Looking to increase eCommerce conversion rate? If yes then you have landed at the right destination where we will help you with some tips and techniques that can optimize your eCommerce conversion rate.

Every eCommerce website knows the importance of sales for their online business. No one wants to compromise when it comes to improving an eCommerce website’s sales. To improve your eCommerce sales you have to focus on getting a high conversion rate on your eCommerce website.

“About Us: SFWP Experts is an award-winning San Francisco web design company specialized in offering conversion-centric custom web design services to all sizes of businesses. Our professionals can create highly effective and fully responsive eCommerce as well as a standard website. We at SFWP Experts have a team of content writing and marketing experts, dedicated to delivering high-quality and fact-based content to educate our audience about the latest trends, tools, tips, and more.“

If you are a newbie then you may think what is conversion in an eCommerce website. Whenever your customer performs the desired action on your eCommerce website then that is called a conversion. Most eCommerce websites in the United States have an average conversion rate of 3%. Look at the above stats by marketingsherpa that indicate the conversion rate by product type.

In today’s competitive world, your eCommerce website is competing with 1.8 million other websites which means you have got tough competition. The above figures indicate a total number of e-retails only in the US. To be successful in your industry you have to focus on improving your eCommerce website conversion rate. Even If you think that you are already getting good conversion then it is important for you to know that you can still improve your conversion rate.

In this article, we have given in-depth details about what is conversion rate and how you can increase eCommerce conversion. Reading this article will give you a brief idea about where your eCommerce website is lacking in driving sales.

What is the eCommerce conversion rate?
Add high-quality product images and videos
Provide Free Shipping
Include gamification pop-ups in your eCommerce Website
Make use of product reviews and Social proofs
Highlight Your Call To Action Button (C-T-A)
Communicate with Abandoned cart user
Insert and optimize Search Box
Optimize eCommerce website speed
Allow seamless communication (customer support)
Integrate live chat support
Analyze and Segment Website Traffic
Offer streamline navigation
Offer responsive and simple design
Optimize & Simplify the checkout process

If you are looking to know the best eCommerce web design for your eCommerce website then check our blog on Top 10 Ecommerce Web Design Trends 2020 For Your Online Store

What is the eCommerce conversion rate?

In simple words, the conversion rate is defined as the percentage of visitors landing on your eCommerce website and successfully made the purchase. There are other activities that fall under conversions like email signup, account creation, ebook download, and more. If your customer is performing the desired action then it is considered as a conversion.

Today every eCommerce website focuses on optimizing their conversion rate as it helps them in determining their website success. There are other measures that help eCommerce websites in deciding their success.

But identifying your website conversion rate will help you in discovering how you can improve your eCommerce website shopping experience? How can you improve your sales? difficulties faced by your customers while making a purchase?

Your product page, category page, landing page and more can give you a clear picture of your site visitor’s conversion. Now you might be wondering how you can calculate the conversion rate of your eCommerce website?

Calculating the conversion rate for an eCommerce website is not a tough job just you have to divide the number of conversions by the number of website visitors. To Check the total percentage of visitor converter you can divide converting visitors by the total visitor and multiply with 100 that will give you the click conversion rate.

Tips to optimize your eCommerce website conversion rate:

1. Add high-quality product images and videos

Images and videos are an essential part of a product page. Before making any purchase every online shopper looks for product images to know what they are purchasing from your store. The image displays on your product play a crucial role in determining whether your potential customer will make a purchase from your store or not.

Using high-quality images and videos on your product page will make it easy for your potential customer to decide whether they should buy the product or not. Compared to your descriptions images tell more about your product. that’s why many e-commerce websites started to display short videos that describe extra features of the product which gives a clear picture of what customers will get after buying the product.

You can also use innovative ways like image magnifiers ( customers can zoom and check product image) to help your customer get more clear details of the product. This type of technique not only increases your conversion rate but it also reduces the chances of post-purchase dissonance.

2. Provide Free Shipping

The incentive has always played an important role in converting potential customers into paying customers. Free shipping and discount codes are among the popular incentives that e-commerce websites offer to grab their user’s attention. Mainly free shipping grabs you their attention because there are times when customers shift to the computer just because they offer free shipping for every product. (Image source: lakeside.com)

Today most of the eCommerce websites don’t prefer to offer free shipping mainly to small and medium-sized Enterprises. But if you want to match up your customer’s expectation then it is important for you to know that customers always expect their order to be delivered free of cost.

