People have started finding alternatives for brick-and-mortar stores since the pandemic began. This change resulted in around a 32% rise in worldwide online retail or eCommerce sales from 2019 to 2020-year end. As per Statista, in 2021, retail e-commerce sales amounted to approximately 4.9 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide. This figure is forecast to grow by 50% over the next four years, reaching about 7.4 trillion dollars by 2025.
ABOUT ECOMMERCE CONVERSION RATE
The continued importance of eCommerce will surely increase the competition between the online stores in the next few years. Let’s find out where is your eCommerce store standing in the competition. Are you competing for your store with a large eCommerce store like Amazon? You also need to check the conversion rate of your eCommerce website. It might be possible that you are receiving enough traffic but not receiving enough conversions or sales. Make sure your existing traffic is converting into desired action. It can be clicking a link on your website, visiting product page, adding product into cart, placing an order or signing up for a newsletter etc.
By dividing the total number of sessions with the actual conversions and multiplying it by 100, you will get a conversion rate in percentage. The average eCommerce conversion rate depends upon your industry and is always changing over time. Below is an average conversion rate benchmark by different verticals and also by different countries.
ABOUT ECOMMERCE CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION
With all the content and products that eCommerce websites offer, it’s easy to think that customers will be lining up to buy. However, in reality, that is not how it works.
In fact, according to recent research, the average conversion rate for an eCommerce website is 2.86%. It’s frustrating to think that after all the efforts of an eCommerce conversion rate optimisation agency, over 97% of website visitors are still not interested enough to buy. Imagine how much revenue businesses could generate if just a few more of these visitors converted.
Fortunately, below are some areas on your eCommerce website to focus on other than recovering abandoned cart sales to increase the eCommerce conversion rate.
1. Make a simple and easy navigation
Check the below website for their header menu & dropdown items. The website offers pet supplies. The best part of the header navigation is that all the important categories and sub-categories are covered in one single place with an exclusive image relevant to the category to make it visually appealing as well.
2. Provide complete product information
Make sure you have bullet points with all required information someone might looking for each product and it should be positioned as high as possible in the page layout. Below is a good example of product information.
3. Write a clear and useful product information
In relation to the previous point, the text must be more than a simple information design. It should tell a story and be clear and easy to read. This involves using many writings’ best practices, such as avoiding jargon, speaking directly to the reader, and using short, simple sentences.
See below example of very clear, short and simple text.
4. Use compelling calls to action
How can you know what works and what doesn’t? Testing the text and layout of different buttons and calls to action is a great way to find out what resonates with your customers. Even a small change can have a big impact on how visitors respond to your calls to action+. So don’t be afraid to try.
See below example of how SK-II displays some of their popular magazine awards to influence the potential customers to take action.
For example, Shoes.com shows a few bullet points e.g., Free Shipping, Free exchange etc. just under the ‘ADD TO CART” button to influence the potential customers to take quick action.
5. Leverage social proof and authority
Two things need to remember as a marketer the human brain is lazy and people are social creatures. So, people are finding shortcuts when it comes to making any decision. One of these shortcuts is social proof. By leveraging the social proof on your website just like highlighted in the below product page screenshot, it will help users to take action quickly.
6. Implement SEO for your website
Search Engine Optimization is key for increasing your website visibility. Visitors who visit your site are likely to be your customers as well. Most people use organic search (for example, by typing into Google) to find the items they want to buy, and if your site is optimized for specific searches, visitors are more likely to click on your link. Let’s do your eCommerce SEO site audit which involves various aspects such as site structure, keyword usage, increasing crawling and indexing, implementing title and meta description, building backlinks etc. Make sure you keep all of this in mind.
7. Speed up your website pages
Site speed and page speed affect your eCommerce conversion rates. People aren’t willing to wait for long to load the page. Keep in mind that a business loses approximately 25% of its online visitors if its site takes more than four seconds to load. If your site is fast compared to others in your industry, then you’re good to go. But if you’re falling behind then you need to find ways to speed up your site.
This part requires technical knowledge, as problems can be caused by images that are too large, an overload of HTTP requests, or problems with your CMS, among other things.
Let’s take the help of web development experts to fix page speed issues.
Moreover, the slow page loading results in a higher bounce rate. As seen in the below screenshot, every second’s increase in page loading will also increase the bounce rate. People lose their patience and may avoid visiting the page again.
8. Optimize your website for mobile devices
Mobile shopping is on the rise – visitors can even do most of their research on mobile before buying on desktop. This means eCommerce businesses need to pay close attention to their mobile experience. However, many people feel insecure when it comes to shopping on mobile devices and may never complete their purchases.
There may be an issue on mobile devices with product images either missing or not properly visible, improperly showing navigation menu etc. Solving these issues is an important part of the eCommerce conversion rate optimization process.
9. Improve your checkout & payment process
Imagine a customer has taken the time to choose items and add them to their cart, and when they try to purchase them, they are met with a long and confusing checkout process. That’s one of the reasons customers abandon shopping carts. To make sure you optimize your shopping cart checkout process, please identify all steps or form fields that are not necessary. It is also important to have a complete summary of the items in the cart during the checkout process; with images, sizes and colours are chosen, as well as quantity. It is highly recommended to replace the multi-page checkout with the One-page checkout as an example below.
10. Expand payment methods
This is perhaps the easiest way to offer customers choice, and yet it is neglected by many eCommerce businesses. While credit/debit and cash on delivery cards are quite popular, many customers want flexibility while making payments. According to the research, digital/mobile wallets are also gaining popularity. Therefore, make sure to offer as many payment methods as possible, such as credit/debit cards, digital wallets PayPal etc. See below Global e-commerce payment methods 2020 & 2024, by share of transaction volume.
CONCLUSION
The best part of optimising the eCommerce conversation rate is that the more optimisations you implement on your eCommerce website product pages, the more conversion rate and revenue you will receive.