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Proven Ways to eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization

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Markedly, eCommerce conversion rate optimization is essential for your business. It helps you understand your customers better while analyzing their journey through the website, lowers customer acquisition costs, and draws more leads. It also increases the lifetime value of the buyer.

By providing a smooth experience, your revenue increases, and instead of one-time buyers, you get loyal customers and advocates that resonate with your brand’s philosophy.

So, what’s this CRO? How to optimize your eCommerce website for higher conversions? We’ll cover all of this in this article.

What Is eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization?

The eCommerce CRO or conversion rate optimization is improving your website to make visitors perform desirable actions: add a product to a wishlist or cart, subscribe to your newsletter, and make a purchase. It involves lots of activities, including:

With a smart CRO strategy, your business will generate more leads and customers.

What Is a Good eCommerce Conversion Rate?

There’s no blanket answer to this question since a “good” conversion rate depends on:

Nowadays, the food and beverage sector has the highest conversion rate, 4%, while the home furniture sector has the lowest one – only 0.7%. Haircare and health & beauty are also some of the highest-converting industries, generating 3.2% and 3.1% respectively.

An example of convenient high-conversion product pages is Amazon, with each online store using the “buy now” trick. 

It eliminates several steps, like adding the product to the cart, clicking on it, and proceeding to checkout. This trick helps people make fast decisions and place orders easily.

This is good for both the user experience of your website and your revenue. 

Another feature with similar purposes is cart preview.

It helps you remember what you’ve already added to the cart, thus improving usability and decreasing the chances of you forgetting all about it and closing the tab.

Factors That Affect eCommerce CRO

Some factors can improve or destroy your eCommerce CRO. To increase engagement and improve conversion, the following have to be on-point:

Tools to Measure Conversion Rate

Here are some tools you can use to measure the conversion rate and see if your eCommerce CRO efforts are working:

Keep an eye on the pages with high keyword rankings and lots of traffic that don’t work well on conversion. There must be something off with them, and they should be in the first queue for CRO.

8 Ways to Increase Your eCommerce Conversion Rate

These eight ways are proven techniques for conversion rate optimization for eCommerce. Use some or all of them to optimize your website for a higher level of engagement. 

#1: Work on Your UX

User experience means a lot for conversion. It’s important to understand how users interact with your website and make it more convenient and intuitive for them. Namely, you should work on the interface, navigation, loading speed, and CTAs.

There’s a three-click rule that states a visitor should be able to find all the needed information in 3 clicks. While it’s a controversial rule, and you should focus on building for experience, not the number of clicks, making your website easier to navigate is crucial.

If it’s an eCommerce website, the Homepage > Category > Subcategory > Product page is an acceptable template. Don’t make it too difficult to find your products.

Adding an internal search engine is also a good practice if you sell a wide range of products.

#2: Understand the customer journey

Go through the customer journey as if you were a regular Internet user. Take all the steps and look at them with a critical mind. What makes a person stumble along the process? Maybe it’s annoying pop-ups, or maybe there are too many steps, each asking for more information in a way that seems suspicious.

You can also reverse engineer the journey from the confirmation page to the homepage. Find ways to make the process smoother and, as you implement changes, do the whole process over again.

#3: Improve key pages

The key pages for your eCommerce CRO are product pages and landings. These should have a clear message about the benefits of your products and how they are better than the competitors’.

Here are some tricks for eCommerce pages:

Have at least two sections under the product’s description – order and return and sizing.

To avoid overcrowding the page, hide the contents under links.

Also, it’s a good idea to make reviews as accessible as possible.

Here, you can see the overall rating ratio and separate categories of reviews with images and keywords.

Other tricks for eCommerce websites:

#4: Engage the audience

For eCommerce conversion rate optimization, you can engage the audience by using:

Work on your written content, optimize it for the right keywords and keep its readability in mind: no complicated terms, no vague words, and no large paragraphs without subheadings or lists.

#5: Simplify the checkout process

To increase the conversion rate for eCommerce, make the checkout process simple. Allow access to website guests without creating an account, although you can encourage them to create one to track their orders and get additional information. 

Also, keep the number of steps to a minimum. You don’t need too much information to complete an order. Get an email to notify about order status and use it for email marketing, where you can gather necessary information later. 

#6: Use remarketing

If you want to increase eCommerce conversion to the max, use remarketing. By tracking abandoned carts, for example, you can retarget your ads and landing pages to those people who abandoned them, encouraging them to finish their purchases.

This is especially convenient if, during the first steps of the funnel, the user gives you their email. By sending them several follow-up emails reminding them about the products they have in their carts, you increase the chance of them completing the transaction.

You can send emails with customer reviews and/or a small discount to slightly nudge the user to buy what they have chosen.

#7: Conduct A/B testing

Conduct A/B tests for landing pages and the checkout page. See which landing works best for improving conversions and optimize the other ones for the same template. Talking about checkout, make it a one-page checkout without obligatory registration. Make sure nothing distracts the user, where the only two ways they can go are:

Test several templates and, through A/B testing, find the perfect one.

#8: Simplify order returns

We know you don’t want people to return your products, but these things happen in every business. So, to make the lives of your customers easier when they are trying to return your product and to avoid negative reviews about your company, simplify the process as much as you can.

Have the information about ordering, delivery, and return under a link on product pages and in the footer of each page for easier accessibility.

Summary

Conversion rate optimization for eCommerce involves lots of processes, including:

Use these approaches and monitor results regularly to find a perfect SEO combination for conversion rate improvement. Also, check out the trends to see the optimal conversion in your industry to ensure you have realistic expectations. Use digital tools to track results, get recommendations, and never stop improving! Buyer behavior has its trends and fluctuations. If you know these trends and are fluent in search engine optimization, your eCommerce conversion rates will always be high. Feel free to check the collection of the best conversion-friendly Shopify themes.