Posted 27.01.2022
By Steven Titchener
Building a successful ecommerce store is about more than driving traffic to your website. While that will net you some sales, and the more traffic you drive the more sales you will get. You still need to increase the amount of people that buy when visiting your page, otherwise you are wasting time and money getting people to the website in the first place.
Optimising your website is one of the best ways to start turning more of those visitors into sales.
They say an image says a thousand words, but a blurry image ruins a reputation.
Using high quality images in your website and product listings make a massive difference to your audience. It allows them to really see what it is they are buying and make a good decision.
High quality images aren’t all about having crispy pixel perfect images, it is also about the information supplied within those images.
This means getting a few nice shots around the product and close up details. You want to show people exactly what it is they are buying, and if you can provide more detail through photography than your competitors, it’s going to build more trust in your product and result in more sales.
Free shipping is one of the best ways to increase your conversion rate on products. This happens because it gives your customer a much easier time working out how much they are going to pay for the product right away.
If you don’t offer free shipping, there might have to be a calculation made in the checkout process, this means that your customer doesn’t know exactly how much they are going to end up paying. If they get to the end of the checkout process then realise they are going to have to pay a load in shipping costs, they will just bounce.
So offering free shipping makes it quicker for a customer to know what they are going to pay straight away and reduces any surprises later on, giving them a comforting feeling. This works even if you have to increase your base cost slightly to accommodate for the shipping costs, people will more likely buy with free shipping than without.
The other option is to have set shipping costs and display those clearly. This might be a set cost for normal shipping times and then one for expedited shipping. But you have to make sure it is visible easily on the product pages so they know what to expect.
You need to gather a certain amount of information to actually checkout a customers purchases, but sometimes these checkout processes can be too long and result in abandoned carts.
A way to increase your ecommerce conversion rate is to shorten the checkout process as much as possible. Amazon are great at this.
Of course, they already have a lot of detail as you have to be signed in to use their service. With their ‘buy now’ buttons it can take you straight from that button to the checkout, removing the cart process completely. All you need to do is verify your card details and off you go. This is a perfect example of a quick checkout that can increase your conversions.
Here are some other ideas on how to shorten the checkout process:
Talking about shortening checkouts, integrating alternative payments methods is a great way to increase your conversion rate.
As mentioned above it can shorten the checkout process which is amazing, but it can also build trust in your brand. People trust their details being on Apple Pay, Google Pay or PayPal, so by integrating those you are showing that you can be trusted, it makes you seem more legitimate.
It also works into people’s daily lives much better, they can buy something at the click of a button rather than having to fill all of their information in and means if they are shopping from their sofa they don’t need to go and find their card to pay.
Finally a video demonstration is one of the best ways to build trust in your product and brand.
By creating a video demonstrating your products features and how it works and looks, people can more easily see it in their lives and it can answer a lot of their questions.
Think about it this way, if you are going to by a laptop it’s easier to watch a quick video that tell you how many usb-c ports it has, if it has a graphics card, what CPU it has and more than reading through the technical specifications. You can do that all in a video while showing them how it looks in a more realistic way.
This gets across so much more information and is one of the reasons why review based YouTube channels do so well, people are actively looking for this information and reviews on a product. So make that video yourself and add it to your website.
Reviews. By now you have probably read a hundred blogs about eCommerce conversion rates and have seen reviews being mentioned in every single one.
That’s for good reason, adding reviews builds trust because it’s people not involved in your business saying how great the product is. It’s the most important feature to add onto your website by a long way.
But we wanted to give a few different ways to improve your conversion rate outside the obvious. All these can be implemented on any ecommerce website, be it Magento, Shopify or Woocommerce.
Read some of our most popular posts on web design, development and increasing trust and conversions here:
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