How to Increase Your Ecommerce Conversions
There are two ways to increase the profitability of your Ecommerce store.
- Increase Traffic
- Increase Conversion Rate
Today we are going to talk about a few simple tweaks you can make on your site to help boost your conversion rate.
Site Speed
Nothing kills an ecommerce site faster than slow page loads. How frustrating is it when you are waiting in line at the grocery store and it takes forever to check out. What do you do? You switch lines. On your site if it takes forever your customer isn’t going to switch lines, they are going to switch sites.
If your pages are taking more than 4 seconds to load then you are taking a huge hit on orders. You must optimize your site to speed it up as much as possible.
Calls To Action
The call to action is the bread and butter of your purchase process. The only buttons that should stand out on your site are the “Add to Cart” and “Checkout” buttons. Make them stand out without making them garish or hard on the eyes. You don’t want there to be any question in your customer’s mind about what they should do.
Images
You’ve heard the phrase a picture is worth a thousand words. This was never more true than it is on a ecommerce site. One of the biggest barriers to purchasing online is that you can’t handle and touch the products. Professional photos that show all the features of your product will increase buyer confidence. This leads to more purchases.
Videos
If pictures are worth a thousand words then videos are worth a million at least. Having a nice video that demonstrates the features and specs of a product can help boost sales. This is especially for true for mobile users and millennials.
Streamlined Checkout
So your customer has filled their cart with goods and are ready to checkout and then the checkout stalls. Many times this happens because there are a million (slight exaggeration here) fields that they need to fill out.
People are more protective of their private information than ever before. They want to share as little of it as possible online. Make sure that you make it easy to tell which fields are required. Even better, remove all of the not-required fields if possible.
Guest Checkout
Nothing will shut down a checkout faster than requiring your customer to register before they can make a purchase. Always let them checkout as a guest. Then you can offer them a chance to register after they complete their purchase.
Free Shipping
Amazon has revolutionized online shopping in many ways. One of the biggest effects is the expectation of free fast shipping. The word free is a huge emotional trigger.
Find a way to always offer free shipping. You can incorporate the cost of shipping into the price of your products. You can also set a minimum threshold to qualify for free shipping.
Contact Information
Most customers never want to hear from your customer service department unless there is a problem. Then they want you at their beck and call.
Don’t make the mistake of hiding your contact info in a FAQ or some other obscure location. Make sure that you have a phone number, live chat, or contact form right there while the customer is checking out.
The SSL
Identity theft is a real fear for many online shoppers. No one wants to have their credit card information stolen. Many people have real concerns about how safe it is to shop online.
A SSL gives customers a sense of security when they are on their site. Yes a SSL is an extra expense and a bit of a hassle but the trust it provides to prospective buyers will pay for itself many times over.
There you have it. There are of course even more tips and tweaks that you can use to increase your ecommerce site’s conversion rate. But these are some of the easiest, and most important, areas that you can improve on your own store.