If your policy doesn’t allow you to offer free shipping to your customer then you can look for some alternative through which you can offer free shipping. there are various Ways available like you can try to include the shipping cost in the product pricing so that it doesn’t trouble customer when they make a purchase from your store

3. Include gamification pop-ups in your eCommerce Website

Today with the increasing trends gamification (offering different types of games) is another trend that can help you to optimize your conversion rate. Offering gamification to your site visitor can increase your customer engagement and acquisition rate. You can use gamification pop up to attract your customer’s attention.

Most of the eCommerce websites claim that gamification has helped them in improving their customer experience. Offering gamification on your eCommerce website can help you to create Nostalgia that most of the customers had in childhood.

Playing games is a natural thing that helps you to grab your audience’s attention and create a special bond with your customers. using this type of technique can help you to make your visitor sign up your email list. there are chances that users may buy the product in the future if they feel connected with your website. If you want to improve your conversion then it is recommended to offer gamification pop-ups to your E-commerce visitor.

4. Make use of product reviews and Social proofs

Today more than 88% of the online Shoppers make their purchase decision based on the reviews and social proofs available on your eCommerce website. A good product good review encourages and persuades your customer to buy the product without any hesitation. If People are purchasing products from your store then let other customers know about their purchase experience product review and more.

Only a few groups of people who required the product at any cost don’t check the review of the product. which means most of your website visitors want to know what the people are talking about your product. Because today every savvy customer knows that every product reviewer shares the truthful experience. they share how it helped them and how effective the product is.

One of the common mistakes that most of the e-commerce websites make is by deleting bad reviews or negative comments. Yes after seeing bad reviews your customer can think about whether they should buy the product or not. But the way you handle those bad reviews will surely impress and encourage your customer to make the purchase.

So if you want to impress your customer and increase eCommerce conversion rate then display the truthful experience of your other customers in the form of testimonials, product reviews, and more. Encourage your customers to write the review and rate your product. you can offer some loyalty points or programs in return for an honest customer review. Combining all these efforts will surely help you to increase the e-commerce conversion rate.

5. Highlight Your Call To Action Button (C-T-A)

The call to action button in your eCommerce website plays an essential role in grabbing your user’s attention. If you want your user to perform the desired action then it is important for you to give them a proper direction. Call to action buttons can help your site visitor in analyzing what they have to do and where they have to go? (image source: Andreas Carter Sports)

Placing your CTA in the right position with an attractive and eye-catchy button can help you to redirect your site visitors to the right place. Always keep your call to action button. Limited excessive use of CTA can confuse and frustrate your customer. in the product page an Add to cart button, checkout button, lean more can minimize the chances of confusion.

For example, if your customer adds some product in the cart then they should know how they can get to the checkout page without any confusion. In the E-commerce website, two buttons play an essential role first is your checkout button which will help your customer to buy the product. Next is your continued shopping CTA button which will help your users to get back on your site after making the purchase. Highlighting these two buttons with eye-catchy colors and visuals will surely help you to improve the eCommerce conversion rate.

If you are asking your customers to subscribe to the email address then you need to place the CTA button at the right place in your home page with attractive colors that can grab your customer’s attention. Once you are successful in collecting your customer email address then it can automatically help you to improve your conversion rate. Same condition applies if you are offering coupons, advertising new products, or asking people to fill the survey form.

6. Communicate with Abandoned cart user

In the e-commerce industry, the abandoned cart rate is one of the common phrases used to identify the percentage of visitors landed on your website added the product on the checkout page but didn’t make the purchase. Look at the above example of an abandoned cart email. If your website is getting a high percentage of the abandoned cart rate then it is important for you to identify why your customers are not making the purchase from your store?

Most of the time this type of situation occurs when a customer either forgets to buy the product or due to some other problem they fail to complete the checkout process. Sometimes because of the poor checkout process customers leave the website without completing the sales.

Make sure that you identify the reason behind the abandonment. Using emails you can retarget your customer and ask them to pursue the product they left in the cart. An Effective and persuading abandoned cart email will surely help you to get your customer back on your website and optimizer conversion rate.

