By Stephanie Danforth

SPONSORED PROVIDER

Did you know that ecommerce store conversion rates average between 1-2%? That’s crazy right?! 

I think there’s an abundance of missed opportunities to increase conversion rates in the ecommerce world. 

But I know first hand how easy it can be to go deep down a rabbit hole trying all-the-things to increase your sales. There are countless apps, strategies, methods, tactics, and more that you can test.

To save you some time, I’ve outlined three of the biggest things to help you increase your conversions and drive sales for your online store.

1. Understand your overall site flow and simplify it as much as possible

Do you know how customers use your site? Are you making it as easy as possible for them to add your product to cart and checkout? If you’re not sure, then take a good hard look at your analytics to see where customers are dropping off to determine where you have room for improvement. 

Things to Try:

• Consider restructuring your navigation, with a simpler navigation or a “mega-menu”, to make it super easy for customers to get to your product pages and add to cart!
• Take a good hard look at your collection pages and product pages and the data for them. Do customers click through to the product pages? Do you have too many steps for them to get to the product they want? Make this as easy as possible by adding filters or endless scrolling on collection pages so customers don’t spend forever finding the product they want.

2. Give customers a reason to buy from you.

Just having your products up on a website doesn’t necessarily mean that customers will buy! Customers these days are very used to buying online, with seamless user experiences on big retailers like Amazon and beautiful, branded experiences on direct to consumer brand’s sites. Why should they buy from you?

There are five major ways to give customers a reason to buy from you:

• With Incentives
• Through Social Proof
• With Mission & Values
• Selling Through Product Benefits
• Seamless Checkout

Incentives

• Probably the most popular and widely used option, give discounts or other offers to help get the sale! Many customers are price sensitive and used to getting discount codes or special offers when they buy from stores online.
  Consider giving customers a discount for their first order or a BOGO discount for products that go well together to incentivize them to buy from you!

Social Proof

• We all know the power of social proof and it’s especially important in ecom. Make sure to show press features, testimonials, instagram shares, and any other social proof you have to help connect with customers.
  Consider enabling customer reviews so new customers can hear first hand about your product from other verified customers.

Mission & Values

• These days, many consumers are especially conscious of brands that operate in more ethical and values-driven ways and are happy to pay extra to buy from great companies. Make your mission, values, or important values-based features (like “vegan” or “cruelty-free”) front and center on your products to connect with customers that are more mission focused.

Product Benefits

• There’s an age-old saying that “features tell, but benefits sell”. Are you writing your product descriptions with basic features about your products? Or are you actually showcasing the real benefits of your products? Talk about the benefits of your products as much as possible to really paint the picture for customers and connect with them about why they really need your product.

Seamless Checkout

• Is it easy for customers to checkout? Do you have popular payment methods enabled, like Apple Pay or Google Pay? Do you have other payment options, like payment plans with apps like Affirm or Afterpay, or subscription options? Make it seamless and easy for people to buy, otherwise they often won’t!

3. Identify ways to improve your site specifically relating to conversions.

The 3 main things to look for when you’re looking over your conversion analytics are:

• Added to Cart
• Reached Checkout
• Completed Checkout

Your main conversion rate will show based on how many people reached checkout, but the other two numbers can help you easily identify room for improvement.

• Is the percentage of add to carts low? This has some of the most options to improve! Take a look at your product pages to troubleshoot and see if anything is broken, like broken links, apps that are loading slow, or a slow page load time that is slowing down the checkout process.
  Also think about how to improve the page overall. Are you incentivizing customers to purchase with a sale price, a discount, an upsell, a bundle, etc? Are you showcasing the benefit of the product and how it will serve them? Are there reviews or social proof to help convince them about how amazing your product is? Consider adding in more of these to help sell your products better to customers.
  Having low add to cart percentages might also be due to low traffic! If you don’t have a ton of traffic, consider trying new marketing campaigns to get more customers to your store. You might actually have a great performing product page and checkout flow, but you need to get more traffic to get more (and better) data!

• Is the percentage of customers that reached checkout low?
  Take a look at your cart page and think about what might be causing them to drop off. Take a look at the page to see if it’s loading slow or if something is broken and interrupting the checkout process.

• Is the percentage of add to carts high, but the number of people that reach checkout comparatively low? Again, take a look at your cart page to see if there are broken links, buttons, apps, or scripts that are slowing the checkout process down.

• Is your overall conversion rate low? If your overall conversion rate is low, there are a lot of factors to consider. Consider making improvements to the other core pages listed above, but also consider updating other key pages like your collection pages, your homepage, your overall site design, and your marketing. Does your site load slow overall? Is customer support easy to reach? Are you pushing any traffic to your site? Think about improving these types of things to  

BONUS

We talked so much about conversions, but what about getting bigger sales? This is called your AOV – Average Order Value. Get people to buy more per order so you don’t have to acquire as many customers!

The most common ways to increase your AOV are to bundle products together somehow. There are many ways to do this, such as creating a unique bundled product listing or using an upsell app to promote the bundle on each individual product page! 

Common ways to increase your AOV include:

• Showing upsells on product pages or cart
• Showing crossells on product pages or cart
• Showing “frequently bought together” items on product pages
• Offering a discount on bundled products
• Create a “Create Your Own” bundle option

Want more strategies for improving your online store sales?

Now that you have a handle on some of the biggest things to consider to improve your store’s sales, download my Free Guide- 30 Ecommerce Profit-Maximizing Strategies to dive into the nitty gritty ways to improve and optimize your store to get more sales!

Want professional help to take your store to the next level?

Get in touch with us today to get a customized strategy built for your business and your needs. We offer 1-on-1 Strategy Sessions, Site Audits, and Bespoke Shopify Design services to help you take your store to the next level, no matter where you’re at in your business.

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