How to Increase E-Commerce Conversion Rates
This week we will talk about increasing conversion rates on e-commerce sites. This is one of the questions we get the most: “What else can I do?” Quite a lot, actually.
Many e-commerce business owners do not realize that money is right there. They don’t need more traffic, visibility or observers if they just pay attention to their current analytics. The way their desktop, mobile, and tablet website is structured, sometimes they have millions of potential dollars.
Optimize Your Landing Page
It’s hard to sell conversion rate optimization because it’s integrated and tied to the platform. What kind of platform can I even change your template’s structure? Does it abide by your brand guidelines? What is the best path for this where we see opportunities to increase people’s conversion rates, and by hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions?
How do you convince somebody that they’re leaving a lot of money on the table?
If you have access to their analytics, you can easily show them the data and drop off points. You’re able to show them where their customers are dropping off throughout the purchase funnel. That’s the easiest way.
If you don’t have access to their analytics, which in most cases you don’t, you just have to use your expertise. Show them their competitors that you know are converting, outperform in terms of revenue. Display the functionality that competitors have. One feature may be a soft add to cart that allows people to easily go to the checkout page or continue shopping.
Improving Your eCommerce Store
We do about 60-plus elements on a weekly basis. We prioritize design and functionality. Making the Buy Now button or Add To Cart button larger is a design element. Adding an upsell on that add to cart button is a “functionality” element. We’re going to review only three to five of these.
The first one is soft add to cart. Soft add to cart is you go to any site, and again go to Amazon, Zappos, Jet, Walmart, you find a product you like, you select the options, you say Add To Cart. The Soft Add To Cart option will say, “This item has been added to cart” and “Do you want to check out, or do you want to continue shopping, or do you want to go to your cart?”
Why is Soft Add To Cart so important?
This option gives the user the ability to make that decision. Many times if I just add a product to my cart. Sometimes it gets lost. It just goes up to the cart, but nothing actually pops up. That is a big problem.
Shopping Cart Issues
We see so many sites. Probably 70% of the e-commerce sites out there, you add an item to the cart, you send me directly to cart. I might need to add more products.
Why are you sending me to the cart? I’m not done shopping yet. That’s like somebody going into a store, picking up something, being pushed to the checkout line. Why would you do that?
The opposite of that is when you add an item to the cart and nothing pops up. The website just shows a little one on the tiny icon on the top right-hand corner. That’s bad.
If I’m a user, where’s the cart? I have to look around. You have to make it as easy as possible for the customer to find the checkout.
If you don’t have Soft Add To Cart, you’re losing one to three percent of your annual revenue because your conversion rates are suffering. Everybody wants to double their traffic, but it’s very difficult. Increasing or even doubling your conversions is much easier.
Converting Potential Customers
Go to your Google Analytics. Visit the section where you have the demographics and audience. Look at the conversion rate on your mobile, tablet, and desktop.
Ninety percent of e-commerce sites’ mobile conversions will be one-third or even half of their desktop conversions. Yet they don’t have the calls to action on their mobile, which lacks optimization.
Why do we see this so many times?
Everybody knows that the majority of their traffic is coming from mobile, yet nobody’s actually done anything about it. They don’t prioritize their mobile responsiveness and instead focus on their desktop.
You need to prioritize for mobile. If I go on a mobile device to shop and I need to now scroll down to see that Add To Cart or Buy Now button, you’ve lost me.
This is especially true when you are trying to increase e-commerce conversion rates on platforms like Bigcommerce, Shopify, Volusion, Magento, 3DCart, Miva, Prestashop, Woocommerce and Zencart.
eCommerce Business Calls To Action
Suppose you make those buttons sticky or having them move with you when you scroll. When I get on the screen, I see the product and that Add To Cart or Buy Now. No matter how much I scroll, it’s right there in my face. As a result, you’ll see a huge increase in conversions.
Implement sticky calls to action. If you take phone calls, as I scroll down on your mobile site or even your desktop site, I need to see Contact and Call. The phone number needs to be clickable.
