Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization Tips | ResultFirst

E-Commerce CRO: Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

Studies have consistently shown that generating leads and sales isn’t that simple for eCommerce websites, but with eCommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO), you can get a better conversion rate. 

A conversion rate for online retailers is one of the most valuable means to measure return on investment (ROI) and see whether or not you’re meeting your business goals.

It’s a metric to monitor while you build your business and increase revenue. Use it to optimize your website correctly and raise your ROI. 

However, conversions don’t grow overnight— you need to prioritize them and, perhaps more importantly, optimize your website.

What is the eCommerce Conversion Rate?

eCommerce conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your ecommerce website or page that complete an action that can be counted as a conversion.

Conversion Rate Formula

Conversion Rate = (Converting Visitors / Total  Visitors) * 100%

The average conversion rate can also be calculated based on the number of visitor sessions rather than visitors to your e-commerce websites.

3 Types of Conversion Rate Formulas

Calculate Conversion Rates as per different metrics – sessions, unique visitors, and leads 

  • Conversion Rate = Total number of conversions  / Total number of sessions * 100
  • Conversion Rate = Total number of conversions / Total number of unique visitors * 100
  • Conversion Rate = Total number of conversions / Total number of leads * 100

eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

Improve Your Product Page

Your product pages fulfill visitors’ requirements and entice them to buy. If they don’t perform well, it is time to optimize and improve them.

You need to optimize product pages so they can let visitors see your information and entice and reassure visitors.

Find the tips below to improve your product pages and conversions.

  • Keep the most important information above the waterline
  • Always use high-quality images
  • Highlight product benefits and features in the content
  • Combine a customer notification module
  • Create SEO-friendly product sheets
  • Add similar or complementary products (up-selling/cross-selling)

Displaying the most popular products on the front page with the highest probability of selling is a smart step. The goal is to create pages that attract visitors and seduce them to buy your products.

Click to learn Effective SEO Tactics to Optimize Ecommerce Category Pages

Offer Free Shipping

In today’s market, FREE SHIPPING is an absolute must. After all, online shoppers expect it.

They will most likely look elsewhere if you don’t offer a free shipping facility.

An alternative is to increase your product prices to cover the shipping costs. Nonetheless, buyers are savvy — if your prices are not reasonable, they will quickly move elsewhere.

Use High-Quality Images & Videos

Use only top-quality images and videos. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and think about what you want to think when you shop.

The best is to use a detailed image or video to let people see and know exactly what you are selling. High-quality images and videos help users better visualize products they want to buy. This increases conversion rates.

Improve Page Load Speed

Page load time and conversion rate are directly related as the longer the page takes to load to retrieve all its resources—images, styling information, scripts to run, etc.—and display it, the more the chance of a visitor is to click the back button and leave the page without any interaction. Your page should load in less than 2 seconds for a better conversion rate. Also, per skilled.co, testing by found that:

Page Speed Insight

  • 40% of visitors leave websites that load more than 3 seconds.
  • Amazon Found Every 100ms of Latency Costs them 1% in Sales, according to Amazon.

SEO companies generally focus on the below activities to improve their site’s loading speed.

  • Use a lightweight theme
  • Remove unnecessary plugins
  • Reduce the size of images and videos
  • Use a cache plugin
  • Compress JavaScript and CSS files
  • Set up a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

After you execute these steps successfully, you’ll notice a significant improvement in site load time.

A few of the best performance tools eCommerce SEO agencies use to measure a site’s speed are GTmetrix, Pingdom Tools, and Google PageSpeed Insights.

Use any of these tools to monitor your site speed.

Optimize Checkout Process

Every unnecessary form on a mobile device makes its length look more unwieldy than on a desktop. Your checkout form should allow users to input more information on a single screen.

According to Baymard’s research,

18% of users abandon orders just because of checkout UX issues. Their experience on the site has either been too long or too complicated.

