With ecommerce becoming an increasingly competitive market, there are certain ways to measure how well your ecommerce business is doing. One such way would be to calculate and try to increase ecommerce conversation rate.
An ecommerce conversion rate is a rate at which customers visit your online store and actually buy something. Let’s consider a simple example: if 2,000 people visited your website during a period of time, and out of those 2,000, 50 went on to buy something, then your conversation rate would be 2.5%.
Other than just making a sale online, a number of other conversions can be considered when it comes to ecommerce. These conversions include email signups, adding products to a cart, social media shares, and more.
So, read ahead if you’re interested in finding out what a good conversion rate is and how you can improve ecommerce conversion rate.
What Is a Good Ecommerce Conversion Rate?
Your ecommerce conversion rate is a good metric to measure the success of your business. The metric is particularly helpful when a business wants to measure its return on investment (ROI). This is because having an optimized and well-functioning website can often lead to a significantly high ROI.
But once we have measured the ecommerce conversion rate for a business, how can we tell if it is a good rate or if it is high enough? On average, many online stores have ecommerce conversion rates between 2.5 to 3%. This means that usually, even with a fully optimized website, you can expect to make a sale between 2.5 and 3 percent of the time.
However, you shouldn’t aim for just the average. A really good ecommerce conversion rate would be between 3 to 5%. Once you’ve reached this level, you can then start to consider some additional, more advanced growth metrics, such as your online store’s click-through rate (CTR), your bounce rate, average page depth, and so on.
Increase Your Ecommerce Conversion Rate with These 9 Best Tips
So, now that you know that you should be aiming for an ecommerce rate above 3% to ensure your business is a success, how can you improve your already existing rate? We’re going to outline 9 of the best tips for you to increase your ecommerce conversion rate. With these tips, we’re sure you can beat the average and gain extra sales on your online store.
1. Upload Appropriate Images and Videos of Your Products
No customer will want to buy a product if it isn’t being displayed in its best light. You must upload appropriate images and videos to give your customers a good idea of the product they’ll be buying. This means high-quality and well-lit pictures and videos capturing the product from different angles.
You should also try and stage the products nicely to give the customers a better idea of what the product might look like in their homes or in their person. If you are dropshipping products, you should use pictures from the supplier’s site and personalize them with a logo. When your customers can see a detailed image of a product, they’ll be more likely to actually buy it.
2. Provide Detailed Product Descriptions
With good images and videos, you also need to put up detailed product descriptions for all of the products you’re selling. Since your customers can’t see or touch the products in person, it would be a good idea to mention all of this information for them to read. This can increase your sales and might also prevent the number of returns you get. A detailed description means the customer knows exactly what they’re getting and will probably be very happy with their purchase.
3. Offer Free Shipping
With the rise of Amazon and other large online marketplaces as the go-to for ecommerce, many customers have started to expect free shipping. A customer often loads up their cart and proceeds to checkout, only to abandon the website when they see the shipping fee. Without free shipping, many customers are likely to find a different store to shop from.
So, to increase ecommerce conversion rate, you may want to consider offering free shipping. Free shipping can also help reduce a customer’s price shock when they see their final cart and come across extra costs like tax and service fees.
4. Introduce Live Chat and Chatbot Options
Did you know that 38% of customers are more likely to buy something from a company if they offer a live chat option? A live chat or chatbox option can be a great way to increase your conversion rate.
This is because both options offer customers a chance to get any potential questions they may have answered. A quick response to queries is also helpful and can allow customers to build trust in your brand. Getting quick answers and being able to interact with a real person all make customers more willing to trust your business and buy your products.
5. Allow Guests to Checkout
Nothing can be more annoying than spending your valuable time looking through different products and adding them to your cart, only to find out that you can’t checkout without signing up or registering to make an account.
In fact, many people might find this to be a huge hindrance and end up taking their business elsewhere. An easy way to overcome cart abandonment is to allow your customers to checkout as guests. This will help increase your ecommerce conversion rate, and you can also benefit from it since your guest customers will have to enter their name and email address at checkout anyway. This means you won’t have to worry about lost connections.
6. Make Your Product Page Easy to Navigate
If your website does not have a user-friendly interface, many potential customers will quickly abandon it for a different website. Part of a great user interface includes a product page that is easy to navigate.
If a customer comes to your website looking for a particular sort of product, they should be able to find it quickly and easily. A way to make your product page easier to navigate is by introducing sort filters to the page. This can allow your customers to sort your products by price, size, color, best sellers, and so on. Finding a product quickly and easily means your customers will be happy to buy that product from you.
7. Introduce A Progress Bar on Checkout
Many customers enjoy browsing different products but dread the actual checking out process. And of the ways you can optimize your checkout process and increase your conversations by up to 35.26% is by introducing a progress bar on checkout.
A progress bar lets your customers know how much longer it will take for a purchase to be completed. This can help streamline the checkout and make the process less tedious for impatient customers. With an end goal visible in sight, fewer customers will abandon their cart and go through with the entire checkout.
8. Use Remarketing to Draw in Customers
If a certain customer has visited your website and browsed the products but left without purchasing anything, you can use remarketing to draw that customer back in.
Remarketing is a kind of paid advertising that uses cookies to allow you to draw back in people who have previously visited your website. This is a great way to improve your ecommerce conversion rate. Customers that see remarketing ads are 70% more likely to make a conversion.
9. Offer Limited Time Offers and Coupon Codes
When you offer limited-time offers or coupon codes for discounted products, you can draw in extra customers. Many customers may jump to avail of these offers as they might suffer from a fear of missing out. These offers can also be a great way to advertise and increase your online store’s popularity.
Additionally, you don’t even always have to offer discounts or cut down product prices. You could offer limited-time free shipping instead, for example, or a buy one get one free deal. When the offers are close to expiring, many customers might feel a sense of urgency and place orders quickly as a result of it.
Increase Your Ecommerce Conversion Rate: Wrapping It Up
Ecommerce is gaining more and more popularity every day, and as such, the industry is highly competitive. With so many businesses competing to gain the same customers, it can be difficult to make sales. However, with these 9 best tips on how to increase your conversion rate, ecommerce will likely be a big success for you. You can draw in more customers and ensure that the ones that do visit your website will end up actually making a purchase.
With an ecommerce conversion rate between 3 to 5%, you’ll be doing better than most of your competitors and will be able to increase your ROI, too. So, what are you waiting for? Be sure to implement these 9 changes to your online store to increase sales.