Five ways to increase conversion rates for ecommerce websites

Conversion rate is defined as the percentage of visitors who land on your website and complete a desired task.

In order to check your conversion rate, you first need to establish your goals. Are you aiming to sell products? If so, your conversion rate will be based on the amount of users who visit your site and leave having bought something. Analytics tools can help you to keep track of your conversion rate, however, there are also ways that you can improve them. We’ve listed our top 5 recommendations below.

Showcase your products

Imagery is hugely important when it comes to selling a product online. Because the customer is unable to see the item in person, and physically hold it, they’ll need to be able to see a clear, true-to-life image instead. Ensuring that your photos are well-lit, and well taken, will mean that customers can get a good idea of the quality of your products. It’s also helpful to offer images (sometimes even videos) of the product from all different angles, and enable zoom functionality to allow users to see the image close-up.

Well-written product descriptions can also help to increase sales, and you’re more likely to gain traffic from search results if your copy is search engine optimised.

Simplify the user journey

Most people will leave a website without buying anything if the user journey is too cumbersome. Therefore, you need to bear this in mind when planning the processes of your site. It is important to make the whole experience as easy and efficient as possible in order to keep users engaged, and to encourage them to buy your products. Allowing them to search for a product means that they will find what they are looking for quicker than if they have to trawl through pages of products in order to find one thing. The purchase process should also be streamlined, with the number of steps visible for users to ascertain how far they have left to go before they can confirm and pay for their order, and multiple payment methods to reassure customers that they can feel secure in buying from you.

Promotional tools

There are a number of ways to promote your products throughout your website. For example, Add-ons allow you to highlight other products that ‘customers also bought’, encouraging users to peruse more items. Related products and discounts also help to increase conversions by highlighting products at multiple points throughout the user journey.

Abandoned basket

A lot of people like to shop comparatively, so will often fill their basket with the intention of returning later on to buy their items. With the ‘abandoned basket’ functionality, you can send an email reminder to a user showing them the contents of their abandoned basket, or the last items they viewed, in order to prompt them to return and ‘buy now’.

Reviews

Most people will be influenced by someone else’s experience when buying a product, and will often favour websites that provide product reviews over those that do not. It’s human nature to want to find out what somebody else thinks of a product or service before you part with your own hard-earned cash. By encouraging users to provide post-purchase feedback, you’re already one step ahead of ecommerce websites that don’t allow this feature.

To conclude, the most important job of any website is to make life easier for the user. If you can provide your products or services with a quick and efficient user journey, you’re more likely to have customers who both want to return, and who will recommend you to others.

If you’d like more information on our ecommerce platform, or any of our other services please do feel free to get in touch.