How to Quickly Improve Your E-commerce Store’s Conversion Rates

by Pradeep S. Digital Marketing Strategist

If you run an e-commerce website, you may think your goals are pretty simple. You just need to get people to visit your e-commerce store, choose some products that they like, and then check out. Your goal is to get as many conversions as possible in order to generate sales and make money. However, not many e-commerce store owners actually know how to improve their store’s conversion rates. Many have a ‘build it and they will come’ mentality, but this doesn’t work online. In this article, we’re going to provide you with some practical advice that you can put into action and that will quickly improve your e-commerce store’s conversion rates.

1. Create Fantastic Product Images

When selling products online, your images are everything. Most buyers are interested in the visuals, and they want to see exactly what it is that they are buying and how they can imagine using it. When designing your store, make sure that you include large images that can be enlarged should the buyer wish to zoom in on a certain area. Leave plenty of white space around the product so that it is the product itself that stands out and not some flashy background. You also want to show the product from as many different angles as possible. For example, let’s say you are selling women’s jackets. You’ll want to show photos of the front and the back of the jacket, any detailing, and ideally, of someone wearing it too. All you need to create fantastic product images is a good DSLR camera and some photo editing software. You could also hire a professional to take product photographs if you can afford it.

2. Write Your Own Product Descriptions

A lot of e-commerce stores use the manufacturer provided product description on their website, and this isn’t usually the best course of action. If you do this, not only will your product descriptions be exactly the same as the majority of your competitors’, but you probably won’t be engaging them either. Ignore the hype, and focus on giving your customers as much information about a product as possible. Customers aren’t afraid of long, detailed descriptions so you shouldn’t be either. Plus, you can also include a short summary box for those who don’t want to read a lot of text. On top of this, when you write your own product descriptions, you will be boosting your website’s on-page SEO, so this has double the benefits.

3. Offer Free Shipping

According to the e-commerce conversion optimization platform OptinMonster, 67.91% of buyers abandon their shopping carts. One of the reasons for this is shipping charges that are higher than expected. Over 50% of e-commerce companies now offer free shipping, and if you are still charging your customers a mailing fee, it’s likely that they’ll just back-click out of your shopping cart and shop with your closest competitor instead. If you don’t think you can afford to offer free shipping on all purchases, you might want to consider offering free shipping on orders over a certain value. Not only are most customers okay with this, but many will also add further items to their cart if they feel they are getting something worthwhile for doing so.

4. Think About Your Web Hosting

When you run an e-commerce store, it is vital that you ensure that it is always online. No customer wants to visit a website and find out that it’s down. When a website doesn’t load or is slow to load, a customer will instantly back-click and shop with one of your competitor’s instead. It’s unprofessional, and in the age of instant gratification, it’s not something that any customer will accept. If you aren’t using the best VPS hosting, look into getting this as quickly as possible. If your site is quick to load and always online, you’ll see your conversion rates increase.

5. Include Reviews

GE Capital Bank conducted a study which found that 61% of shoppers look at reviews before they purchase an item. Unless you want your customers to find reviews on your competitors’ websites, and decide to buy from them instead, you’ll want to allow reviews on your site. Most e-commerce platforms have review plugins that can be activated within seconds. Those who host their site on a platform like WordPress will also find plenty of free review widgets that can be installed. One thing to keep in mind here is that you want your customers to trust your site. So never, ever delete negative reviews. The important thing to do, instead, is to encourage as many reviews as possible. Positive or negative – both are beneficial in increasing conversions.

6. Make Your Contact Information Clear

Adding your contact information to your e-commerce website may seem like a simple thing to do, but it’s something that has been proven to increase conversion rates. This is an especially important thing for small or new e-commerce stores to do, as it’s unlikely a customer will have heard of your brand before arriving on your website, and they will need to know that they can trust you. Consider the different ways that you will allow customers to get in touch with you, and dedicate a page on your website to this. Most customers aren’t keen on sending emails or snail mail, but will be happy if you have a live chat option and a phone number they can call. You could even include this information in your store’s header to build trust further.

7. Email Those Who Abandon Their Carts

If you’ve ever added items to your cart on the Amazon website and then not checked out, it’s likely that you received an email soon after reminding you of your shopping basket. This, surprisingly, can encourage customers to return to the website in question and complete their purchase. There can be many reasons for a customer to abandon their shopping cart, such as distraction, doubt, forced registration, slow site speeds, and higher than expected shipping costs, but often personalized emails that encourage business can be all it takes to turn things around. You can even make this process automated. Even if you only manage to capture around 25% of abandoned carts, it’s still a higher conversion rate than you would have originally had.

8. Improve Your Call to Action

Finally, one final tip is to improve your call to action. If you take a look at the Walmart website, as one example, you’ll see that they have a large red or orange button on each of their product pages encouraging customers to add the item to their carts. The button stands out, and also invokes a sense of urgency in the customer. Offering something similar on your site could also lead to an increase in conversions. Make sure that your ‘add to cart’ and ‘checkout’ buttons are large, easy to find, and prominent on your pages. Doing so will lead to more sales – trust us.

It’s a good idea to employ all of these tactics if you can, but do make sure to use a conversion monitoring software to determine how effective they are.