Ensure the checkout process is easy and seamless so your customer does not hit any snags when buying from your store.

How to optimize the checkout process

  • Have a Single “Name” Field (avoid “First Name” and “Last Name” fields). Users usually type their full name in the “First Name” field. So, keep a single named field like in the second image.
  • Hide “Address Line 2
  • Use Zip/Postal Code Autodetection
  • Hide “Billing Address” Fields

Let the users (who need separate billing addresses) uncheck the checkbox to get those fields for separate addresses.

Launch Limited-time Deals/Offers

Creating DEALS or OFFERS is a smart move.

Customers can use them at checkout for a limited time for better pricing.

When your deals or offers are likely to expire, this triggers a sense of urgency, and buyers can make purchase decisions without distractions.

Use Call to Action Sparingly

For better eCommerce SEO, avoid overwhelming visitors by giving too many options and adding CTA buttons on one screen. It is good to place CTAs on all your product pages and make them noticeable.

Call To Action

Whether it is ‘ Share Icons,’ ‘Add to Wishlist, or ‘Add to Cart,’ having your CTAs all in the same area on the same page can ensure that your pages aren’t over-cluttered.

Keep these things in mind when creating CTAs:

  • Place your CTA at the top of your fold.
  • Make your CTA stand out with the shape and color of the button.

However, knowing which call-to-action button works well for you is not always easy. So, use the A/B testing method to determine what works well and what doesn’t!

Make your CTA benefit-oriented. Avoid too many of them.

For example,

‘Download,’ ‘continue,’ and ‘click here’ are bland and are not action-oriented. Examples of benefit-centric CTA’s are ‘Show me more,’ Get my eBook,’ and ‘Stay connected.’

Implement a Live Chat Feature

Implement live chat support software to interact with customers. This allows customers to get answers to their questions faster.

But, before this, you need to learn how to implement it correctly. Constantly interrupting users must be avoided. Make sure it does not irritate and deter users.

These days, life chat pop-up boxes can be seen anywhere on the page, which is bad for users.

The live chat, a non-user initiative, is perceived as irritating and distracting. It is useful and helpful when users have specific questions they need answers to.

Be Reasonably Priced

Don’t forget to price your products at or below the average price to compete, especially if you sell brand-name items that other stores offer.

Also, modify your pricing often to see what resonates.

The quality of your images and marketing strategy impacts the price users are willing to pay.

It is, therefore, important to look for the best SEO agency and market your brand to the right audience with the right messages. Conversions will increase.

Implement Shopping Cart Abandonment Software

Increase your store conversion rates by using abandonment cart software. The tool grabs the email address and sends it to an automated email marketing sequence.

For example,

If any purchase occurs, no emails will be sent by this software. Instead, an email automation process will continue if the purchase is not made.

Some eCommerce platforms offer this type of software for free as part of the store functionality, and BigCommerce is one of them.

The success of Cart Abandonment Software depends on every business. Nevertheless, it helps eCommerce stores.

Allow Visitors to Find Products Easily

Structure your product categories to provide shoppers with options like ‘Shop by Product Type’ and ‘Shop by Color.’ The goal is to make sure users can reach a product as fast as possible.

  • Set up a rotating banner to showcase top products
  • Implement a website search to allow customers to find products easily

Note that the faster users find a product on your eCommerce store, the more likely they will buy from you.

Display Shopping Cart Contents

If your visitors cannot find their cart, they will likely not checkout.

Be sure that your site has a shopping cart icon with a link to get it (cart) after entering an item into the cart.

It is important to get your customers to see what they buy as they check out.

Build an SEO-Friendly Online Store

If your store is not SEO-optimized, you’re hurting your sales. eCommerce SEO is important to help audiences find your site on Google.

Here are some tips to increase traffic and visibility and improve conversions.

