Improve Your Conversion Time. Increase Your Sales.

The secret of reducing time is always a magic formula. We all want faster cars, shorter queues and quicker delivery. This is no less true for seasoned owners of eCommerce stores who know full well the benefits of conversion time improvements for improving sales figures. The drive for faster page loads goes without saying for eCommerce professionals in our fast-paced online shopping age. No customer enjoys the lifetime’s wait between the click and the next page. But page loads aside, what about the other time period that makes all the difference to your eCommerce sales. We call it conversion duration.

Conversion duration is the time it takes for a willing customer to make their way through the front door of the landing page all the way out to the checkout and exit, complete with a confirmed sale. On some sites, we’ve seen you’d think customers were demanding a treasure hunt or an obstacle race through a clumsy collection of Magento pages to find the way out! It’s common sense that people just want to grab the product they’re after, maybe browse related options, and then exit stage left without having had too much time to think about the (hopefully large) sum of money they’ve just parted with in your shop. Get it wrong and you’ll be plagued with abandoned trolleys.

To track conversion durations, measure the time from ‘add to cart,’ through the sales funnel, right to confirmation. Track the period right from arrival on site for the full picture. Practically speaking you can improve the conversion duration by increasing the urgency; increasing calls to actions (CTAs) will help. Certainly have a CTA on every page, if not after every section. Reduce the steps in the funnelling that isn’t strictly necessary since busy customers will take very little persuasion to click off elsewhere if they’re starting to feel bored or frustrated with the maze of pages you’re offering. Pop-ups have a high success rate generally speaking, especially if the conversion you’re measuring is gaining a shiny new email signup for your database.

Make the route to conversion a speedy downhill slide and you’ll increase your sales figures almost effortlessly.