The world is facing an internet revolution and the shopping experience is no exception to that. We are living in the age where e-commerce sites have taken over our product buying experience and are dominating it increasingly. In such a case, for the business owner, it becomes important to understand their companies by the numbers. From fine-tuning your sales messages to figuring out the quality of your traffic, everything needs to be monitored. One of the other important aspects that you will have to keep a tab on will be your conversion rate.
E-commerce conversion rate is basically the percentage of visitors that land on your website who complete a fruitful action like the following:
- An online sale.
- A user adding a product to their cart
- A user adding an item to their wishlist.
- Email signups.
- Social media shares.
- Any KPI your company finds valuable.
A good conversion rate will be between 1% – 2%. A 2%+ conversion rate should be the goal for your online store.
Here are some great techniques to help you improve your conversion rates:
- Use high-quality product images
The fundamental disadvantage of having an online retail store would be that people cannot physically experience your products. In a physical store, the customers can see your products from every angle. Thus having a detailed image that will make sure there is nothing left to doubt of the customer will be important. The best thing you can do is to show as detailed an image as possible so that the customer knows exactly what they are getting. Having good quality images that will allow the customers to zoom in closely will prove to help a lot.
- Offer free shipping
Free shipping lets your customer get into an illusion that they are getting some sort of advantage and doing business with you is a good deal. You can even adjust your product prices to achieve that. There is another way to boost sales. You can offer free shipping above a particular price range and that way your customer will be encouraged to buy more for availing of the free shipping.
- Provide coupon codes
Coupon codes create a sense of excitement in your customers and they will surely want to use these codes. You can create coupon codes that customers can use to get a specific amount off or a percentage of the purchase.
- Adjust product prices
The best way to stay in the race is by being competitive. And this competitiveness must be reflected in your prices predominantly. If you are selling brand-name items that a lot of other stores offer, you will have to make sure that your prices can compete with their prices.
Be sure to adjust your prices frequently to see what suits your business model. You can also adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.
- Tweak and test your e-commerce checkout process.
The checkout process needs to be like a girl’s skirt; long enough to cover the important subjects and short enough to keep interested. If your store checkout process is too long, complicated or unconventional, you may lose a lot of customers there will definitely be a standard checkout process offered by your platform but you can always learn more about it and tweak it to suit your business.
- Keep updating the latest payment options
It has to be convenient for your customers to pay. Different people have different prefer different options and it is your duty to be able to integrate these options into your system.
PayPal, Master, Visa debit, and credit cards are some of the popular options that people want to go with. At the same time, you might want to consider providing an option of Cash On Delivery to your customers. The new ones might want to go with that.
- Provide support and build a relationship
Provide good online support. This will help your one-time customers turn into loyal ones. It is very necessary for the customers to know that they will still be listened to after they have made the purchase. It gets very crucial to build this trust in your customers.
The most helpful feature that can provide support is the live-chat feature that works 24/7. This is shown to improve the site-wide conversion by 10% or even more. If you cannot manage to have the resources that are required to deploy such a facility, you can still provide customer service of some other sort.