How to increase your eCommerce conversion rate

For any eCommerce business, growth and sustainability are driven by a well-designed marketing strategy. You can gauge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by continuously tracking conversions. Therefore, you’ll want to keep tabs on your eCommerce conversion rate and implement strategies to increase it.

To make it easier for you, we will walk you through the following 10 simple yet effective strategies to boost your eCommerce conversion rates:

1. Optimize product listings for improved search engine visibility and better user experience
2. Speed up your website loading speed
3. Streamline your checkout process to reduce shopping cart abandonment
4. Create a sense of urgency to drive immediate purchases
5. Optimize your website for mobile devices to capture more traffic
6. Personalize shopping experiences to enhance customer engagement
7. Deploy live chats and chatbots to improve customer support
8. Craft a balanced pricing strategy to stay competitive
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9. Offer free shipping to incentivize website visitors
10. Utilize authentic customer reviews to build trust and drive sales
11. Keep reading to learn more about how to improve your eCommerce conversion rate using each of these powerful growth hacks.

What is Your Conversion Rate?

In simple terms, a conversion rate is the percentage of your website’s visitors who make a purchase.

Whether these visitors are coming from search engines, social media platforms, or paid ads, the process to calculate the conversion rate is quite simple:

1. Divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors to your website.
2. Multiply the result by 100

The average eCommerce conversion rate falls within a range of 2.5% to 3%.

As a business owner, your aim should be to surpass the 3% mark. However, maintaining a high conversion rate is often a challenging task for many sellers.

How To Increase Your ECommerce Conversion Rate

Increasing your eCommerce conversion rate is a worthy goal, but it can be tough to know how to get started. However, with the right strategies, boosting your conversion rate is indeed possible. Here are 10 actionable tips that you can implement right away.

1. Optimize Your Product Listings

The goal of optimizing your product listings is twofold. Firstly, it helps improve the visibility of your products on search engines like Google.

This is due to how search engine algorithms work. They favor content that is relevant and well-optimized, pushing such content higher up in search results. Higher visibility in search results leads to increased organic traffic to your website, providing you with more opportunities to make a sale.

Secondly, a well-optimized product listing is your chance to make a great first impression on potential customers. Since they can’t actually see or feel your product in person, your product listing is your opportunity to convince them to buy.

To optimize your product listings, you need to:

• Create concise and descriptive product titles
• Craft engaging product descriptions
• Use high-quality images and videos

A clear, attractive product title and image, complemented by a comprehensive description, can effectively convey the value of your product to the shopper, making them more likely to purchase.

2. Improve Page Load Speed

There’s a direct relationship between page load speed and conversion rates. The longer it takes your webpage to load, the lower your conversion rates tend to be. In fact, the highest conversion rates are seen on websites that load between 1 to 2 seconds.

Why? Well, in our fast-paced digital age, customers expect websites to load almost instantly. If your page takes too long to load, you run the risk of the visitor losing patience and moving on to another site.

That means that every additional second that your page takes to load can cost you potential customers. For this reason, it’s in your best interest to ensure your site loads as swiftly as possible.

There are various methods to achieve this, including optimizing images, reducing server response time, and eliminating unnecessary plugins, among others. If you’re struggling with your website loading time, consider hiring a web developer or IT professional to help you out.

3. Streamline the Checkout Process

Clear, easy to find, and easily accessible ‘Add to Cart’ and ‘Checkout’ buttons, paired with a straightforward and user-friendly checkout page, can greatly enhance the user experience and boost your conversion rate.

Keep the checkout process simple and brief so that customers don’t second guess their purchase and abandon their cart midway through the process. In addition, include as many payment options as possible to cater to all of your customers’ preferences.

In addition to simplifying the checkout process, you should also reassure customers about the safety of their personal information.

With cyber threats on the rise, customers need to be confident that their data is secure when shopping online. Ensuring your website is secure, and clearly communicating this to your customers, provides them with peace of mind. This makes them more likely to complete the purchase and can contribute to an increase in your conversion rate.

4. Create a Sense of Urgency

Creating a sense of urgency is a great way to convince potential customers to go ahead and click that “buy” button. This technique capitalizes on the fear of missing out, or FOMO. It’s a psychological principle that pushes consumers to make faster decisions because they worry they’ll miss out on something great if they don’t.

Time-sensitive promotions or highlighting limited stock availability can motivate customers to make immediate purchases.

By conveying that a product is in high demand or a special deal is soon expiring, you create a situation where customers feel compelled to buy now rather than later.

