It’s getting to the end of another month. You’re looking at your sales reports and wondering if you’ll hit your revenue goals for the month. You had hired an SEO agency, invested in social media, and created paid search campaigns.
But your sales didn’t grow as much as you had hoped. All that traffic coming to your site but only a small percentage of of that converting into sales. What’s going on here?
Obviously your online store is not doing a good job of convincing visitors to buy your products. It’s going to need some changes to get visitors to trust you more, and to persuade them to buy.
You already see where this is going, don’t you? You’re wondering if you need to redesign the site, or hire a conversion rate optimization agency.
Actually, you don’t! Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization isn’t only about making big changes to your key pages, like your checkout flow. In fact, there are some relatively simple CRO improvements you can make that don’t involve much coding or help from a web developer.
Here is a list of 15 simple changes you can make right now that will improve your eCommerce conversion rates:
General
- Mention a few good risk reducers, like free shipping, lowest price guarantee, or free returns, in your website header. These days, consumers expect perks like this. Guarantees like free returns means that customers don’t take on any risk if they purchase from you. By placing them in your header, you can influence your visitors no matter what page they arrive on.
- Remove clutter from the side bars on your eCommerce pages. These should only contain key navigation options and filters, with one or two promotional items or banners at most. Unnecessary clutter only confuses customers and might drive them away from your site empty-handed.
- Add a short 3-5 word tagline under your logo that summarizes and explains your unique value proposition. Adding it near your logo means it can be seen no matter which page visitors arrive on, and your logo is one of the first places they will look. This is particularly important if your business name doesn’t really relate to what you sell.
- Plug in a live chat tool and have it stick to the bottom right corner of your pages with an enticing offer to help. This is essential for making sure your visitors have access to quick answers, without needing to pick up the phone and call you. Live chat is also a great way to get feedback from your visitors about your website and offerings, and what could be improved.
- On your homepage, above the page fold, add in some short bullet points that explain your unique value proposition and benefits. In particular, be sure to mention why consumers should shop on your site instead of a competitor’s. Your homepage has seven seconds to convince new visitors to continue shopping with you, so make it count!
- Add some personality to your ‘about us’ page. Instead of having a boring, generic, ‘about us’ page, use it to tell a story of how your business was created, why you are passionate about what you sell, and include photos and fun facts about the owners. People want to buy from businesses with personality and a good story, not soulless corporations!
Product Page
- Turn your product page descriptions into short bullet points to increase readability wherever possible. Don’t use long blocks of text, as these are harder to read and key info gets buried in them too easily. Also, remember to put these above the page fold to increase the chances of them being seen. and always mention benefits, not just features.
- Mention your biggest risk reducer, like free shipping, right next to your ‘add to cart’ button on your product page. Showing an icon of this, like a shipping van, will draw the visitor’s eye to it.
- Any time you display a product on your homepage, category page or product page, include the MRP and savings. This gives context to your price, and points out how much consumers save by purchasing it.
- Make your product page ‘add to cart’ button stand out. Don’t be afraid to make it larger or more colorful, and remember to keep it up above the page fold. Also, make sure other buttons don’t compete with it. This will just make it easier for customers to find the button.
Checkout Page
- Add trust logos to your website footer and checkout flow, like a BBB logo or association logo. Placing them in your footer means they’ll be seen across your site, but the checkout page is where they’ll make the most impact. These trust logos simply ease customers’ fears and prove to them that you are a legitimate business and not a scam.
- Add the words ‘100% safe and secure’ to your shopping cart and checkout flow along with a padlock or secure logo, particularly on the billing page. This is where customers have last minute objections, so adding these will ease concerns and reduce shopping cart abandonment rates.
- Turn off your header navigation menu on your checkout pages. This quick simple change, as shown below, helps reduce distractions and gets visitors through your checkout pages faster, resulting in higher eCommerce conversion rates.
- On your checkout billing page, you need to clearly explain what the credit card security code (CVV) field is. Not doing this is a major eCommerce conversion killer. Either put text next to the security code field explaining it, or have a popup. Ideally include a simple image of where to find it, like you can see on the example shown below.
- Get rid of your ‘coupon code’ box on your checkout page if you don’t offer coupons. This is another big conversion killer. The coupon box tends to prompt visitors to leave your website to find coupons. Often, they’ll get distracted and won’t return. Or, if you do offer them, clearly mention how visitors can get coupons (from your newsletter, etc).
Conclusion
Many of these changes take a couple of minutes to implement, especially if you use a really flexible eCommerce platform. It really takes no effort or extra coding knowledge, so you have no excuses. Pick one and get it done right now!
And, if you have enough traffic, I definitely suggest you A/B test a few different variations of some of these to find the highest converting ones. All you need is a low cost A/B testing tool, like Visual Website Optimizer or Optimizely, to setup a simple A/B test, but you will need at least 1,000 uniques per week to the pages you want to test.
Of course there are hundreds of other less easy changes that you can test and improve on your ecommerce website, but these are some of the quickest high-impact ones. If you are looking for more ideas to boost your ecommerce sales, you should consider my new conversion rate optimization course, featuring over 6 hours of video on topics like social proof, trust, security and using analytics and visitor feedback to gain high-impact A/B test ideas.