One of the biggest questions e-commerce store or business owners have is the question of how they can increase their e-commerce conversion rate.

Do you own an e-commerce store or you run one for someone? You are worried sick by now if you have not achieved the goals or milestones you set out for yourself.

There are a lot of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that show the growth of an e-commerce business but the most pronounced among the pack is Conversion Rate.

How do you increase ECR for your online store? In this post, we would be considering the best ways to increase the conversion rate of your online store. We would also be looking at how to figure out your current ECR and how good it is.

What is Ecommerce Conversion Rate (ECR)?

Before you increase your ECR, it makes absolute sense to know what the e-commerce conversion rate is.

Since conversion rates differ between businesses, let us look at what a conversion rate would mean to an online store owner or e-commerce executive.

Ecommerce Conversion Rate can be seen as the percentage of visitors that arrive at your e-commerce store and ends up buying something or completing a desire task or action.

For this post, we would assume that raking in the sales is the most important KPI for your online store and so, for us to understand it, we need to figure out how to calculate your conversion rate and how good your current conversion rate is.

How to Calculate Ecommerce Conversion Rate

Let’s say you have an online store that enjoys 5000 visits per day. On further research, you found out that on the average, you get to make 70 sales for every 5000 visits.

Let us calculate your current ECR. To do that, we would have to divide the number of sales by the number of visits you get. That is 70/5000 which gives us 1.4%!

Like is already stated, if raking in the sales is your major Key Performance Indicator, then your ECR is 1.4%.

Is “1.4%” conversion rate good enough? Conversion rates differ from business to business.

According to a recent study by Invespcro, the average conversion rates for American e-commerce websites is 2.63% as compared to the global website conversion rate of 4.31%. From this research, our previous conversion rate of 1.4% is very poor.

What is your current conversion rate?

Every e-commerce expert wants to increase their conversion rate no matter how much sales they make in a while. The question becomes: how do I increase my e-commerce conversion rate by a large margin?

How To Increase Ecommerce Conversion Rate

1. Offer Free Shipping

You see, online shoppers have grown their expectancy from just good service to wanting an excellent, error-free service delivery. Free or subsidized shipping has become a part of the quality service your customers expect these days.

To increase your conversion rate or how many products you sell, you must employ all the client acquisition and retention strategies or tricks you know. A major advantage of e-commerce is that customers get to shop stress-free from anywhere in the world and this is an interesting prospect because it exposes you to a large client base.

Offering free shipping is a very good way to get more customers and retain your present buyer-base. Think about it for a second, would you rather buy from Shop A that sells a shirt at $25 plus $5 shipping cost, or from Shop B that sells the same shirt at $28 plus free shipping?

The trick is that you would always get the shipping fee from the total cost of the product. It now becomes your duty to factor in shipping costs into the product price; this is a psychological game.

If however, factoring in shipping fees for large items would make it look too expensive, you can reduce shipping costs a bit while still making your pricings relatively competitive.

2. Use Cart Abandonment Software

So many people abandon their carts these days!

From personal research, I have found out that the leading reason why people abandon carts in an online shop is their short attention span. This, however, is not the only reason why carts are abandoned but it happens a lot.

You should use cart abandonment software.

A cart abandonment software works with the details like email addresses users drop while shopping in your store.

The software allows you to create follow-up emails that will remind the customer of the products they abandoned in the cart and encourages them to come back for them. You can also issue out a coupon to them or even give a price discount as an incentive for them to come back and complete their order to “checkout”.

If your key performance indicator is largely about sales, then you should pull all the strings (reasonably) to make sure customers conclude their purchase or order.

3. Always Use High-Quality Product Images

Quality images work magic!

How do you feel when you see a high-quality image of that wristwatch or necklace you’ve always wanted on display? Most times, people buy products they did not set out to buy simply because they saw an appealing image of the same product.

What quality of images are you using? It would be highly rewarding for your business if you have a good graphic designer in your employ.

If you must use a video, use a well-edited, relevant video. It could be a video of the product in use or just a plain advert video. Whichever one you use, make sure it is of high quality as image quality plays a huge role in convincing a customer to buy a product just like a good product package influences a customer to buy products when displayed on a shelf together with other similar products.

4. Give Accurate And Detailed Product Description

I have had bad experiences shopping online where products are either not described well or given fraudulent descriptions. I have had to return countless products simply because what the product description states is not what I got, and that is a bad thing!

If you have other vendors uploading their products by themselves on your store, figure out a way of making sure that they give not only detailed product descriptions but accurate information.

No customer would be happy to return to your store after returning products to you more than once.

5. Have A Great Return Policy

If there is ever going to be a reason to return products to you, make the experience seamless. I have observed that over 45% per cent of buyers would read your return policy before buying anything from your product just to be sure that their money is safe.

Make the return experience a good one as it doesn’t always have to be on a bad note. Refuse to over-promise but make it very easy for your customers to return whatever they bought from you while also meeting your return policy terms and conditions.

While this doesn’t look like a good conversion rate optimization practice, it is great for customer retention. When you retain a customer, there is every likelihood that they would buy from you again soon.

6. Implement Upsells, Cross-sells, and Down-sells

Upsells, Down-sells, and Cross-sells are other ways of increasing your sales.

Sometimes, your customers are willing to buy even more products without knowing it. Offering them other complementary products as they continue to checkout would increase your conversion rate.

They would most definitely want to add a brown belt to the cart when they already have a brown shoe in the cart.

Upselling means persuading a customer to buy something additional or more expensive while Down-selling is when you offer a customer who has already rejected your offer another product, usually cheaper than the one they rejected. Cross-selling is just simply offering an unrelated product to a customer while they continue shopping.

Whichever strategy you use, employ it in a way that would intrigue them to feel they would miss a wonderful offer if they do not add the product to cart and check out.

Conclusion

If you must increase your conversion rate, you should carefully go through your online store like a customer would do. Always visiting your store like an admin would not give you the real experience your customers have when they come to your store.

It is a common practice for customers to abandon items in a cart, especially when they get confused about your check out procedures or get confused about where to go from their present page.

Optimize your e-commerce store using these strategies as listed above and see your conversion rate increase by a very noticeable margin.