E-Commerce CRO: Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

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Studies have consistently shown that generating leads and sales isn’t that simple for eCommerce websites but with eCommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO) you can get a better conversion rate. 

A conversion rate for online retailers is one of the most valuable means to measure return on investment (ROI) and see whether or not you’re meeting your business goals.

It’s a metric to monitor while you build your business and increase revenue. Use it to optimize your website correctly and raise your ROI. 

However, conversions don’t grow overnight— you need to prioritize them and, perhaps more importantly, optimize your website for them.

What is eCommerce Conversion Rate?

eCommerce conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your ecommerce website or page that completes an action which can be counted as conversion.

Conversion Rate Formula

Conversion Rate = (Converting Visitors / Total  Visitors) * 100%

Conversion Rate can also be calculated by average conversion rate by the number of visitor sessions rather than visitors to your ecommerce websites.

3 Types of Conversion Rate Formulas

Calculate Conversion Rates as per different metrics – sessions, unique visitors, and leads 

• Conversion Rate = Total number of conversions  / Total number of sessions * 100
• Conversion Rate = Total number of conversions / Total number of unique visitors * 100
• Conversion Rate = Total number of conversions / Total number of leads * 100

eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

Improve Your Product Page

Your product pages fulfill visitors’ requirements and entice them to buy. If they don’t perform well, it is time to optimize and improve them.

You need to optimize product pages in a way that they can let visitors see your information, and entice and reassure visitors.

Find the below tips to improve your product pages, thereby conversions.

• Keep the most important information above the waterline
• Always use high-quality images
• Highlight products benefits, and features in content
• Combine a customer notification module
• Create SEO-friendly product sheets
• Add similar or complementary products (up-selling/cross-selling)

Displaying the most popular products on the front page with the highest probability of selling is a smart step. The goal is to create pages that can attract visitors and seduce them to buy your products.

Click to learn Effective SEO Tactics to Optimize Ecommerce Category Pages

Offer Free Shipping

In today’s market, FREE SHIPPING is an absolute must. After all, online shoppers expect it.

If you don’t offer a free shipping facility, they will be most likely to look elsewhere

To cover the shipping costs, an alternative is to increase your product prices. Nonetheless, buyers are savvy — if your prices are not reasonable, they will quickly move elsewhere.

Use High-Quality Images & Videos

Use only top-quality images and videos. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and think about what you would like to think when you shop.

The best is to use a detailed image or video to let people see and know exactly what you are selling. High-quality images and videos help users better visualize products that they want to buy. This increases conversion rates.

Improve Page Load Speed

Page load time and conversion rate are directly related as the longer page take to load to retrieve all its resources—images, styling information, scripts to run, etc.—and display it, the more is the chance of a visitor is to click the back button and leave the page without any interaction. Your page should load in less than 2 seconds for a better conversion rate. Also per skilled.co, testing by found that:

• 40% of visitors leave websites that take more than 3 seconds to load.
• Amazon Found Every 100ms of Latency Cost them 1% in Sales, according to Amazon.

In general, SEO companies focus on the below activities to improve their site’s loading speed.

• Use a lightweight theme
• Remove unnecessary plugins
• Reduce the size of images and videos
• Use a cache plugin
• Compress JavaScript and CSS files
• Set up a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

After you execute these steps successfully, you’ll notice a significant improvement in site load time.

A few of the best performance tools used by eCommerce SEO providers to measure a site’s speed are GTmetrix, Pingdom Tools, and Google PageSpeed Insights.

Use any of these tools to monitor your site speed.

Also Read – Techniques That Improve Page Load Speed of Your Website

Optimize Checkout Process

Every unnecessary form on a mobile device makes its length look more unwieldy than on a desktop. Your checkout form should allow users to input much more information within a single screen.

According to Baymard’s research,

18% of users abandon orders just because of checkout UX issues. Their experience on the site has either been too long or too complicated.

