Transforming Your Online Store: The Art of E-commerce Website Redesign for Higher Conversions and Customer Engagement

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You’ve been running a comprehensive search engine marketing campaign comprising SEO and Google ads for your ecommerce store and have decent website traffic coming to it. The problem is that only a small percentage of those people who visit your website end up buying from you or subscribing to your newsletter. Now you may be thinking, “What can I do to fix my ecommerce conversion rate?”.

Poor ecommerce conversion rates typically are a result of a website design that is hard to navigate or transact on or doesn’t deliver an intuitive browsing experience. So more often than not, the answer is to update your current website design or invest in an ecommerce website redesign.

The result? Since you don’t need to acquire new traffic to optimize your website for more conversions, you can get more returns from the traffic you already have on your website.In this blog, we discuss strategies that will significantly make it easy for your customers to find what they are looking for and make shopping around an enjoyable experience. 

But first, let’s establish what conversions mean for your store and what’s a good benchmark to aim for. 

What Actions Should You Track as Conversions?

Conversions can refer to any action that you want your customers to take on your website, including adding things to the cart, checking out, and signing up for your newsletter so you can continue marketing products to them. 

You need to define what you want to track and what is most important for your business. Typically, ecommerce stores track orders as conversions and use that as a benchmark. 

Note: The most important type of conversion for an ecommerce store is the event of an actual purchase. This is why Google Analytics 4 sets up the purchase event as the default conversion action for ecommerce stores. To track other kinds of conversion actions, such as when a user creates an account, adds products to a wish list, or signs up for an email newsletter — you’ll have to manually set these events for tracking in Google Analytics 4. 

What is a Good Conversion Rate for Your Ecommerce Store?

According to Shopify, average ecommerce stores have a conversion rate (CTR) of 2.5% to 3%. However, that’s not the ideal conversion rate to aim for for many businesses. For instance, a large ecommerce store that gets 200,000 visitors monthly can get by with a conversion rate of 3% (6,000 conversions). But for a smaller more niche store that receives monthly traffic of say, just 10,000 visitors, a 3% conversion rate only means 300 conversions. That number can be minuscule. 

In either case, every ecommerce store can stand to do better than the average conversion rates. Shopify suggests using a 2.5% conversion rate as a baseline and using conversion rate optimization (CRO) techniques to optimize it further.

Note: Conversion rates vary significantly across marketing channels. Paid search and paid shopping campaigns typically yield higher conversion rates compared to direct or organic channels because they target people who are actively looking for products to purchase, with keywords such as “Buy [insert product name] in [insert country]”. 

In other words, they are finely tuned for the final stage of the buying journey where the customer is already ready to make a purchase. On the other hand, direct and organic traffic includes customers from all stages of the buyer journey, including existing customers who could be engaging in non-purchasing activities like reading a shopping guide, seeking customer service, or technical support.

If you want a complete picture of your ecommerce conversion rates, compare it on a channel-to-channel level too. This means that your goal should track organic and paid conversion rates separately, and try to set benchmarks to improve those individually as well. When you actively work on both, your overall conversion rate will automatically improve as well. 

Here are the average conversion rates across different ecommerce industries that you can use as a reference:

Industry	E-Commerce Conversion Rate Range
Agriculture	0.62% – 1.41%
Arts and Crafts	3.84% – 4.07%
Baby and Child	0.87% – 1.43%
Cars and Motorcycling	1.35% – 0.65%
Electrical and Commercial Equipment	2.49% – 1.31%
Fashion, Clothing, and Accessories	1.01% – 2.20%
Food and Drink	1.00% – 2.01%
Health and Wellbeing	1.87% – 4.20%
Home Accessories and Giftware	1.55% – 2.34%
Kitchen and Home Appliances	1.72% – 3.00%
Pet Care	2.53% – 2.20%
Sports and Recreation	1.18% – 1.62%

7 Best Strategies to Improve Your Ecommerce Conversions with an Ecommerce Website Design

SEO industry professionals tend to unanimously agree that it’s always a good idea to improve conversion rates, even if you already have a more-than-average CTR for your industry.

Use these tactics to take it to the next level:

1. Design for a Pleasant User Experience (UX)

UX and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) typically go hand-in-hand because improving one can significantly impact the other. According to a Forrester report, improving your ecommerce store’s UX can improve conversion rates by up to 400%.

The easier and quicker you make it for your website visitors to find what they are looking for, the higher their chances of converting. Here are some best ecommerce UX tips:

• Aim for a faster page load time. According to Crazyegg, websites with the highest conversion rates tend to have a load time of less than 2 seconds.
• Create a consistent layout so the navigation feels more intuitive. 
• Make sure your top-level menu navigation is organized logically and allows website visitors to reach even the deepest pages on your website within a few clicks from the home page or anywhere else on the website. The fewer the number of clicks, the better. A lot of industry professionals recommend aiming for less than 3 clicks. 
• Allow them to use saved form-fill data to reduce the time it takes to fill out forms during checkout. 
• Display product information and shipping information clearly on all product pages.
• Show all-inclusive costs (product + taxes + shipping fees) on the product page itself to minimize surprises during checkout. If they find that the costs on the checkout page don’t match what they saw before, they can lose trust in your brand and abandon the cart. 

1. Optimize Your Ecommerce Design for Your Customer’s Entire Buying Journey: 

When the goal is to make the overall shopping experience more pleasant, you have to consider how to do it at every stage of the buying process. 