After 1 hour of abandonment, you can send an abandonment cart email to your customer and remind them of the product. To make it more effective you can add incentives like free shipping, coupon code, and more. If your customer does not respond in the first email then after three or four hours you can send them another email with an eye-catchy subject line to ensure that the customer opens the email and checks the details inside it. An effective abandonment cart email will surely help you to increase the eCommerce website conversion rate.

There are various software and email service providers available that can help you to automatically generate the abandoned cart email at the right time when the chances of open rates are high.

7. Insert and Optimize Search Box

The eCommerce industry is all about offering satisfactory customer experience. Adding a search box into your e-commerce website helps you to optimize your customer’s shopping experience. More than 40% of the customer uses a search box to browse their product in your eCommerce website

Including a search box in your eCommerce website will help your user to find the right product within a short span of time. Most of the initial stage Websites don’t focus on optimizing their search box but there are times when search boxes do not respond because of small technical issues. These types of small problems can trouble your website visitor which will directly affect your eCommerce website conversion rate.

To optimize your website conversion rate it is important for you to include search boxes and check whether it is working for every product or not. Offering these types of services improves your selling experience and customer’s shopping experience.

8. Optimize eCommerce Website Speed

According to the latest statistic, 0-4 second is considered as the ideal load time for a website. If your website fails to load within 4 seconds then there are chances that your website visitor may abandon your website and purchase the same product from your competitor’s website.

No matter how effective your product and e-commerce website design is, if your website is not loading faster than your customer will not hesitate to shift to your competitor website. Today no one likes to wait for a website to load for a long time. if your website is taking a long time to load then your customer will simply abandon your website.

There are various online tools available like page speed Insight, GTmetrix, and more that can help you in identifying your eCommerce website speed. Most of the time images in your eCommerce website can reduce the loading speed. Identify the reason behind the slow loading speed, resolve the issue, Optimizer e-commerce website speed, and start selling your product online. It will not only increase your conversion rate but it will also help you to offer satisfying customer experience to your potential customers.

If you are using WordPress for handing your eCommerce website then check our blog on 8 Tips to Fix a Slow Loading WooCommerce Website Speed.

9. Allow seamless communication (customer support)

To succeed in The E-Commerce competitive industry you need to ensure that your customer can reach you faster and contact you easily without any difficulties and trouble. Most of the time a new visitor gets confused while making a purchase or finding the product at the time when they look for customer support to resolve their issues. If they fail to find customer support assistance then your store may end up losing potential customers.

Every new customer who doesn’t know about your business and website looks for some assistance so that their job gets easier. Providing proper customer support can help your customer feel more relaxed and comfortable while selecting new products and making the purchase. If your website is already offering customer support through various communication channels like phone, email, and chat then you are already ahead of many eCommerce websites.

Sometimes the customer gets confused while purchasing the recommended item because they fail to find the proper information features of that product. Chat support and Emails are the best way to help customers facing these types of problems. To make your customer support more effective you can display the phone number and email address at every product page.

There is a group of customers who don’t like to write a long paragraph type to tell about their issues and problems. That’s the time when they look for the phone number of the E-commerce website. Displaying phone numbers on your eCommerce website can help you give your customer detailed information about their problem and to get the right solution for their problem. If your business is into B2B displaying phone numbers on your website will surely help you to close your sales. That’s why if you want to increase eCommerce conversion rate then it is important for you to display the right customer support details on your eCommerce website.

10. Integrate live chat support

Today every customer needs instant support while making their purchase, if you fail to provide assistance then it will directly affect your conversion rate. Live chats are the best feature that can help you To provide instant chat support to customers looking for immediate assistance. Not including live chat support can harm your conversion rate but adding it will surely improve your customer acquisition rate as well as conversion rate.

Even if your chat support team fails to respond to your customer immediately, a chatbot can give them a simple help message which can assure your customer that they will get assistance soon. Offering an accurate answer to your website visitor question through live chat support will surely help you to enhance your E-commerce website image, trust, and conversion rate.

11. Analyze and Segment Website Traffic

Segmentation is one of the most effective strategies that can help you to craft different strategies for the different types of visitors on your eCommerce website. For example, a marketing strategy and sales strategy can’t be the same for an existing customer and newly arrived customer. Yes, segmentation is not an easy job mainly for the e-commerce websites targeting international customers. But you can start by segmenting your newly arrived customer, returning customer, existing customer, and loyal customer.

