In this insightful guide, we explore the essentials of conversion rate optimisation (CRO) for e-commerce businesses. Whether you have just launched a new website or have visions to elevate your existing store, mastering effective CRO strategies is essential for amplifying sales and enhancing customer engagement and experience.
Achieving a high conversion rate goes beyond just attracting traffic; it requires a deep understanding of user behaviour and what it takes to craft a seamless shopping experience. From A/B testing to user-friendly enhancements and checkout processes, we will explore how particular elements play a crucial role in minimising cart abandonment and maximising conversions. By implementing these targeted improvements, you can ensure that every aspect of your e-commerce platform is aligned to encourage final actions and foster business growth.
Understanding ecommerce conversion rates
An ecommerce conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who purchased something from your online store. There are a number of different forms of conversions including:
- A final sale
- Adding products to carts and wishlists
- Email sign ups
- Social media shares
- Any valuable KPI
As such a broad topic, ecommerce conversions can be impacted by every aspect of the user experience, so improving the CRO means you can target particular results, usually sales. The CRO can be conducted throughout land pages, categories pages, products, long-form content and any other touchpoint that visitors will reach during their customer journey. But how can you optimise and improve your ecommerce conversion rate?
Find out more about which metrics to track here.
12 ways to optimise your ecommerce conversion rate
Coupon codes and discounts
Creating codes and discounts for your customers is the perfect way to get them engaged and complete a sale. These codes can last for as long as you want and can be as little as 5% off. When these discounts expire, it will influence a sense of urgency and also a level of retention as customers will return knowing they might have another code waiting.
High-quality product imagery
When shopping online, customers don’t have the privilege of seeing their product in person, meaning the imagery and videos need to be of the highest quality. When advertising a product or service online, make sure to use crystal clear photography and include features such as zooming, rotations and different angles.
Perfect your checkout process
If you’re constantly faced with cart abandonment problems, there could be an issue with the final stages of your customer journey, whether that be shopping costs or too much personal information required from the customer. Perfect that final process will ensure your customers can swiftly check out and don’t have time to ponder or look elsewhere.
Chatbots and live chat
Having a live chat option on your website will ensure that your customers don’t need to leave a certain page when they have a query. Unlike being in a physical store, customers don’t always have someone to answer a question immediately, however, a live chat provides that support there and then. This will mean the customer can continue with their action without having to find answers or abandon their purchase.
Offering different payment options
Ecommerce purchases can happen anytime, anywhere, meaning customers might not always have their debit card on them in order to complete a purchase. As an ecommerce store, you need to make sure that there are multiple ways in which a customer can pay for their items. Payment options include PayPal, credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and instalment apps such as Klarna. Along side these, it’s always a good idea to have security badges visible so that customers know your site is safe and their details are protected.
Offer free shipping
One of the biggest reasons behind cart abandonment is down to shipping fees. If a customer sees that they are having to fork out more money for shipping, they may go and find a retailer who offers it for less or for free, especially if your goods are sold through places such as Amazon or eBay.
Store layout and design
Structuring your products and categories is key to ensuring customers can find what they’re looking for quickly and smoothly. As well as placing products into categories and groups, most ecommerce stores also provide filters and ‘ shop by ‘ options to improve customer experience and organisation.
Guest checkouts
A simple way to improve CRO is to allow customers to check out as guests. Even if you want your customers to make accounts, this can be enough to put someone off if they are trying to do something quickly or don’t want to insert personal details. Once your customers know they can do this, they may end up making an account in the future if they find themselves returning.
Detailed product descriptions
Make sure you are describing your products and services in great detail, highlighting key features and measurements that the customer will want to know. With items such as clothing, many stores will include model sizing, fabric type and washing specifications. For items such as TVs, you will want to include measurements, channels, wiring types, screen sizes and picture quality. Make sure to check what competitors are including in their descriptions and take on any feedback from past customers.
Read more on optimising product pages for CRO.
Product reviews
We are now seeing more and more online retailers include customer reviews on their product pages. This not only gives customers peace of mind when ordering from your site but is also ideal for finding out extra information, seeing real-life images and comparing things such as body measurements. Another way to use this to your advantage is to reward customers who leave a review with things such as loyalty points or personal discount codes.
Perfect your returns process
Although you’d like to avoid customer returns, there is always going to be instances where customers arent happy with their product, whether that be because it arrived late, it’s too small or it’s not what they expected. Introducing a costly, confusing return system is enough to put any customer off making the purchase in the first place, especially if they are required to pay for it or return it in a way that is inconvenient.
Most ecommerce businesses will offer free returns, with a wide range of return options such as Royal Mail, Evri, in-post lockers, DPD and so on, ensuring that their customers can easily return the goods. This is also important as that customer may want to make another purchase ( for example order a smaller size ) but will be put off doing so by the lengthy or costly returns process.
Optimise your mobile site
By now, the majority of online stores are operating through mobile commerce, adapting their sites to fit different screens and offer mobile-friendly solutions. If your site doesn’t offer a great mobile experience, you are therefore missing out on mobile sales, which in this day and age, is a lot! By being able to shop on mobile, customers can purchase items when on the go and marketing efforts such as social ads are also much more effective.
Other ways to optimise conversions:
- Be competitively priced
- Keep the checkout form simple
- Show cart contents
- Make add-to cart or basket prominent
- Hace clear contact details
- Create valuable content
- Collect a mailing list
- Implement call to actions
- Personalise content and copy
- Add in-depth filters to categories and collections
- Implement sustainable efforts