This means making it easy to not only get accurate information to choose the right products but also make it easy to trust and buy them.  

Follow these practices to optimize for every stage of the buyer’s journey: 

• Incorporate trust signals like user reviews and product guides to help them visualize how your products can solve their problems. 
• Use clear and concise product descriptions that list physical attributes like weight, dimensions, make, and more. You can also include a bulleted list of features that make the product stand out from the others.
• Implement an advanced site search function that shows personalized recommendations to customers based on their browsing history and past purchases. In a study, Barilliance found that the average order value (AOV) of their customers when they didn’t show personalized recommendations was $44. The same AOV multiplied by 369% with a single personalized recommendation. And the effect continued to snowball for up to 5 clicks.
• Engage customers who abandoned their carts with follow-up emails to nudge them to finish their purchases.
• Provide excellent customer service (including returning options) after the purchase to encourage customers to return to your store again for future purchases.

1. Use Clear Calls-to-Action (CTA)

For ecommerce stores, it’s best to stick to short CTAs like “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” for intuitive navigation.
But it’s important to make them stand out from the rest of the layout. Use distinct colors (such as green), styling, and sizing for these buttons to make them stand out from the background.

Note: If you have multiple payment or financing options available, you may be tempted to have those listed as buttons on the product page. However, that can distract your audience and visually clutter the page. Anything except the “Buy Now” and “Add to Cart” buttons should not be your primary focal point. 

It’s important to be mindful of your design choices so that they still center around your primary CTAs. Instead of displaying those payment options as buttons, it may be a better idea to design those as banners and place them below the fold.

4. Create a Sense of Urgency

Choice paralysis can be a real thing when your customers have thousands of options to choose from for any product on the web. 

Creating a sense of urgency using features such as timers that offer limited-time deals or text such as “only 5 products left” can put a natural deadline to their actions, which encourages them to act now and not be indecisive.

Booking.com, Agoda, and many other leading ecommerce stores use these tactics heavily to promote immediate action. 

Another tactic you can use to create a sense of urgency is sending “back in stock” notifications/emails to your customers.

Typically, when an item goes out of stock, it means that you lose a potential sale. But by allowing customers to subscribe to alerts that notify them when the item they wanted is available again, you not only proactively encourage them to complete the purchase, but also create a sort of countdown effect, similar to limited-time deals. 

Since they have already seen this product go out of stock before, you can bank on it to convince them that it can go out of stock again unless they act immediately. Some websites also amplify this effect by adding text like “Hurry! This item is likely to go out of stock again” or “Act now! Limited stock left” to their notifications.

But how much of an impact can creating a sense of urgency ultimately have on your ecommerce conversion rates?

According to a CXL study, creating urgency can increase ecommerce conversions by 332%. 

5. Make it Easy to Transact with You

This has a few components: flexibility, accessibility, and security. 

Accessibility is simply easy checkouts. That could mean giving them the option to choose from their saved payment options or offering one-click checkout options. The idea is to reduce the friction of transacting on your website as much as possible. 

Secondly, your ecommerce website must seem secure enough to transact on. It can seem risky to give your credit card information to a website that doesn’t have trust badges (see images below) and an SSL certificate. Listing that you don’t save their credit card information without permission can also help customers feel more at ease. 

Lastly, you need to offer flexibility of multiple payment options so they can choose the one that is most convenient. This can include standard credit card/debit options along with payment wallets, cash on delivery, etc. 

Giving them the option to pay for products with easy monthly installments that come with zero-interest payments can also make it easier to purchase things from your website, especially if the cost of goods is on the higher side. 

6. Create a Responsive Mobile-First Layout

According to Statista, 78% of all traffic to retail websites, including ecommerce stores, is generated by mobile devices. Yet, many websites neglect optimizing their stores for it. 

Use a responsive design that adapts to users’ screens to give your store the best chances of conversions. Keep mobile page load speed and factors like ideal text-to-image ratio in mind as well. You want to make it easier to consume information and have enough visual breaks to make the shopping experience more pleasant. 

This mobile-first approach could also help you get more traffic in the first place — which could also impact your conversions positively.  According to Google Search Central documentation, “Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a site’s content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking. This is called mobile-first indexing.”

7. Use a Minimalistic Layout and Add High-Quality Images

Human beings’ attention spans weren’t designed to focus equally on multiple stimuli at once. This is why we get distracted. 

Reducing distractions on your ecommerce website with a minimalistic design can help you engage your customers more, which can lead to higher conversions. 

Try to create your layout in a way where the most important things are shown first. Use different styling to highlight focal areas such as product information or total costs. Keep the background plain and ensure there’s not “too much” going on on a page. 

As too much text can make it harder to scan a page, use copy sparingly but effectively. Remove anything from your text that doesn’t need to be there, and mention product features properly and clearly. You can use bullet points to keep the info concise. 

Using high-quality images and product videos rather than huge chunks of text is also helpful. Videos and images help customers visualize the product and how it could solve a problem for them better — making it easier to make up their minds about a purchase. 

According to OnlineDasher, 75% of customers rely on product photos to decide if they want to make a purchase, and pages with high-quality images tend to have a 94% higher conversion rate. 

Final Words

If you’re not seeing many sales despite solid traffic, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and redesign your ecommerce site with conversion rate optimization in mind. 

When you put yourself in the shoes of your customers and focus on the best UX, an increase in conversion rates (and thereby sales) will naturally follow. 

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