7 Conversion Improvement Tips for E-commerce Players

Blog: MattsenKumar Blog

2 decades ago, when the e-commerce industry started brooding, little did anyone expect that a time will come when over 1.8 billion people will shop online and the industry will grow at 23% annually! E-commerce players have roped in varied technologies and methodologies to foster quality customer experience, decrease return rates, and facilitate faster decision making but the e-commerce conversion rate continues to average at 2-3%.

While product discovery, omnichannel expertise, and catalog quality checks help marketplaces cultivate an addictive shopping experience, why online conversions are so low, and what are some tricks that can help?

Reasons why Conversion on E-commerce Platforms is So Low

Customers are unable to Find Relevant Products: Visitors on your online stores are not converting into customers because they are unable to find the relevant products. Brand interference and duplicate listing often impact the on-site search results, which affects the user experience.

Your Site is Not Optimized for Mobile Devices: A study recently predicted that by 2021, 54% of total e-commerce sale will come through mobile devices. If you are still not optimizing your e-commerce store for mobile devices, you will lose to players that are.

Poor Product Description or Low-Quality Images: To facilitate faster decision making, online stores need to invest in content writing product photography. With an exquisite piece of content, created with the sole purpose to help customers understand the product, online stores can generate good sales. High-quality images will help customers identify the relevant product faster.

Other reasons why E-commerce Conversion Rate is Low

The page has distracting elements like Ads
Lack of Call to Action button
Lack of multiple payment options
Customers do not trust your site

Must Read: 10 E-commerce Marketplace Management Tips for Greater Success

E-commerce Conversion Improvement Tips that work like Magic

1. Create Landing Pages with Laser Targeted CTA

When creating a landing page, one needs to identify the purpose first. Explore whether you want to collect emails, promote application download, or drive sales through a landing page and then start creating it.

When the focus is on the end goal, it gets easier to identify elements that can make or break the landing page. With the motive in mind, you can easily create Call to Action buttons that appeal and ensure conversion.

Also, with a clear idea of the end goal, one can easily identify CTAs that will work. CTAs that are meant for collecting emails will have a different copy than the one meant for driving sales. Start with an image of the final product in your mind and you will never go off track.

2. Use a Simple Design Layout

Smooth navigation is the key to facilitating more sales in your online stores. When customers can go from one page to another with great ease, they can compare multiple products and then decide on one product. This e-commerce conversion improvement tip has worked for thousands of sites. There are instances where marketplaces have outsourced design simplification to improve e-commerce conversion.

Simplification of Design Layout brings in additional benefits like

Improves the overall customer experience
Helps customers find products faster leading to better conversion
Customers can spot and use CTAs for placing order or requests
Increases the overall time spent on site by users, which is an important metric

3. Leverage User Generated Content or Social Proof

A good number of customers have suffered at the hands of fraud sellers. Instances of triangulation, phishing, and credit card fraud have led to the demand for e-commerce fraud prevention methods. Customers today are skeptical about shopping from new marketplaces.

To gain the trust of customers, marketplaces will have to leverage Social Proof or User Generated Content. By promoting UGC on your platform, you can make it easier for potential customers to identify relevant products and imagine how it will look in real-life.

Providing social proof of products in the form of customer reviews, customer photos, or videos can help marketplaces ensure that their ad budget is bringing in customers that buy from them.

Also Read: Best Practices & Precautions for Offline Retail Players to Tackle Pandemics

4. Make Important Pages Easily Accessible

Displaying the search button on every page is a practice that improves customer experience, similarly adding other important pages like “Home” “Cart” and “My Orders” easily accessible can go a long way.

Home Button: When the Home button is visible from all pages (on desktop as well as Mobile Version), people can always go back to the ad or offer that they first clicked on. Such a nuanced approach towards design can improve conversions by a notch.

Cart: It often happens that people add a product to cart and then wander looking for more products but never go back to the cart. By making Cart accessible from all pages, e-commerce stores can help customers complete their orders easily. Such intricate placement of buttons goes a long way in shaping a quality experience.

My Orders: Almost 22% of all online sales come from repeat customers, which is a huge number. A lot of people visit online stores to place repeat orders, which makes the “My Orders” page important and by making it easily accessible, online stores can help customer’s shopping experience smooth.

5. Free Shipping

An intricate study found that 56% of people check return policies before buying a product. Offering free shipping not only reduces the e-commerce cart abandonment rate but also impacts the customer’s perception of an organization. Offering free shipping over a threshold limit can help marketplaces garner an impressive response from the customer in terms of loyalty.

Amazon leveraged the practice of offering free shipping with a threshold limit before launching Prime Services and it worked wonders for it. Offering free shipping offers instant gratification and makes customers feel valued.

Other impacts of Free Shipping with a threshold limit includes

Increased AOV: When marketplaces offer free shipping after a threshold price, customers try to make their order bigger and save shipping fees. Customers think they are winning here but on the contrary, marketplaces emerge as a winner.

Upselling Opportunities: Leveraging upselling tabs on the Checkout page can help customers save money on shipping and help marketplaces sell more products. Inform customers that they can avail free shipping with CTAs like “Add products worth $5 for free shipping”.

6. Simplify the Support Feature

A huge percentage of customers request support when placing huge orders. Offering quality support can help online stores drive more sales and increase the overall conversion rate. By making customer support easily accessible, marketplaces can garner the following benefits:

Render all doubts obsolete and stop customers from abandoning carts

Allows agents with an opportunity to offer coupons and ensure conversion
Display their quality customer support and ensure referral sales
Increases the recall value of your brand
Puts your customer journey into perspective by revealing loopholes

Must Read: Omnichannel Customer Experience for E-commerce Players: A Primer

7. Experiment with Fear of Missing Out

We all have come across phrases like “Order before the Sale Ends” or “Only 2 Items Left in Stock”, no matter how silly these phrases look like on an e-commerce platform but they work wonders. By letting people know that they can miss out on “once in a lifetime sale” e-commerce stores have improved their conversion rate impressively.

Why these FOMO Phrases work so well on Online Platforms?

People Share it: When customers come across sales that appear to be once in a lifetime, they share it with their friends and family member. Adding phrases like “only a few left in stock” or a time ticker coaxes people into making the most of it. First, they buy it and ask their friends to buy it too before the stock ends.

Everyone Loves Buying Quality Product at Dirt Cheap Prices: You don’t have to offer a heavy discount, you just have to make it appear huge. Phrases like “40% off” or “Offer Ending Soon” makes people believe that they are missing out on something valuable and that’s enough.

Final Thoughts on E-commerce Conversion Improvement Tips

The E-commerce industry has overcome innocuous problems like fake products by leveraging catalog quality checks and offered quality customer experience through options like live chat and omnichannel expertise, now it is about time, e-commerce players started working on conversion rate optimization.

By leveraging the practices mentioned here, marketplaces can coax customers into completing their purchases. By reducing steps, making CTA buttons visible, and improving site speed, online stores can simplify the buying process and improve the overall conversion rate.

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