Struggling With Your E-Commerce Conversion Rate? Follow These Tips!

It’s more difficult than ever to get qualified traffic through to your website. With paid social being much more expensive and competitive, bid costs of PPC going up and organic spaces being highly competitive, once you’ve got traffic on your website, you need to do everything you can to get it to convert. So, if currently you’ve got a low conversion rate on your website, then you need to follow these tips. There may be some simple tricks that you’re missing that can improve the user experience and encourage people to convert to maximise the traffic you’ve worked hard to get onto your website. So, make sure you’ve got all of these things considered to help transform your business! 

Improve Photography 

Firstly, you should review your photography. First impressions count, and if your products don’t instantly look incredible and inviting, then the user will lose trust and likely go somewhere else. Photography is an important part of a brand’s identity, so you need to get it right and invest in professional photography. You want some fantastic lifestyle imagery for your homepage to create a strong sense of brand. Then, on all of your category and product pages, the main image should be a simple image of your product on a white background. This will create consistency and a clean look that modern consumers are looking for. Then, you can follow up with more images that are more lifestyle focused to help the user imagine what it would look like or be like. 

For example, say you have a category dedicated to wedding guest dresses, you’d have the simple ecommerce image as the first one that appears in the grid format, then when they click through, you’d have images of the dresses being worn and styled in more realistic situations. This provides clear product images that the user can compare to one another to begin with, and then once they’ve decided to invest more time looking into a product, they can start to visualise how it would look in their life. Great lifestyle photography is also key for use in paid channels like paid social! 

Make Any USP’s or Discounts Very Clear 

Next up, you need to make any unique selling points or discounts very clear throughout your website. You should have a banner on every page with your main benefits, whether it’s free shipping over £30, a 15% discount code for new customers or any other promotion you can offer to drive people to commit to the purchase when they’re on the website, making it too good for them to leave! Then, when it gets to product pages, you need to show what makes your products different. As well as including a clear sense of brand, you need to highlight what makes your business and products different. An example would be including plenty of information about the types of materials you use and how they help with product longevity, as well as providing thorough size guide and care instructions so the user understands everything about the product to give them confidence in purchasing. Make their experience too good for them to want to leave! 

Focus Heavily On Your Checkout Process

One of the key considerations when it comes to improving conversion rates is the checkout process. The majority of lost purchases happen at the checkout process, where someone will add to cart and then either find an obstacle that prevents them from purchasing or gets distracted by something else during the checkout process because it was taking too long. So, you need to provide every possible avenue to encourage someone to purchase and make sure the process can be quick. 

So, once someone has added to cart, reduce clicks to purchase to an absolute minimum. When they go to checkout, automatically apply any relevant discount codes, and also give an option for a guest checkout. Most importantly, you need to enable the user to checkout using any method that they prefer, as something as simple as someone having to get up, find their card and manually fill in their details can cause them to not purchase. So, you should offer Shop App, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna, traditional filling out bank details and then anything else relevant to your business. When people regularly use these features, their details are usually all pre-saved and so the process is really quick and simple for them, giving them one less reason to leave the website and not purchase. 

Use Heat Mapping Softwares

If you’re struggling to identify where users are dropping off, then you should use heat mapping software. This provides visual representation of where users are engaging and clicking on your website, and also where they drop off. So, you might think having a chunk of content at the top of a product page before the images is helpful, yet you might find out that this is what users are finding distracting and leave the website. You can also do user testing, so getting actual people who are in your customer demographic to follow instructions such as “find a pink dress and add it to your cart”, then they will be asked to do that process and identify any potential issues along the way. Both of these are really helpful, as when you’re on your website all the time, it can be easy to miss these things, yet it can be a simple fix that helps to really transform the conversion rate of your website, so it’s definitely worth investing in! Simple web design amendments can make the biggest difference. 

Ensure The User Is Never Questioning What Action To Take Next

Another important thing to ensure is that a user is never questioning what action to take next. If they struggle to find the page they’re looking for, can’t see where to click, can’t see clearly how to select a size and add to cart, then they’ll get frustrated and leave. So, you need to have a clear call to actions throughout your homepage, category pages and product pages, as well as a clear and easy navigation system to help them easily navigate. Working with a UX agency for this can be really great to help you identify things you wouldn’t usually consider. 

Final Thoughts

So, there are some key things to consider! The average conversion rate of an ecommerce website can sit anywhere between 1.5% and 4% as a ballpark, however more expensive products like artificial grass Melbourne based will likely see a lower conversion rate than that whereas more affordable ones will be higher, like cheap tracksuits. 

Of course conversion rate can also vary depending on the time of year, often increasing around promotional periods like Black Friday.