Running an ecommerce store can be quite challenging, since there are a lot of factors you need to consider in order to ensure a smooth shopping experience for your prospective buyers. Every online shopper seeks the best possible online shopping experience, but can your ecommerce store provide them with such an experience?
Before you answer that question, take a look at this fact for a moment – the online shopping experience your ecommerce store offers to your customers greatly impacts your conversion rate.
When your customers feel valued and respected, not to mention confident in your brand, the chances of them making a purchase at your store can very easily hit the fan. Therefore, you must ensure that you optimize your ecommerce store in order to improve your site’s user experience and do everything you can to keep increasing your conversion rate. Here are some quick tips to help you do that.
Include Trust Factors on Your Product Pages
The content you provide on your product pages can help you build trust with your customers, so you should always add user-generated content that will make your ecommerce store stand out from your competition and ensure your customers build confidence with your store.
Including trust factors on your product pages can help you do just that and the best choice for implementing them is displaying them near the add-to-cart button, since they can influence your customers’ purchasing decisions that way.
Trust factors can include a free shipping offer, shipping information, return policy, money back guarantee, customer service information and phone number and credit card logos. Including all of these factors can help your customers know exactly what to expect before they go to your checkout page.
Additional trust factors that you should consider adding to your product pages are live chat and customer reviews, both of which are very important for increasing your ecommerce conversion rates, as they promote customer trust.
Optimize Your Checkout Process
Once your customers arrive at your checkout page, it’s your job to lead them towards actually completing their purchase. Something that can help you do that is featuring customer reviews and ratings on your checkout page.
People’s purchasing decisions are highly influenced by the experiences of other buyers, so adding social proof to your checkout page can help your customers build trust with your brand.
So, how can you optimize your checkout page to ensure that your customers proceed with their purchase and that your cart abandonment rates are reduced?
The best way to accomplish that is to remove all of the header elements on your checkout page, so that your customers can complete their purchase without any distraction. This simplifies the online shopping experience and can even double your conversion rates.
Optimize Your Shipping Offers
Shipping costs can very easily scare away customers and the most common reason for cart abandonment is exactly that; shipping. Therefore, you should optimize your shipping offers, as they can greatly influence your conversion rates.
You can consider offering free shipping, but if you cannot afford such an option, you may consider offering it at a certain threshold. For instance, you can offer free shipping for orders over $30. What’s important about this is to have it displayed on every page, so that your customers know what to expect while navigating through your site.
You can also add a free shipping countdown to your cart, informing your customers that, if they reach the exact value you have provided, they can get free shipping. Something like this can not only increase your conversion rate, but also your average ecommerce order value.
Another thing you can do to optimize your shipping offers and both increase your conversion rate and reduce your card abandonment rate is to use flat rate shipping. You should display it in the header of your site, so that it shows your customers the exact shipping cost for every product from the very beginning of their online shopping process. If you use flat rates, your customers are not likely to abandon their carts once the shipping fee appears, but are instead very likely to actually complete their purchase.
Conclusion
Increasing your ecommerce conversion rate is not a one-time job. It is something that you should constantly work on and you will manage to achieve your goal by thinking about your customers and their needs, instead of only thinking about the numbers. After all, they are the reason why your ecommerce store is thriving, right?
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