Make sure the checkout process is easy and seamless so that your customer does not hit any snags when buying from your store.

How to optimize the checkout process

• Have a Single “Name” Field (avoid “First Name” and “Last Name” fields). Users usually type their full name in the “First Name” field. So, keep a single named field like in the second image.

• Hide “Address Line 2
• Use Zip/Postal Code Autodetection
• Hide “Billing Address” Fields

Let the users (who need separate billings addresses) uncheck the checkbox to get those fields for separate addresses.

Launch Limited-time Deals/Offers

Creating DEALS or OFFERS is a smart move.

Customers can use them at checkout for a limited time to get a better pricing option.

When your deals or offers are likely to expire, this triggers a sense of urgency, and buyers can make purchase decisions without distractions.

Use Call to Action Sparingly

For better eCommerce SEO, avoid overwhelming visitors by giving too many options and adding CTA buttons on one screen. It is good to place CTAs on all your product pages and make them noticeable.

Whether it is ‘ Share Icons’, ‘Add to Wishlist, or ‘Add to Cart,’ having your CTAs all in the same area on the same page can ensure that your pages aren’t over-cluttered.

Keep these things in mind when creating CTAs:

• Place your CTA at the top of your fold.
• Make your CTA stand out with the shape and color of the button.

However, it’s not always easy to know which call-to-action button is working well for you. So, use the A/B testing method to determine what is working well and what isn’t!

Make your CTA benefit-oriented. Avoid too many of them.

For example,

‘Download,’ ‘continue,’ and ‘click here’ are bland and are not action-oriented. Examples of benefit-centric CTA’s are ‘Show me more,’ Get my eBook,’ and ‘stay connected.’

Implement a Live Chat Feature

Implement live chat support software to interact with customers. This allows customers to get answers to their questions faster.

But, before this, you need to learn how to implement it correctly. Constantly interrupting users must be avoided. Make sure it does not irritate and deter users.

These days, life chat pop-up boxes can be seen anywhere on the page, which is bad for users.

The live chat that is a non-user initiative is perceived as irritating and distracting. It is useful and helpful when users have specific questions they need answers to.

Be Reasonably Priced

Don’t forget to price your products at or below the average price to compete, especially if you are selling brand-name items that other stores are offering.

Also, modify your pricing often to see what resonates.

The quality of your images and marketing strategy has an impact on the price users are willing to pay.

It is therefore important to look for the best SEO agency and market your brand to the right audience with the right messages. Conversions will increase.

Read on to uncover important tips for conversion rate optimization for eCommerce businesses.

Implement Shopping Cart Abandonment Software

Increase your store conversion rates by using abandonment cart software. It’s a kind of tool that grabs the email address and sends it to an automated email marketing sequence.

For example,

If any purchase is taking place, no emails will be sent by this software. Instead, an email automation process will continue if the purchase is not made.

Some eCommerce platforms offer this type of software for free as part of the store functionality — BigCommerce is one of them.

The success of Cart Abandonment Software depends on every business. Nevertheless, it helps eCommerce stores.

You can check the best eCommerce platforms here.

Allow Visitors to Easily Find Products

Structure your product categories in a way that can provide shoppers with options like ‘Shop by Product Type’ and ‘Shop by Color.’ The goal is to make sure users can reach a product as fast as possible.

• Set up a rotating banner to showcase top products
• Implement a website search to allow customers to find products easily

Note that the faster users can find a product on your eCommerce store, the more likely they are to buy from you.

Display Shopping Cart Contents

If your visitors are unable to find their cart, they are more likely not to checkout.

Be sure that your site has a shopping cart icon with a link to get it (cart) after entering an item into the cart.

It is important to let your customers see what they are buying as they checkout.

Build an SEO-Friendly Online Store

If your store is not SEO optimized, you’re hurting your sales. eCommerce SEO is important to help audiences find your site on Google.

Here are some tips to increase traffic, and visibility and improve conversions.

