Ecommerce CRO is one of the most important elements to growing an ecommerce business.
A poor conversion rate on your store is going to result in less revenue and profit.
Most people focus on increasing traffic when they should also be figuring out how to increase the total sales from the stores existing traffic numbers.
In the post, I’m going to break down 11 essential ecommerce conversion rate tips you need to consider for your ecommerce website.
These are the exact CRO tips I use to get an 8% conversion rate on my ecommerce store.
And here’s a client’s ecommerce business that increased its conversion rate by 15% in 3 months using the tips in this guide.
Even better, you can implement these CRO tips without any major changes or complex website designs to increase your conversion rate.
So, here are the tips to increase your ecommerce conversion rate:
- Make Your Offer Above The Fold
- Use Clear & Simple Navigation
- Be Easily Contactable
- Invest In High-Quality Product Images
- Optimising Product Descriptions
- Automate Customer Reviews
- Improve Customer Experience (CX)
- Display Refunds, Privacy & Shipping Policies
- Set up an Abandoned cart email sequence
- Include Product filters on your category pages
Why ecommerce conversion rates matter
When we look at how to scale an ecommerce business. There are 4 levers to growth.
- Increase traffic – what everyone focuses on
- Increase AOV – not always possible
- Increase Customer LTV (retention strategies)
- Improve conversion rates
This post focuses on growth lever #4 and here’s an example to illustrate how it works:
Let’s say you run an ecommerce business doing $1 million per year in sales at an average conversion rate of 1%. That means for every 100 visitors to the store, 1 of them will convert into a sale.
Now, if you can increase your store’s conversion rate by 1% bringing it up to 2% then congratulations, you just doubled your store’s annual revenue to $2 million.
Here’s the crazy part
Did you know on average, ecommerce businesses are spending $92 to acquire customers (growth lever #1) and only $1 is spent on converting them (growth lever #4)? Source.
So while your competitors spend all their time on increasing traffic through paid shopping ads and SEO, you can add conversion rate optimisation to your growth strategy and experience some fantastic results without increasing costs associated with traffic acquisition.
How To Increase Your Ecommerce Conversion Rate
1. Place Your Best Offer ‘Above The Fold’
What does Above the fold mean exactly? It’s anything on your site that’s immediately visible without scrolling.
And the crazy part is that 80% of your store’s visitors only pay attention to what’s above the fold so it’s super important you grab their attention at this point with an irresistible offer and call to action.
For example: It could be a new winter sale or a new range of products that you want to promote. Whatever it is, the key idea here is that it’s super crucial your best offer is above the fold as that’s where the majority of your customers are focused.
Pro-tip: Each tip I share with you here will boost your bottom line so the more you can apply the better your sales will be.
2. Use Clear & Simple Navigation
Spend time organising your store and how it flows. Is it easy for customers to search for products and find what they’re looking for?
How you want customers to move through and browse your store is determined by its navigation.
The key is to make sure that the transactional menu (the menu that lists out all your products & categories) stands out and is easy to browse.
Your transaction menu should showcase your product range in an eye-pleasing way.
That way, customers can easily find what products they want and move to the next stage of the shopping journey.
3. Be Easily Contactable
Building trust with customers is an incredibly powerful way to increase conversion rates.
Don’t shy away from making yourself easily contactable. Displaying contact details across the header and/or footer of your website builds trust with potential customers and shows your store is a credible and real business.
The bottom line here is:
- Make it easy for customers to contact you
- Contact details show customers you’re a credible business they can trust.
Review your website and check to see that:
- You have a mailing address on the site in case a customer needs to send a return.
- There is a contact phone number displayed. Some customers prefer this over an email.
- Are you using an online chat system with a real person (not a chatbot)?
I can tell you from first-hand experience as an ecommerce business owner that adding a contact phone number and online chat alone will increase conversions and get you more sales.
Some customers want just that little bit of extra support to nudge them across the line.
Adding a phone number and online chat are 2 easy fixes to increase ecommerce conversion rate so be sure to action this one.
4. Invest In High-Quality Product Images
Unfortunately, they can’t do that on your site, so the next best thing is to have lots of great product photos.
Things like:
- image close-ups
- photos of different angles,
- in context photography (think hiking boots being hiked in)
- a short video of the product.
Product images are the main tool you have to showcase products. The secret to increasing conversions with product images is to use images that capture more than just the product, i.e. ‘in-context’ to help potential customers visualise how the product will look in the real world. This is a no-brainer for any eCommerce store and yet I’m always surprised how many stores neglect to invest in high-quality product photos.
This brings us to the next essential thing a lot of ecommerce stores neglect…
5. Optimising Product Descriptions For Conversions
It might surprise you to know that only 15% of the people visiting your site will read product descriptions but it’s this 15% who are most likely going to purchase.
