When you create an E-commerce website, you have to make sales and conversions through your site to sustain your ongoing business. If you think, setting up your E-commerce website and displaying a wide variety of products will help you to obtain traffic and you will start generating leads, then you are absolutely wrong. So we produced this useful e-commerce guide to help improve your store conversion rates.
Maximize your profits, see if any of the advice in this e-commerce guide applies to you or your online store. If any of these e-com tips do apply; then consider what action steps are necessary to improve performance and sales conversion rates going forward.
E-commerce Guide : Improve Conversion Rates
When you configure an E-commerce website, you have to pay careful attention to ensuring that you offer in demand products at desirable prices. The sales funnel should be intuitive and fluid to maximize profits.
The Problems That Face Store Owners in 2017
These days, buyers have lots of purchasing options and their mood keeps changing all the time. There are so many customers that will land on your website, spend some time on it and leave without making any buying decision.
The store visitors do not just arrive as if by magic either, if only they did. When they do arrive they do not always purchase in numbers likely to make you happy. All of these problems can be solved but they do take time and some self learning.
Some of the challenges facing e-com store owners include ensuring that product and blog content is engaging and fast loading. To offering highly sought after products at competitive prices with a fluid sales funnel designed to trigger maximum conversion potential. All these kind of issues in fact:
- Providing Steady Stream of New Content
- Managing Product Descriptions
- Checking Tracking and Sales Funnels
- Applying SEO and Social Media Strategies
- Monitoring Performance of Web Site or Blog
- Analyzing Statistics, Campaigns and Traffic Sources
Did you ever consider why customers and store visitors behave a certain way when arriving on your site. Why nobody buys or looks at content even if it is right there in front of them. Often the answer is in the various data points, there could be many reasons but you have to know where to look.
If you do not appreciate this, then you are losing your business little by little. As a serious E-retailer, you need to track the conversion rate of your e-shop or blog and find out ways to improve it. So, let’s have a look at some tried and tested ways of increasing sales in our definitive e-commerce guide.
1. Secure your Website with an SSL Certificate:
2 Know your Targeted Audience
E-commerce guide : Know your Targeted Audience
Understanding the buying habits of your targeted audience is essential for the success of your website. When you know your potential customers and have an idea about their buying traits, then you can design your website accordingly, display merchandise on it and encourage your potential customers to buy your products.
Ensure Easy Navigation On Your Website
E-commerce guide : Ensure Easy Navigation On Your Website
Website navigation is an important factor in the E-commerce business. When buyers land on your website, they want to find their desired products in the minimum number of clicks. If they face navigation problems on your website, they will leave without purchasing anything.
Therefore, make sure the navigation model on your E-commerce website is simple and straightforward. It shows the path to visitors to keep exploring their desired products and services.
To boost user experience on your E-commerce portal, you can use breadcrumb navigation on your website. It allows users to know their location in a website and help them to move freely.
3. Make Your E-Commerce Website Faster
E-commerce guide : Make Your E-Commerce Website Faster
Both, search engines and users expect websites to load quickly. When your website loads quickly, you get more chances to engage with more and more people and encourage them to make buying decisions. It also determines whether users will stay on your website or navigate elsewhere.
When you operate an E-commerce portal and want to increase the conversion rate, trim its loading time as far as possible. It will help your website to find a better place on Google and more traffic as well.
To do this consider installing a caching plugin to run alongside a CDN. A caching plugin simply optimizes your code. It crunches it and makes it smaller so your pages load fast. A CDN on the other hand distributes your content around the world. This way your store content and blogs are available to Internet users locally.
Further Resources
For caching WordPress websites we recommend WP Rocket.
For a CDN Cloudflare is a great place to start, signup to Cloudflare right here.
E-commerce Guide and Tutorial Videos
Why not take a few minutes to view our choice selection of E-commerce guides and tutorials that cover a range of exciting but highly relevant E-com topics. From setting up Shopify style platforms to integrating a store within WordPress blogs and running Facebook Ads.
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4. Improve Site’s Visibility In Search Engines
In fact SEO is such a specialist subject that there are entire sites devoted to it
If you want to increase the pace of lead generation on your E-commerce website, then it is important for you to make sure that your website is visible up in the SERPs of Google and other leading search engines.
If your website has a low ranking in search engines, it is possible that people will not find your website. Take a look at some of the 2017 SEO trends that we are noticing so far this year.
