Best Ways to Skyrocket eCommerce Sales Conversions

Are you looking for the best ways to skyrocket your eCommerce sales conversions? Are you tired of implementing ‘proven’ eCommerce strategies and getting little or no results? If this is you, this article is for you.

After spending a lot of time and resources to create the ‘perfect’ eCommerce website, you expected a sales explosion. 

You did your homework and found in-demand products and trusted suppliers. You even set aside a considerable budget for advertising. But despite doing what the internet tells you to do, your eCommerce sales remained below par.

The reason why you are not hitting those big numbers is competition. There are over 47 billion websites on the internet; your site is just one of them. In the US, there are approximately 1.3 million eCommerce websites. 

Imagine following the same strategies that 1.3 million eCommerce websites are doing and expecting to perform better somehow?

The average eCommerce sales conversion rate is between 1% to 2%. This rate is what those strategies will get you. If you want to skyrocket your eCommerce sales conversions higher than that, you have to do what only the successful minority of eCommerce store owners are doing. You have to dig deeper to optimize your conversion.

Let’s get started.

11 Best Ways to Skyrocket Your eCommerce Sales Conversion

1. High-Quality Visual Content

View your eCommerce store from the eye of your customers. Will you buy your products if you stumble on your store online?

When you are selling products and services, keep it at the back of your mind that your prospects cannot feel the product. Your first task is to make them feel the product as much as possible.

Place high-quality images and videos about your products on your store and watch your sales conversion increase. Pictures and videos are the best forms you can use to demonstrate to your visitors that your product is right for them.

Product descriptions are also helpful, but your visitors are often either in a hurry or cannot picture your products with the descriptions. Add high-quality images/or videos about your products to your product descriptions for more results.

Renderforest is an all-in-one branding platform you can use to create high-quality videos and graphics for your online store. You can use Instasize to edit your photos and videos.

A good example is the Unbound Merino clothing store that uses high-quality images and videos for its product pages.

2. Free Shipping

People are wired psychologically to love free things. They are always looking for the best value for a budget. If two Etsy sellers sell the same pair of shades for $10, one offers free shipping, and the other requires you to foot the bills. Which of these two sellers will you give your money to? 

If you are human, you will give it the former that offers free shipping. Why? Because the seller helped you save extra money you would have spent on shipping.

You can use the attraction of free shipping to bump up your eCommerce sales conversion rate. Amazon and other eCommerce platforms have ‘spoilt’ online shoppers with free shipping. You will lose a lot of potential sales if you do not offer this.

Now, you are probably worried about your profit margin or selling at a loss if you offer free shipping. Who will foot the bill? The answer is the customer.

Understand that offering free shipping is a psychological game. You are merely giving your visitors a reason why they should buy from you. By offering free shipping, you pass across a message that your service is affordable, and you have their best interests at heart.

Calculate what it will cost you to ship products for free to your customers, and increase your products’ price to cover it. However, do this moderately not to chase away your customers.

If you must charge separately for shipping cost, make it clear from the start. Tricking your customers with a small figure and then suddenly adding the shipping cost at the checkout page will increase your cart abandonment rate. 

Alternatively, you can start selling on Amazon FBA and let the eCommerce giant offer free shipping and fulfillment services for you. 

Nordstrom is the perfect example of an online store that uses free shipping to boost its eCommerce sales conversion. The eCommerce site offers free shipping and free returns on all orders, even for discounted sales. Why wouldn’t you want to buy it?

3. Retarget Abandoned Shopping Carts

Customers abandoning their shopping carts are one of the biggest threats to your eCommerce sales conversion rates. For a visitor to pick items in a cart, it shows they have a significant interest in purchasing them. But for one reason or the other, they did not make a purchase.

If you reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts, your eCommerce sales conversion rate will increase. However, you cannot reduce abandoned shopping carts without understanding why these carts were abandoned.

Source: Acquire

Recovering abandoned shopping carts is essential for generating more revenue for your store. Sometimes, your prospects get distracted along the way and forget about their carts. 

Set up an automated abandoned shopping cart feature with Shopify or other alternatives. This feature will send follow-up or reminder emails to customers who abandoned their carts in your store.

Radley London, an eCommerce clothing accessory store, boosted their eCommerce sales conversions by retargeting customers who abandoned their carts.

You can send discount messages to customers that abandoned their carts as an incentive for them to complete the order. ROAD iD, another online accessory store, does this well.

4. Improve Your Site Speed

Slow website speed is terrible for business. It is one of the biggest threats to your eCommerce sales conversions. According to Small SEO Tools, a one-second delay in page loading time will result in a 7% fall in conversion rates, 11% fall in page views, and 16% fall in customer satisfaction.

Source: Shopify

By improving your site speed, you can skyrocket your conversion rates. Rhone Apparel boosted its site speed in April 2020 and saw a 17% increase in conversion rate and a 3% decrease in bounce rate.