This urgency can increase your conversion rates as customers hurry to take advantage of an offer before it’s too late.

5. Optimize Your Online Store for Mobile Devices

With mobile devices contributing to 65% of all eCommerce traffic, it’s important to ensure your website is mobile-friendly.

If your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you could be missing out on a significant portion of potential sales.

A mobile-optimized website needs to provide a smooth user experience, easy navigation, and strategically placed call-to-action (CTA) buttons.

Designing your site with mobile users in mind not only caters to a large portion of your audience but also enhances the overall user experience, which can, in turn, boost your conversion rates.

6. Personalize the Shopping Experience

Today’s customers are not just looking for products; they are looking for experiences. They appreciate it when online stores cater to their individual needs and preferences.

Providing personalized product recommendations and crafting tailored content can significantly improve customer engagement and increase conversion rates. A whopping 76% of consumers report that they are more likely to consider making a purchase from brands that use personalization.

By analyzing customer behavior data, you can offer product suggestions that align with their browsing history or purchasing trends. There are now many AI (artificial technology) eCommerce tools that gather and analyze data in order to provide better personalized recommendations.

Similarly, customized content, such as personalized emails, ads, or offers, can make customers feel valued, fostering brand loyalty and encouraging more conversions.

7. Have Live Chats and Chatbots on Your Website

The speed and efficiency of customer service can greatly influence conversion rates.

Providing immediate, accessible customer support through live chats and chatbots can help guide your customers, answer their questions, and resolve their doubts, all without them needing to navigate away from your page. Keeping them on your website means they’ll be more likely to go through with a purchase.

Live chats give your customers a platform to interact directly with your team, offering a personalized customer experience.

Chatbots, on the other hand, are powered by AI and can provide immediate responses to common inquiries, ensuring that customer questions are addressed 24/7. These tools can significantly improve your customers’ shopping experience and, consequently, your conversion rates.

8. Craft a Balanced Pricing Strategy

The price point of your products plays a significant role in the buying decisions of your customers. A well-thought-out pricing strategy can indeed make or break your conversions.

You want to ensure your prices are competitive but fair.

• If your prices are too low, customers might get suspicious of the quality of your products.
• If your prices are too high, customers might opt for a cheaper alternative from a competitor.

In order to make sure you’re pricing your products right, take a look at competitors who sell similar products. Keep your prices in or near the range of your competitors, while making sure you’ll still be bringing in a profit.

Striking a balance with your pricing can encourage customers to make a purchase, boosting your conversions while maintaining a healthy profit margin.

9. Incorporate Free Shipping

Free shipping has almost become an industry standard, largely due to its adoption by eCommerce platforms like Amazon.

Nowadays, customers not only appreciate free shipping, but many have come to expect it. Not offering free shipping could potentially deter customers, costing you valuable sales.

Interestingly, some customers are even willing to pay a higher price for a product if it comes with free shipping.

Therefore, it may even pay off to raise your prices slightly in order to implement free shipping. Another option is to offer free shipping on a certain minimum order, which also encourages customers to purchase more and increases your AOV (average order value).

By absorbing the shipping cost or incorporating it into your product pricing, you can remove a common hurdle in the purchasing process, thereby encouraging more conversions.

10. Showcase Customer Reviews

Customer reviews act as social proof and can significantly influence a potential buyer’s purchasing decision.

Seeing that others have had positive experiences with a product often reassures customers about the product’s quality and value, making them more inclined to make a purchase. In fact, 98% of consumers consider reviews an “essential resource” when making decisions about purchases.

Remember, the more reviews, the better. However, it’s important that these reviews are both genuine and compelling. Fake or unconvincing reviews can do more harm than good.

Encourage your satisfied customers to leave reviews, share their experiences, and even include pictures or videos of the product.

This not only helps build trust with potential customers but also provides additional insights into your product, further driving your eCommerce conversion rates.

In Conclusion

A high conversion rate is achievable with the right techniques and optimization. But remember, you need to continue to refine your website to maintain and incrementally boost your existing conversion rate.

While these strategies are beneficial, it’s also important to ensure that you have enough inventory in stock to fill orders and keep your customers happy. Many businesses need external eCommerce funding in order to make this happen.

At 8fig, we have empowered hundreds of eCommerce sellers to reach their full potential with cash flow friendly funding aligned to their supply chain costs. Our proven method ensures that you have the funding you need while optimizing your cash flow, so you have the working capital you need to stay in stock and keep your business running smoothly.

Apply for funding now so that you can focus on increasing your eCommerce conversion rates, instead of worrying about growth capital.