Therefore, optimize your E-commerce website with the latest practices of SEO so that it may appear on the first page of different search engines. It will drive traffic to your website and you will be able to convert them into leads. If you don’t know how to optimize your E-commerce website for high ranking in search engines, you can take the services of digital marketing companies that provide SEO solutions.
5. Keep Your E-commerce Portal Up-To-Date
Operating an E-commerce website is a challenging job as it has lots of products, pages, categories, sub-categories, etc, and their status keeps changing regularly. When a buyer comes to your website and if he/she finds pages such as “products not availableâ€, “out of stockâ€, “products with no description or relevant images†then he/she will leave your site immediately and will never buy from your website.
So, you need to update your E-commerce website regularly and keep your customer/potential buyers/clients informed about it. With platforms such as Shopify this is a fairly easy process but you still need to keep on top of it. Make sure that all your web pages display up-to-date information about the products and help buyers to get all-inclusive details for making instant buying decisions.
6. Call To Action Button
You must have observed that the majority of visitors that visit your website, don’t buy from your shop. It happens due to various reasons, among which the lack of call to action button is prominent. In fact, the call to action button increases the conversion rate up to a great extent and boost your site’s usability.
Therefore, you should have clear and compelling CTA buttons on your E-commerce website asking visitors to sign up for newsletters, buy your products, download your site’s stuff (such as an app, content), generate a question regarding your products and services, etc.
7. Reasonable Shipping Cost
To be honest, high shipping cost is the conversion killer. Frequent online buyers are conscious about the shipping cost of the product. If they find you’re charging a hefty amount as the shipping cost, they cancel their order and look for some affordable options.
If you want your E-commerce website to be the first choice of buyers, eliminate absurd shipping prices as soon as possible. Keep them minimum so that customers can happily pay that off.
8. Display Reviews On Your Website
Before buying a product, customers look for its reviews to know about the opinion of other buyers and get a general idea about the pros and cons of that product. If everything goes well, buyers tend to purchase products instantly. Ever noticed those stars adjacent to listings in Google? These are review type articles.
Therefore, show product reviews on your websites or its pages. It will help customers a lot when they buy from your website. Allow customer to give their candid reviews on your website on all products they have used. If they raise any problem, try to sort them out as soon as possible. This will make your customer happy and they will be your loyal customer for a long period of time.
9. Display Contact Information
Generally, website owners are extremely reluctant to display their contact information online because of their apprehension of getting lots of junk email or unnecessary calls. If you don’t display contact information on your website, if will be very difficult for customers to communicate with you and they might consider your website unreliable.
Therefore, display contact information (such as phone numbers, Email, Fax number, etc,) on your website and always be ready to assist your customer whenever they have issues while buying products/services from your website, defects in products, etc. You can think of adding virtual assistants to your E-commerce website to address the concerns of buyers easily and quickly.
10. Multiple Payment Options
It may sound peculiar, but most of the E-commerce websites offer restricted payment options to their customers. However, buyers expect a variety of conceivable payment options on the checkout page and when they find that their favorite payment method is not available, they relinquish shopping without making any further delay.
Therefore, make sure you provide multiple payment alternatives on your E-commerce as it allows customers to pay for products/services easily. It also reduces shopping cart abandonment rate up to a great extent.
11. Educate Your Customers
In E-commerce business, many times, it happens that you launch awesome products and services for customers, but you don’t get the desired response from customers. It happens due to the lack of awareness about your products/services among customers.
When you aim to multiply your E-commerce sales and leave your competitors behind, you need to advertise your newly launched products and services on various forums/platforms to make people aware of it.
You can setup a blog at your online store and update it with latest deals & offers, product launches, changes in policy etc. You can also run paid ads, special sales campaign and conduct direct communication with your customers using social media channels or through various other platforms. When customers come to know your product, they may think it necessary to give it a try. If they are satisfied with your products, they may keep buying from your website.
12. Hassle-Free Checkout Process
The checkout process on your E-commerce website is an important factor behind successful conversions and leads. All buyers that land on your website for purchasing products, are not technically sound. If your site’s checkout process is complicated and confusing, it is possible that they may leave your website immediately.
Therefore, keep your site’s checkout process simple and easy as far as possible. This will help customers to complete transactions quickly without any fuss.
Final Thoughts
E-commerce business is full of heavy competition as all stakeholders try to improve their sales. There are some handy strategies in this E-commerce guide that can help you to boost your E-commerce store’s conversion rate greatly and expand its sales clout in all directions.
So follow our insightful e-commerce guide and sales tips to see if there are any areas of your blog or online store that could do with subtle improvement, tweaking or refining in 2017.