You can improve your eCommerce website speed and boost your eCommerce sales conversions as Rhone did. Google loves a website with fast speed loading time, favors it in its search engine rankings, and harbors sites with slow loading time. Here is how to do it.

1. Test Your Speed

The first step is to evaluate your current eCommerce store to find out how fast it loads and how much speed optimization you need. You can use many tools to test your website speed, such as Google PageSpeed and Pingdom. 

2. Check Your Hosting Plan

After testing your website and discovering that your page loading time is slow, the next step is to check your hosting plan. Many eCommerce business owners make the mistake of going for a low hosting pricing plan from a web hosting provider and expecting the best hosting services.

When you use shared web hosting plans for your eCommerce store, you will encounter occasional crashes and slow loading speeds as your traffic grows. Instead of losing customers to cheap hosting plans, pay the extra bucks for an eCommerce web hosting plan.

Alternatively, you can change your website hosting service to one that has an affordable but robust eCommerce hosting plan for you. Shopify or Wix website hosting are excellent choices for hosting your eCommerce store. 

3. Optimize Your Images

Using high-quality images for your online store helps you increase your eCommerce sales conversion. However, these high-quality images are heavy and take time to load, negatively impacting your website loading speed.

According to Jetpack, sites with too many images and bulky images have longer loading times than those who don’t. After video content, images are the next significant weight factor in a webpage. 

Source: Kinsta

Although high-quality images boost your eCommerce sales conversion, the value they bring is quickly eroded by slowing down your site. 

You can use high-quality images and have fast website speed; the two are not mutually exclusive. To achieve this, you need to optimize your images. 

There are two options for optimizing your images on your online store. The first option is to compress it before uploading or use an image optimization tool such as Adobe Photoshop, Trimage, and JPEG Mini. 

5. Use A/B Testing

Testing various aspects of your website is one of the easiest ways to increase your eCommerce conversion rate with minimal effort. 

The A/B split testing is essential if you want to run anything successfully online. If you notice a drop in conversions, you can guess all day why your landing page is not converting. Instead, run A/B testing to compare two different landing page ideas.

Source: Devopedia

You can do split testing for anything. For example, you can test two different landing pages with different images and headlines to convert better. 

The A/B testing tool will send half of your website traffic to Test Landing Page A and the other half to Test Landing Page B. Review the results and use it to improve your eCommerce sales conversion rate. It is a straightforward and quick way to boost your conversions.

By default, eCommerce platforms have in-built A/B testing tools, so you do not have to worry about getting one. 

If you cannot get this feature with your eCommerce software provider, you can use the free Google Optimize tool to conduct A/B tests. 

6. Use Live Chat Support

Give your eCommerce store a human presence, and make your customers feel your availability using live chat support. 

Using live chat support can increase your eCommerce sales conversion rate. According to a survey done by eMarketer, 63% of customers stated their interest in returning to a website that offers live chat support. 

Source: eConsultancy

Customers can get confused or have questions about your products and services and require urgent answers. The usual medium for customer support is to use emails and live tickets to receive customers’ problems, with a promise to respond within 24 hours.

Some customers want to make a quick decision and would love to contact you instantly. By using live chat software, customers can engage you or your customer support team for quick answers. 

Adding live chat software to your online store improves your customer satisfaction rate. You can build trust and bond with your customers and get returning customers due to it. Hire proactive live chat agents that will respond quickly to your customers. 

Some of the best live chat software apps you can use to boost your eCommerce sales conversions are ProProfs Chat, LiveChat, and Zendesk.

The chatbot is another option for quick resolution of customers’ complaints. Live Chat software also has a chatbot feature that automatically responds to customers’ queries.

Watch your eCommerce sales conversion increase by combining both Chatbox and Live Chat features. Give your customers as many options as possible, and let them choose from a multitude of options.

7. Provide Social Proof

Including authentic social proof (pictures, testimonials, and reviews) to your product and landing pages will skyrocket your eCommerce sales conversions.  

Social proof is one of the best ways to turn your visitors into paying customers. According to Vendasta, more than 88% of online shoppers use reviews to make a purchase decision. 

Always provide social proof for as many of your products as possible. Nobody wants to be the first to buy a product; they want to buy what others are buying. 

Online reviews and testimonials influence whether or not a customer will buy a product. If a product has positive reviews, more people will buy. If there are negative reviews, fewer people will make a purchase.

Offer quality products and services, and your online store will get positive reviews. Ask your customers for feedback about your products, and open the door for reviews on your product pages.

Personal recommendation is one of the most potent forms of social proof possible. Many of our purchases are influenced by what close friends and family recommend to us. 

You can gain more traffic and increase your conversions from social media by using influencers. Find the best influencers in your niche that can boost your conversions. 

Source: Oberlo

Having social share buttons on your eCommerce website can encourage customers to share your products with their audience.