How about Product pages? I need to see Add To Cart right away and the button needs to scroll down with me. You need the simplest, most basic JavaScript code.
At the bottom of this post, we’re actually going to create gifs and show you how these functionalities work. If you perform the same methods, you have another three to five percent of conversions.
Motivation To Boost Average Conversion Rates
Why tell and show people what to do? Remember that the average user now has an attention span of fewer than six seconds, if you don’t tell them what to do, they will not do it. We’re bombarded with thousands of messages on a daily basis and we can only focus on maybe three to five elements.
Look at this video. What do you see? Are you looking at my face? Or are you looking at the TV or at the wall behind me?
You can only focus on three to five things. You want to take their focus and integrate it within a call to action. Call it a funnel or attention but implement focus. If they keep seeing Call, Contact, Add To Cart, Finalize, Checkout, Purchase, Finish Your Order or Reorder, they’re more likely to do it.
Let’s talk about another element. We’re going to show all of this as gifs.
When I add an item to my online cart, I have the Soft Add To Cart. Thank you for that. My conversion rate went up 5%.
In the cart, there’s a section for coupons. Would you remove the coupon field from the cart?
Absolutely.
Why?
Why am I going to distract a user? I’m putting a hurdle in the way prior to them going to the checkout page, which is ultimately where I want them to go. I want the least amount of distractions as possible.
Remove the navigation, shipping, and other potential distractions. All of that can be done in the checkout.
Coupons are the worst thing that happened to e-commerce. If you are an e-commerce site, stop implementing them. Go to Google, open a new tab, put in your brand. The first thing that Google will pre-fill is coupons.
You know what happens? People go to the cart and see the coupon field. They leave your site, to get a better deal. That leads to fewer conversions.
Google your brand name, and test every single coupon they find. This becomes tedious, even with coupon solutions. One solution called Honey was sold for $4 billion to PayPal.
If you have a coupon field in your cart, you’re messing up big time. A new client or user will likely leave your site and search for a coupon. Move that field to checkout.
Our last suggestion is to limit navigation after a customer has selected items for their cart. After I validate products and click checkout, I see a huge navigation with a menu and your entire site.
Why is that bad?
You’re giving them the option to leave. Don’t, because then you won’t get those conversion rates. Instead, you get hustling consumers.
When you add an item to your Amazon cart and say “I’m ready to purchase,” see what Amazon does. They remove all navigation because you only need to see “Proceed to checkout.” You’re ready to provide your credit card.
Use ApplePay To Improve Your Conversion Rates
Apple Pay is great for limited navigation. The option doubles your conversion rates on mobile for anybody that’s using an iOS device as the fastest way to purchase. When websites have Apple Pay, I don’t have to enter a shipping address or a credit card number. I press my thumb or I just show my face and I’m done.
What’s another Apple Pay benefit? If you’re on e-commerce platforms like standard Shopify or Big Commerce, you don’t have the ability to edit the one-page checkout. Thus you can’t reduce form fields or really optimize that page so much. A one-click option like Apple Pay helps you optimize the checkout process tremendously.
Any single one of the major carts out there has this functionality. Again, this is just three to five that we reviewed. You probably have a twenty to twenty-five percent increase in conversion rates.
Imagine if you made twenty-five percent more revenue. That means that if you’re earning ten million US dollars in revenue right now, you’ll probably have 2 to 2.5 million a year.
Other eCommerce Site Strategies
What did we miss?
Make sure that you have good product images. See if you can devise a product video. They don’t require custom functionality, but you’ll see a nice little uptick in conversion.
Anything you can do to differentiate your content from that of your competitors will increase your conversion rates as well. These include images, videos, product reviews, case studies, shopping guides, and other media.
Let us know if you need help. We’ll talk to you next week.
Is your site not performing up to your expectations?
Tired of seeing abandoned carts, high bounce rates, and low conversion rates?