People who take the time to read product descriptions are the most interested in what you sell and seriously consider purchasing. Don’t give them an excuse to leave because you failed to cover all of their burning questions and concerns about your product!
You must leave no stone unturned and answer all of their questions.
At a minimum, here’s what each of your product descriptions needs to have to improve conversions:
- Avoid technical jargon if possible or if you think it’s important then make sure you explain what it means.
For example: don’t say it has xtc-300 technology built-in – explain what that means in an easy-to-understand language i.e. ‘xtc-300 technology means it loads faster than any other product on the market saving you time.’ - Could a 12 yr old understand what the product is by reading the description? If not then you need to re-write it to improve clarity.
The bottom line…
Don’t assume your customers will understand what your product is based on the manufacturer’s description.
The best product descriptions highlight the benefits of your product and are laid out in an easy to read bullet-point format.
Yes it’s important to also include features but it’s the benefits your product offers that customers will use to influence their purchase behaviour.
Now, If there’s 1 CRO tip you take away from this guide and implement on your site it’s tip #6 I’m about to share with you.
This conversion tip alone doubled my ecommerce store revenue.
6. Automate Customer Reviews
Reviews are one of the best ways to increase ecommerce conversions and can be completely automated. Take one look at Amazon for example, the most successful ecommerce store of all time showcases customer reviews everywhere.
Remember: People don’t buy what you sell, they buy what other people buy and there’s no better way to showcase that than product reviews sprinkled across every part of your store.
On top of that, reviews, both good and bad give you some amazing feedback on your products and insights on how to improve them.
Pro-tip: Set up your review request emails to be sent out approximately 7-days after customers receive their items, that way you know they’ve had a chance to check out the product and can leave a higher-quality review.
Personally, I’ve been using judge.me on my ecommerce store and it works great but a simple Google search will bring up lots of different review automation tools you can test out.
7. Improve Customer Experience (CX)
This is more of an ecommerce merchandising tip but improving customer experience will go a long way to increasing conversions. The main idea here is to make sure the buyer’s journey is as frictionless as possible.
Customer experience can be hard to figure out, especially if it’s your own store as your natural biases will impact what you see and it’s not always clear where the friction points are.
To test your stores buyer journey, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and shop your own store:
- Was there anything difficult about the shopping experience?
- Did anything feel a bit clunky or confusing?
- Perhaps the add-to-cart connection with the checkout page could be simpler?
- Were there a lot of steps involved in completing a purchase?
- Did your call to action on the site guide customers and make it clear what actions they were taking?
If you’d like a 3rd person perspective on this you can request a free ecommerce CRO teardown for your ecommerce business.
8. Display Refunds, Privacy & Shipping Policies
Like displaying your contact information, refund and shipping pages reduce customers’ perceived risk, so make sure it’s easy to find by displaying these in your footer menu.
You can even take this a step further by showing this across product pages.
9. Set up an Abandoned cart recovery email sequence
Cart abandonment is one of the biggest sources of lost revenue for ecommerce businesses with up to 70% of shopping carts being abandoned in some cases.
And while it’s impossible to know why these people abandon their cart there is still a good chance you can get them back to complete their purchase using an abandoned cart email sequence.
Here’s the crazy part…
On average, abandoned cart emails are opened 40% of the time which is great news because it gives you another chance to convert potential customers without spending more money on traffic acquisition.
An email as simple as “hey we noticed you left something behind, here’s 15% off your purchase to say thanks for shopping with us” is enough to see an immediate uplift in conversions.
10. Include Product filters on your category pages
Product Filtering on category pages gives people the freedom to shop how they want to shop.
It also makes it easy for them to focus on specific products and make faster decisions.
Look at it this way, What’s easier? Trying to decide between 3 items you like or 20?
It’s a no-brainer you’ll make a decision way faster if you’ve only got 3 options.
You see this strategy used by many on SaaS websites giving you only 3 different pricing tiers to choose between.
Ok, you’re awesome for making it this far! Here’s my final ecommerce CRO tip…
11. Upsell & Cross-Sell On Your Online Store.
One of the best ways to increase average order values is to offer convenient, one-click upsells across the product and checkout pages.
Adding one-click upsells, especially at the checkout stage, will lift your AOVs as customers are more committed to their purchase now and offering a small upgrade or accessory item is an easy sell.
FINAL WORD
Increasing ecommerce conversion rates on your website store doesn’t have to be complicated.
Most of the time, slight adjustments make a big difference.
Now it’s your turn.
Which ecommerce conversion rates tip w?
Let me know in the comments below!
One Response
Good work