Based on your segmented customer behaviors you can personalize the message and provide personalized coupons. Now you may think how segmenting website traffic can help you in improving your eCommerce website conversion rate?

If you provide a personalized offer to a new customer then it will surely help you to improve eCommerce conversion rate. But providing the same personalized offer to your loyal customers can affect your budget and ROI. Because your loyal customer already knows about your website and its functioning. Putting effort to attract a new customer using these techniques can help you to improve your e-commerce website conversion rate.

To make your segmentation strategy more effective you can start segmenting your website visitor depending on their location, time and day, devices, and more. Using this you can identify your visitor preference, depending on that you can target them and optimize your conversion rate.

12. Offer streamline navigation

Your e-commerce website navigation plays a crucial role in determining the conversion rate. Difficult site navigation makes it hard for your site visitor to find the right product they’re looking to buy. Because of that, your customer can get frustrated and leave your website. there are chances that they may never return back on your eCommerce website. Now you know the importance of website navigation mainly in the e-commerce industry.

If you want to optimize your conversion rate then focus on offering seamless navigation experience to your customer. Many e-commerce websites use a hamburger (web design trend) menu for the mobile device to offer a smooth navigation experience to your user.

Most of the time e-commerce websites commit a mistake by categorizing the wrong product under the wrong category. That’s Why Make sure that all the products are categorized in the proper category and subcategory. If your visitor fails to find the right product under the right category then there is a chance that they will leave your site with an intention of never returning back.

You can go through your website’s internal search data which will give you a clear picture of how your customers are navigating your website and what are the difficulties faced by them. Optimizing your website navigation will automatically improve your eCommerce website conversion rate.

13. Offer responsive and simple design

Every e-commerce website has more than 1000 products for sales on their eCommerce website. Offering a complicated and confusing design to your customer can directly affect your conversion rate. Not only that but there are times when the Ecommerce website failed to load on different screens. This type of situation occurs when your website is not responsive for all devices.

If you want to optimize your conversion rate then it is important for you to offer a responsive and simple design so that the customer can interact with your website easily. If done correctly it can help you to optimize your site visitor experience. Make sure that your eCommerce website is easy to navigate with a simple design that can grab your site visitors. Many people may recommend you add more visuals to your E-commerce website. but in reality, every site visitor wants to see a simple web design with proper white spacing and fewer visuals.

The best way to identify the best responsive design is to look at your industry leader. They are the ones whose website will always be optimized to improve their selling and customer buying experience. Analyzing your industry leader’s website will give you in-depth detail about where your website is lacking and how they are optimizing their product and category page. You can get a better idea of how you can use your homepage not to display all the products but advertise most selling, upcoming products, and products under offer.

14. Optimize & Simplify the checkout process

If you want to increase conversion rate then you have to decrease extra steps involved in sign up and checkout page. Optimizing your customer expression is not about how you connect with your customer, it’s about how satisfied your customer feels after making a purchase from your store. Adding too many Steps after the checkout page can frustrate your customer and there are chances that your customer may never come back on your website to make the next purchase.

To improve the e-commerce conversion rate you need to focus on simplifying and reducing your checkout process. One way you can increase your conversion is by decreasing the number of steps required for guest checkout. You can test your checkout process and make it less complicated to have a powerful and persuasive storefront.

You can start by reducing the number of the button and visible options absorbable in your cart page, which will make it easy for the user to know what step they have to take to buy the product. if your cart page contains a related page button then it is recommended to remove as it can directly improve your 10 to 12% of customer’s conversion. Make use of various payment options available to make your checkout process easier. After making the changes you can always perform testing to know how your checkout process is impacting your bottom line.

Conclusion

The eCommerce conversion rate is an essential percentage that every eCommerce website owner is looking to improve. No matter how effective your product and website is if your website is not persuading your customer to buy the product then there is no sense of running an eCommerce website.

Yes, there are various ways through which you can increase eCommerce conversion rate. but identifying and implementing the right strategy can surely help your eCommerce website to boost its conversion rate. Above we have mentioned some important and effective tips that can help you to optimize your conversion rate.

If you have an initial stage eCommerce website then It is recommended to start with simple tips like improving your website image, speed, adding customer support, and live support features. Once you see a surge in your website traffic and orders then you can go ahead with the other hacks that will help you improve your conversion rate.