When you use social share buttons for your website, avoid putting a counter showing total views. It is counterproductive if your total views are small figures.

The whole essence of using social proof for your online store is to make visitors feel your products are in hot demand and enjoyed by others. Any other image shown can affect your eCommerce sales conversion rate negatively.

You can also offer your products to popular review websites to get a positive review to attract visitors to your online store. 

Joulies, an online coffee store, uses social proof to boost its eCommerce sales conversions. It does this by showing visitors prominent publications where it has been featured.

8. Accept Multiple Payment Options

Having broad payment options can reduce your cart abandonment rates. When visitors shop for products they want, add them to a cart, and move to the checkout page, they can abandon their carts if their preferred payment methods are not available.

Offering only credit card options like many online stores will limit some customers from purchasing from you. Not everyone is comfortable entering their credit card details online, even if it is a secure checkout page.

Statistically, you can’t integrate all the payment options in the world into your online store. However, you want to offer a good range of options, and not just credit card payments.

The next popular choice for customers after credit card payments is PayPal. Other payment options include other eWallets, bank transfers, and prepaid cards.

Add cryptocurrency options to attract customers that have investments in cryptocurrencies. It is impossible to add all the altcoins and tokens. Add popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash, Litecoin, and Monero as payment methods.

Overstock, a home accessory online store, uses multiple payment options, including accepting cryptocurrencies to boost its eCommerce sales conversions.

 

9. Email Marketing Optimization

Sending emails to your prospects can help raise your eCommerce sales conversion rates. Contrary to what many people believe, email marketing is not dead and still one of the most effective channels for converting cold audiences into customers.

When your prospects buy from your store, sending a simple ‘Thank You’ message or confirming the purchase gives your online store a human feel. It is an opportunity to establish communication with your customers and advertise other related products.

Always collect emails from visitors to your site through a simple form. The fewer details you need to gather in the online form, the more people will want to take time to fill it. You can limit the information required to name and email address.

Asking your visitors to subscribe to your email list is better than buying an email list online and spamming them with your emails. Visitors who opt-in to your email newsletters are a ready-made market for your marketing campaign. They are familiar with your brand and won’t trash your emails into the spam folder.

Use email marketing software like Moosend, ConvertKit, or Mailchimp to automate your emails.

Converse, an online store that sells shoes for everyone, optimizes its email marketing campaigns to skyrocket its eCommerce sales conversions. When you visit their site, you get a simple pop-up form asking for your email to share with you new products and other discount offers.

Learn how to upsell your products via email to get customers to buy more valuable products from your store.

10. Boost Your eCommerce Sales Conversions By Traffic Source

There are a lot of traffic channels that attract visitors to your online stores. They include social marketing, customer referrals, emails, SEO, content marketing, Ads, etc. There is no end in sight of possible traffic sources.

Source: Databox

You can skyrocket your eCommerce sales conversions by optimizing your traffic sources to attract more visitors. SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, pay-per-click, and re-targeting are the top traffic sources for eCommerce sites.

The importance of optimizing numerous traffic sources cannot be overemphasized. If you depend only on SEO, a simple Google update to its SEO algorithm can cause a fall in conversions if your SEO ranking drops as a result. 

Avoid SEO mistakes such as not optimizing your internal and external links and not targeting your audience’s search intent.

When your traffic sources are coming from numerous streams, a fall in one source will not negatively affect the others.

SEO remains one of the top sources of traffic to online stores. Traffic coming from this medium is organic and has a higher eCommerce sales conversion rate than others. 

11. Optimize Your eCommerce Site’s Mobile Responsiveness 

According to OuterBox, 79% of online shoppers make purchases with their mobile devices. Mobile traffic accounts for 63% of traffic to online stores and 53% of sales (Drum, 2020). 

Source: Statista

You can optimize your eCommerce website for mobile devices by using mobile-friendly responsive themes and optimizing your site’s speed and appearance on mobile. Make it easy for users to navigate and find the information they need.

Source: Neil Patel

Tommy Hilfiger, a clothing giant, has a well-optimized eCommerce site for mobile users. It uses a simple navigation menu to make its products in record time.

Ready to Skyrocket Your eCommerce Sales Conversions?

Getting a higher eCommerce sales conversion rate than 2% is a reality. There are thousands of online stores comfortably recording high sales conversion.

To join this class of eCommerce sites, all you have to do is copy what they are doing right. Luckily for you, we have covered the 11 best ways to skyrocket your eCommerce sales conversions. They are all copied methods responsible for the high eCommerce sales conversion rates of these eCommerce sites.

The internet is a place of opportunities. Anyone can open an online store and grow its eCommerce sales conversion. Will you reach out and grab it?

Author Bio:

Anastasia Belyh is a 3x serial entrepreneur with a deep passion for digital business models and innovation.

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