• Keep products near the homepage (just a three-click aware from the homepage)
• Write effective title tags using a typical search term for your products
• Find the right keywords and use them in your content
• Improve page URL. Keep it short, easy to understand, and include your title tag
• Add appropriate tags that link to identical items or products
• Enter the rel=canonical tag in the categories to avoid the duplicate content issue

Read step by step guide for SEO Best Practices for eCommerce Websites.

Create Valuable Content

When we discuss the best SEO practices for eCommerce businesses, high-quality and user-friendly content with enriched keywords is important.

Supplement your products by writing valuable and functional copy. The more valued and informative your content is, the more likely people will buy from you.

Focus and clearly mention your Unique Selling Propositions (USPs). Let your audiences know why they should buy from you; what keeps you unique among competitors in selling the same products.

Make sure your headline (copy, title, or tagline) is selling your USPs. Create short, crisp, and to-the-point taglines. They should tempt customers to read ahead and breed their interest in the products.

The goal is to educate, inform, and engage your audience by writing content on your product landing pages. This boosts organic SEO traffic.

Also Read: 4 Ways To Boost Ecommerce Lead Generation Using Content

 Place Trust Signals on Your eCommerce Site

You need to build trust for customers so that they can feed their card/bank account details on your website. Let visitors know that they are dealing with a legitimate store. Consider these few things:

• Add SSL certificate at checkout and site-wide if possible
• Show small images of PayPal, credit cards, and other payment options. It shows that you use customer-trust payment options.
• Display McAfee, GeoTrust, or other security badges. Ensure that you have an active account with them.

Enable Guest Login

Let your customers checkout as guests. Allow them to checkout without signing up for an account because you will have their contact details (name and email address) when they buy from you.

Pushing them to register is another possible reason to leave your store.

Allow Customer Reviews

Allowing customer reviews in the digital shopping world to improve eCommerce CRO is an absolute must. To encourage customers to write reviews, offer them some incentives (like coupon code) next time they buy as a reward for providing a review.

See below why many people buy from AMAZON.

Go Mobile-Friendly

Smartphones are the future.

By 2025, more than 10% of all retail sales in the USA are anticipated to be generated through mobile commerce, according to Statista.

If your online shop fails to provide a great mobile experience, you’re missing out on significant sales.

So make your website mobile-friendly.

For this,

• Pick a mobile-responsive theme
• Consider user experience (UX)
• Browse your site on mobile to check if everything is visible
• Ensure your buttons are easy for people with large fingers to press
• Reduce how much text you use and avoid using Flash
• Check if people don’t accidentally press the wrong button
• Evaluate how accessible fonts are

For the full list, click here.

A mobile-friendly site is a foolproof strategy to improve eCommerce conversion rates.

Have a Great Return and Exchange Policy

Customers read the return and exchange policy before buying.

So, create a great policy about product return and exchange. But, avoid over-promising. Instead, make it painless and as easy as possible for customers to return or exchange products.

It’s not for conversion optimization, but a basic business practice acting as CRO.

However, you can drive sales and improve conversion rates by earning trust values from your customers.

Measure your eCommerce CRO Success

Ensure your tweaks and changes are working by measuring your eCommerce CRO success.

Track your store’s conversion rates day-over-day, week-over-week, month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, and year-over-year. An eCommerce platform like BigCommerce can help you with this.

You are able to see the progress on your dashboard or the Analytics dashboard.

Offer 24/7 Live Support

Transparency is one of the major factors to increase trust. And Live Chat Support is a good means of transparency. Integrate a live chat support option to subconsciously make visitors believe your site is trustworthy.

Not only can people ask questions through live chat that create doubt in their minds, but they can make quick purchase decisions to buy your product as well.

The Final Word

Conversions are important for your store’s growth.

Make Conversion Rates your No 1 priority because it motivates customers to do what is important. The aforementioned points are top practices. They have helped your competitors and will help you too in achieving better results.

If you think we have missed some points in the list, let us know in the comment section below!

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