Frequently Asked Questions:

1. Why is my conversion rate dropping?

If your e-commerce website conversion rate is dropping then you should worry about it because it can directly affect your business revenue and ROI. there is no specific reason on why your conversion rate is dropping sometimes e-commerce website conversion rate drops because of below reason:

Your eCommerce website design
Slow-loading website speed
Wrong link present on the landing page
Your website not optimized for mobile users
Poor quality product images
Your face contains too many texts and distracts the user from making the purchase
Excess shipping cost
check out page is confusing and difficult
Poor remarketing and retargeting strategy
Your competitors are selling the same product for a cheaper price
you’re not engaging your abandoned cart users
Poor chat support & customer assistance

2. How do I increase my Shopify conversion rate?

Looking to increase your Shopify conversion rate then you can use the below tips to drive more conversion:

Firstly we would recommend you to an optimizer e-commerce website for mobile devices
Optimize your website Speed and Performance
Use high-quality images and short videos to tell a customer about the feature of the product.
Display genuine review and testimonial of your customer’s buying experience
Interact with your abandoned cart customer using email
Offer free shipping to your customers

3. How do you calculate conversion rates in retail?

Calculating the conversion rate for an eCommerce website is not a tough job just you have to divide the number of conversions by the number of website visitors. To Check the total percentage of visitor converter you can divide converting visitors by the total visitor and multiply it with 100 that will give you the click conversion rate.

4. What does a low conversion rate mean?

A low conversion rate occurs when your eCommerce website fails to interact with your website visitor. A low conversion rate may result in a drop in your website traffic and revenue. Most of the time a low conversion rate starts increasing when you fail to satisfy your customers. Sometimes bad reviews about your product and poor shopping experience can result in these types of issues.

5. How do I recover the abandoned cart users?

The abandoned cart rate is one of the common phrases used to identify the percentage of visitors landed on your website added the product on the checkout page but didn’t make the purchase.

Interact with your customer before they abandon your cart. You can do it by embedding a chatbot to help your customer in solving their problem.
Craft an enticing email that can persuade your customers to visit back on your website to purchase that product.
create an eye-catching email subject
Make use of retargeting ads to bring your customer back on your website.
Make use of push notification to notify your customer about the product they left in the cart

6. When should I send an abandoned cart email to my customer?

7. How can I speed up my eCommerce website?

Your website loading speed plays a crucial role in determining the conversion rate of your e-commerce website. If you wonder how crucial then read the follow-up sentence – Even a small delay of two seconds can directly affect your revenue. No matter how effective your product and e-commerce website design is, if your website is not loading faster than your customer will not hesitate to shift to your competitor website. You can use the below tips to optimize your website loading speed:

Identify the reason behind the slow loading speed using online tools
If you are using extra visuals in your eCommerce website than reduce the size of the page
Use effective and popular content delivery Network (CDN) and optimize your website speed
Reduce the size of your email by compressing images of every product
Use a proper hosting even after optimizing everything if your website loads slow then you can shift to a new hosting provider
Reduce HTTP request by deleting unnecessary extension images and other files present in your e-commerce website
Improve your website Time to first byte (TTFB)
You are using the third-party extension in your eCommerce website that is recommended to revise the third-party extension to optimize your eCommerce website performance and speed.

8. What is the best live chat support plugin for woocommerce?

No matter how effective your product and your eCommerce website is if you fail to update your website with the latest technology then it will surely impact your conversion rate. Live chat support is another feature that helps you to improve the eCommerce conversion rate, the customer acquisition rate, and more. Below is the list of best WordPress chat plugins for your eCommerce website:

LiveChat
Pure Chat
Sendinblue
WP – Chatbot for Facebook Messenger
Formilla Live Chat
REVE Chat
Pure Chat
Zendesk Chat
Tidio Live Chat

9. What are the best plugins to boost WordPress website speed?

Your website loading speed plays a crucial role in determining the conversion rate of your e-commerce website. If you wonder how crucial then read the follow-up sentence – Even a small delay of two seconds can directly affect your revenue. No matter how effective your product and e-commerce website design is if your website is not loading faster than your customer will not hesitate to shift to your competitor website. Below are the plugins that will help you to optimize your website speed:

WP-Optimize
Autoptimize
WP Fastest Cache
WP-Rocket
Shortpixel
Asset Cleanup
Heartbeat Control
AMP For WP
ShortPixel
Perfmatters