How to Improve the Conversion Rate of Your Ecommerce Site

Jessica Bruce

5 years ago

In the world of digital marketing, the question “how to increase conversion rates of my ecommerce site” means “how can I increase sales”.

When it comes to ecommerce optimization, everything is about boosting sales and increasing the revenue figure. Even so, sales generation does not happen out of thin air. It’s a slow, strategic process that involves numerous steps to enhance the conversion funnel – which is what will lead to the actual sales.

What’s more, a conversion is not necessarily making a sale. It could be any step in the process of the marketing funnel. Depending on your KPIs and business goals, it could mean a whole lot of things, such as:

Making a payment
Newsletter sign up
Click on a CTA button
Social media share
Click through on your email

In short, a conversion is can be any KPI that adds value to your business. For ecommerce sites, this might be anything that improves the UX so as to encourage as many conversions as possible. Ultimately, ecommerce best practice is all about the experience of your website users:

Are they enjoying the shopping experience?
Are they able to find the products they are looking for?
How accessible is your website for every kind of user?
Do users feel safe paying online via your site?
Do they trust your business?
Is there anything else on your site that may be pushing customers away?

There are a number of optimizations that are easy to implement and can make real improvements to your web store’s performance. Even the seemingly unnoticeable discrepancies can really hamper your conversions.

So, how to increase ecommerce conversion rates with just minor changes?

There are five main aspects that influence buying decisions of ecommerce customers. If you can optimize your online store on these five fronts, you may just be able to secure more conversions and significantly boost revenues.

1/ Optimize your store homepage

The homepage is a crucial touchpoint for any ecommerce website. Most of the direct traffic from repeat visitors or referred users end up directly on the home page itself. For example, most people who decide to search for a product on Amazon will land on the home page and go from there.

To get better results from your home page search it is recommended to have a progressive product search system embedded on your home page. Any discrepancies in your search bar reflect directly on your conversion rate. So embed an efficient search bar that can look for products based on advanced aspects like keywords, categories, price, and availability, etc. See how Amazon does it:

The home page should also include enough shortcuts so that users can easily navigate to popular strings. This can be done by embedding special sections, such as:

Offers
Popular products
Featured products
Daily or weekly deals

You can further enhance the catalog by adding different sections based on various types of recommendations, for example, recommended electronics, and recommended phones recommended furniture, and recommended brands, etc.

2/ Optimize your product pages

The home page is extremely important for driving sales from repeat and referred visitors, yet it’s the product pages where the actual purchases (conversions) of organic traffic happen. Furthermore, A large amount of your organic traffic will land directly on the product page from the SERPs. Let’s go over some ways to enhance your product pages and encourage conversions:

Use only high-quality product images and videos: Don’t compromise. If you can’t afford to hire a professional product photographer, there are loads of online tips about how to DIY your product images.
Offer product zoom: The zoom feature lets users see the product details more clearly, helping them to make a more informed purchase decision. You’ll need high quality images to do this – if you are going to invest in zoom, allow users to see the product in detail from all angles.
Embed stock and price drop alerts: Many page bounces happen when a product goes out of stock or it’s out of the customer’s budget range. Embedding back-in-stock alerts will let them purchase the product when available, while the price drop alert will give you an idea of which product to put on discounted sale next. Something like this will do the job:

Using these kinds of alerts will not only help you retain customers, but can also enable you to build a customer email list for retargeting and marketing purposes.

3/ Optimize your pricing structure

It’s a big factor in your conversion rates, but hardly controlled by you alone. The cost price of the product will determine the cost to your customers. The best approach to reducing cost price is by negotiating terms with a bulk supplier. Make sure your wholesaler is offering you competitive pricing. In addition, the following optimizations will allow you to control the pricing as much as possible:

Offer competitive pricing: Conduct competition research and offer the lowest you can afford without bearing any losses.
Offer discount coupons: Offer limited time discount coupons to new and repeat customers on selected products. The price drop alert will also come in handy when deciding which products to include in your discount campaign.
Launch occasional sales: Use festive and other important occasions to launch a site-wide sale. Get your suppliers and sellers to participate in the campaign by offering them a discount on the commission cut.
Promote your campaigns: Use popular marketing channels to promote your sales and coupons codes. You can rely on social media, native advertising, newsletters, push notifications, affiliate marketing, and third-party coupon sites to promote your deals.

4/ Optimize your checkout process

According to the Baymard Institute, shopping cart abandonment is largely related to inefficiencies in the checkout process.

You may do everything to optimize your website, but a fault in your checkout process will significantly reduce the efficacy of all other optimizations. The best approach to e-commerce optimization is preventing shopping cart abandonment by focusing on optimizing the checkout process. Use the following tips to optimize your checkout:

Offer one-page checkout process
Implement autofill for the customer’s personal details
Offer guest checkout as an option for unregistered users.
Offer social login for those who want to register.
Use dynamic form validation to catch errors in real-time.
Use ajax-based cart review to change product quantity without page-reloading.
Offer multiple shipping options
Offer multiple payment options

5/ Optimize your online trust factors

For new ecommerce sites, getting online sales is not easy. If you are not a well-known name, you need to work to build trust among your potential customer base and site visitors. It’s the only way they will agree click the buy button and open their wallets.

Here are a few essential optimizations that will improve your sites credibility and boost customer trust in your business:

Offer live chat for customer support.
Get an SSL certificate and migrate your site to HTTPS.
Offer a ticket system for assured customer support.
Implement a refund or return policy.
Provide a forum for customers to write product reviews for purchased products.
Put seals of trust on the payment pages and website footer.
Provide your contact details in a clear, easy to find location.
Mention the physical address of your office – this builds credibility.
Start an official blog, create case studies, behind-the-scenes articles and more.
Be active on social media and post images and behind-the-scenes galleries of real people in your business.

If your ecommerce site has been up and running for a while, or especially if you have just launched your web store, implementing these optimization tactics will help boost your conversion rates. It is by no means an exhaustive list, yet it focuses on the five key aspects of customer engagement. Whatever you can do to optimize these five areas will have maximum impact on driving conversions. So, don’t delay – start optimizing your ecommerce site today.