously customer reviews are one of the secrets to Amazon’s growth over the years, and no one has really done a better job of exploiting customer reviews and making them central to the customer journey as Amazon has, here can see an Amazon product page for an excellent book called “How to Get to the Top of Google”. And it’s got over 500 ratings.
It must be amazing. It is, now they’ve made the review system really easy to use for customers by allowing you to search by review rating by including reviews that mentioned particular words that basically give you the gist of all the reviews and also by allowing people to upload images, which increases the credibility of their reviews.
Well for potentially a confusing purchase, like a new laptop, you really want to see people’s reviews.
If your store doesn’t have lots of reviews yet, you really need to build that credibility in other ways. For example, if you have a new site selling mobility scooters and there are no customer reviews, but what you can do instead is give a detailed product description and give your own verdict, include some testimonials. So it’s a great idea to add your personal or your business’s honest perspective on the product.
How can you add the review piece which people are looking for? People read reviews, because they want to know what other people think about it. They want to remove some of that fear and the uncertainty from the purchase. So how can you provide a more honest perspective on it by giving your verdict, talking about why people choose this rather than something else. And what sorts of considerations someone might want to keep in mind when they’re buying a product like this?
8. MAKE IT EASY FOR CUSTOMERS TO REACH YOU
Now this might seem a little bit counter-intuitive because as an e-commerce business, you probably never want people contacting you about anything, just buy through the site and don’t ever phone or email me, right?
But if we really want to maximise our conversion rate, giving customers a way to contact us should they have any questions is a great way of improving your conversion rate. So, consider adding your phone number to the top of the page. Now you might be thinking, I don’t want people to phone me. I just want people to check out.
Yes, I hear you.
But what you might find when you do this, is that actually just the credibility of having a phone number that people can contact you through actually increases your e-commerce checkout rate anyway, because if they have a problem with the purchase later on, they know that they can reach a real person.
You also might want to try live chat, particularly live chat plugins, using things like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Because these allow you to have an ongoing conversation with someone. Even if they leave the site midway through the chat, you’ve still got that conversation in their WhatsApp or in the Facebook Messenger app.
Also consider adding a contact form to your site as well so people can message you. And we’ve seen this to be particularly important for clients where they might have someone bulk purchasing, or they might have a trade side of the business, and sometimes having a contact form on your product page in addition to the buy button is a great way of picking up those trade inquiries because those trade buyers might be less inclined to buy straight through the site, knowing that there might be a bulk discount on the other side, if they get in contact with you personally.
9. WELL WRITTEN PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
Tip number nine is all about product descriptions. Product descriptions need to be detailed and they need to be specific. Imagine your best sales person talking to your best customers, so what does detailed mean? Well, detailed means enough detail to answer any possible objection that someone might have about buying that product. And this doesn’t always have to mean text.
Check the example below, it can see fantastic products page layout with lovely detailed description. We can see a brief description at the top. We can see that some extra quick info are available and then you can include detailed product descriptions below it.
You can call out different elements of the product. For example, breaking the description down into performance, comfort and style, safety, delivery. And this allows people to quickly scan through the page and find the thing that’s most important to them.
You’ll also include videos and high resolution images embedded throughout the website. It really makes a decent page.
Now if you’re selling a product where descriptions are handed down to you from the manufacturer, most of the time, you’re going to be okay to write your own, unless you’re selling an Apple product, for example, where you have to use their product descriptions. Most of the time you can write your own product descriptions and you absolutely should.
Now you might be saying, well, I’ve got 15,000 products on my site. How am I gonna write unique descriptions for all of them? Well, you just got to do it. You’re an e-commerce business. Like this is the name of the game. So consider building up a template, which says okay, these are the different features that we’re gonna talk about, we’re gonna talk about performance, delivery, some of the features and then going as detailed in each of these areas as you would.
If you’re having trouble writing enough detail in your product descriptions, then just ask yourself, what are the top questions that people would have about this particular product? Then answer them in as much detail as makes sense.
10. USE EMAIL-OPTIN OFFER
Tip number 10 is to capture leads through your e-commerce store, yes, leads. You want to capture email addresses of people who haven’t bought from you yet.
Top brands invest heavily in getting people on their email list. They will incentivize people with discount codes and exclusive offers to get them to sign up for the email list because they know if they can get someone’s email address, they can continually market to them.
They don’t have to pay to advertise to that person on Google next time they’re searching for those products. So running an email list, which allows people to request some kind of voucher or discount or exclusive offer or additional benefits in order for submitting their details is a great way to build your email list.
You can have offers like 5%-10% discount. Click to activate your discount. You have to enter your email. You click activate discount. And voila.
Most stores find that they have to offer 10%, 15% before they get a really high opt-in. But by all means test and measure to see what sort of discount you need to offer in order to maximise your profit from this.
Remember if you’re selling a product that people buy repeatedly over time, you might want to invest more in getting that customer for the first time, knowing that you’re gonna get profit from them on each additional sale.
It’s increasingly common for businesses to break even on the first sale, knowing that they’re gonna make money on the follow-up sales. So do what you need to do to get this person into your world, even if that means sacrificing margin on the first sale.
Now there’s a few different ways of implementing this. You can just have it pop up when they open the page, or you can have it as an exit intent popup. So as someone motions to move that mouse out of the screen, you step in and say, whoa, hold those horses. Get a 10% discount code by dropping your email in here.
So I hope you’ve learned something in this blog today. If you have then considered dropping a comment below and do share this article on social media.