  • Keep products near the homepage (just a three-click aware from the homepage)
  • Write effective title tags using a typical search term for your products
  • Find the right keywords and use them in your content
  • Improve page URL. Keep it short and easy to understand, and include your title tag
  • Add appropriate tags that link to identical items or products
  • Enter the rel=canonical tag in the categories to avoid the duplicate content issue

Read the step-by-step guide for SEO Best Practices for e-commerce Websites.

Create Valuable Content

When we discuss the best SEO practices for eCommerce businesses, high-quality and user-friendly content with enriched keywords is important.

create quality content

Supplement your products by writing valuable and functional copy. The more valued and informative your content is, the more likely people will buy from you.

Focus and clearly mention your Unique Selling Propositions (USPs). Let your audiences know why they should buy from you and what keeps you unique among competitors in selling the same products.

Ensure your headline (copy, title, or tagline) sells your USPs. Create short, crisp, and to-the-point taglines. They should tempt customers to read ahead and breed their interest in the products.

The goal is to educate, inform, and engage your audience by writing content on your product landing pages. This boosts organic SEO traffic.

Also Read: 4 Ways To Boost Ecommerce Lead Generation Using Content

 Place Trust Signals on Your eCommerce Site.

You need to build trust for customers so that they can feed their card/bank account details on your website. Let visitors know that they are dealing with a legitimate store. Consider these few things:

  • Add SSL certificate at checkout and site-wide if possible
  • Show small images of PayPal, credit cards, and other payment options. It shows that you use customer-trust payment options.
  • Display McAfee, GeoTrust, or other security badges. Ensure that you have an active account with them.

Enable Guest Login

Let your customers checkout as guests. Allow them to checkout without signing up for an account because you will have their contact details (name and email address) when they buy from you.

Pushing them to register is another possible reason to leave your store.

Allow Customer Reviews

Allowing customer reviews in the digital shopping world to improve eCommerce CRO is essential. To encourage customers to write reviews, offer them some incentives (like coupon codes) next time they buy as a reward for providing a review.

See below why many people buy from AMAZON.

customer reviews

Go Mobile-Friendly

Smartphones are the future.

By 2025, more than 10% of all retail sales in the USA are anticipated to be generated through mobile commerce, according to Statista.

CTR

You’re missing out on significant sales if your online shop fails to provide a great mobile experience.

So, make your website mobile-friendly.

For this,

  • Pick a mobile-responsive theme
  • Consider user experience (UX)
  • Browse your site on mobile to check if everything is visible
  • Ensure your buttons are easy for people with large fingers to press
  • Reduce how much text you use and avoid using Flash
  • Check if people don’t accidentally press the wrong button
  • Evaluate how accessible fonts are

For the full list, click here.

A mobile-friendly site is a foolproof strategy to improve eCommerce conversion rates.

Have a Great Return and Exchange Policy

Customers read the return and exchange policy before buying.

So, create a great policy about product return and exchange. But avoid over-promising. Instead, make it painless and easy for customers to return or exchange products.

Return Policy

It’s not for conversion optimization but a basic business practice acting as CRO.

However, you can drive sales and improve conversion rates by earning trust values from your customers.

Measure your eCommerce CRO Success.

Ensure your tweaks and changes are working by measuring your eCommerce CRO success.

Track your store’s conversion rates day-over-day, week-over-week, month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, and year-over-year. An eCommerce platform like BigCommerce can help you with this.

You can see the progress on your dashboard or the Analytics dashboard.

Offer 24/7 Live Support

Transparency is one of the major factors to increase trust. Live Chat Support is a good means of transparency. Integrate a live chat support option to make visitors believe your site is trustworthy subconsciously.

Not only can people ask questions through live chat that create doubt in their minds, but they can also make quick purchase decisions to buy your product.

The Final Word

Conversions are important for your store’s growth.

Make conversion rates your no-one priority because they motivate customers to do what is important. The aforementioned points are top practices. They have helped your competitors and will help you achieve better results.

If you think we have missed some points in the list, let us know in the comment section below!

 

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