Tips and Best Practices to Improve Your Online Store’s Conversion Rate

It’s easy to launch an online store nowadays: ecommerce platforms are at your service and provide all the necessary tools to get you started. If you have the money to cover a one-year subscription plan and know exactly what you are going to sell, that’s good, but it’s only the start of a long journey through which key metrics such as conversion rate will decide the fate of your business.

The thing is that conversion doesn’t come out of the blue, you need to create the milieu to make it happen. In other words, it requires hard work and optimization, so whether you are doing this for your own business or as a marketing director of an ecommerce company, conversion should be among the top items of the key performance indicators (KPI) for the year.

In order to develop a strategy for conversion, you need to first understand what online conversion is. Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors arriving on your website and completing a desired action.

In this case, if you were thinking of replacing the “desired action” with “purchase”, then you would be correct. That’s the main goal of every online store – sales – but we say “conversion” when your goal is, for example, to see a customer adding a product to their cart, signing up to your newsletter, or sharing something from your store on social media. In other words, it depends on the goal of your campaign’s and ultimately it impacts the user’s experience of your online storefront.

In order to increase revenue, your store needs conversion rate optimization. This can be done on landing pages, category pages, or any other touchpoint where the consumer meets your site. Think of the seasonal landing pages of online stores, for example: as a holiday period approaches – whether that’s Christmas, Valentine’s Day, or 4th of July – ecommerce sites create special pages to increase their conversion rate, which is to say to convert visitors into customers. It could be an irresistible offer or a special reward, but we’ll get to that…

Setting conversion rate goals

Studies of the biggest online merchants all indicate that the average ecommerce conversion rate is only 1-2%. That, of course, can go much higher, but the main takeaway is that it is wise to have this number in mind and not set the bar too high, otherwise you’ll only feel a failure.

To calculate conversion rate, use this simple metric: if the goal was to evaluate purchases for a set period, then compare the total number of purchases during that period with the number of visitors you had. So, for example, if you had 10,000 visitors and 100 sales, then the conversion rate is 1%. Most ecommerce platforms include conversion rate measurement tools by default and can access such data through the dashboard.

1. Make the experience easy

Just consider the Amazon product and checkout page: the former provides a lot of detail underpinned by images and sometimes videos so that the customer knows what they will be purchasing. If you allow product reviews on that page, then the conversion rate increases because the product already has a history and other people have shared their opinion about it. Put yourself in the customer’s position: have you ever searched for reviews of a product you were considering buying? Yes, of course. Did that influence your decision? Yes, of course. With clear information and reviews displayed on a single page, you reduce the possibility of the customer leaving the page. Add free shipping or a frictionless returns policy and you’ll be all set for a high conversion rate.

2. Simplify the checkout page

How many times have you had the intention of making a purchase but ultimately changed your mind because the checkout page was cluttered with other offers, was tied to a forced registration or was simply too lengthy a process? Any of these are a frustration, and that’s why it makes sense to simplify the checkout process. Just consider the Amazon checkout page once again: as soon as you click on “checkout”, the clutter disappears and you see a page where every segment leads to finalizing the purchase. Displaying more offers on the checkout page confuses the customer, and since you want them to head through to payment it’s best to let him finalize the purchase and instead display offers on the thank-you page. They may jump on other deals if it’s relevant or they’re just on a shopping spree.

These are the most important two steps to improve your conversion rate, especially at first. Have you implemented these changes into your own store, and was it useful? Drop us a line and let us know what you think in the comments section below.