Your ecommerce conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that complete a desired goal, out of the total number of visitors. Conversions can range from submitting an email address to a newsletter list, to signing up for a loyalty program, to completing a purchase.
Selling is the ultimate conversion goal for an ecommerce site, but how do you know if you could be selling more?
A healthy ecommerce conversion rate can mean increased sales, improved brand engagement, and stronger customer loyalty, making it an important metric to track. However, conversions are not driven solely by marketing activities; your overall customer experience and underlying tech have the largest impact on conversions.
Below are 7 issues with your ecommerce site that are killing conversions and how you can resolve them:
1: Your site takes more than 15 seconds to load
Slow-loading pages are one of the top conversion killers. If customers cannot access your site, they cannot find the products or information they need to make a purchase. 47% of customers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, and even a one-second delay in load time means a loss in conversions and a decrease in customer satisfaction.
There are several factors that contribute to site speed, but these are the core few that will have the biggest impact if optimized, so start here:
- Use the right web hosting service.
- Get a CDN provider.
- Avoid unnecessary widgets or plugins.
- Strategically use external services and avoid too many ads.
- Optimize site images.
2: Your checkout process is tedious or clunky
Make sure you are allowing customers to check out as guests. Nothing creates more friction at checkout than forcing a customer to create an account. In fact, 23% of customers will abandon a cart if they are forced to make an account. Online shoppers want to move quickly, and bogging them down with additional forms only gives them more reasons to abandon your site without purchasing.
Additionally, make sure your ‘Checkout’ and ‘Add to Cart’ buttons are highly visible and easily accessible no matter where the customer is on the site. A/B test placement, size, and color to find what performs best with your customer. This may seem like such a small piece of your site, but these two buttons can make or break your average ecommerce conversion rate.
3: Your customer experience isn’t personalized
Studies have found that 44% of customers are more likely to become repeat customers if they have a personalized experience with a company. Personalizing the ecommerce site experience means delivering relevant, high-quality content to customers when and where they want it. For example, some brands will use cookies to show two different versions of their homepage to different site visitors based on their past browsing or purchase behavior. Personalized product recommendations also provide great opportunities for cross-selling and upselling customers when they add a product to their cart or right before they check out.
Additionally, offering Shop by Store or adding multiple languages to your site further personalizes the customer experience, and creates greater convenience for the customer.
