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Every single eCommerce marketer has three basic objectives. Firstly, they must bring in new visitors to their store. Next is to actually convert more of these visitors into customer sessions. Finally, they must create incentives for these customers in order for them to return for future purchases at a later date.
Apart from enticing new visitors to your store, the rest of the marketing objectives are all directly influenced by a store’s conversion optimisation strategy. Conversion Rate Optimisation, or CRO for short, has been a key component for eCommerce marketing for way over a decade. Yet, a lot of businesses continue to make serious mistakes that will impact their stores conversions rates.
Apart from enticing new visitors to your store, the rest of an eCommerce marketers objectives is all directly influenced by a store’s conversion optimisation strategy.
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Not Showing The Number Of Items In A Guest Cart
Customers today will land on an eCommerce store from a wide range of devices, whether it be their smartphone, laptop or tablet. However, each time they return to your site on a different device, they will get tagged by your analytics tool as a “new visitor” even though they clearly aren’t.
User behaviour analysis have shown that such visitors tend to click on the cart immediately upon landing and expect to complete their checkout process. In circumstances like these, it is important to communicate to the visitor that you don’t have the necessary information. People who tend to land on an empty cart are pretty unlikely to go back and add in all their products all over again.
An easy workaround to this from a CRO perspective is to clearly show the number of items in the cart from the header menu. Visitors are more likely to continue shopping when it is communicated in this type of way.
Not Linking Directly To Product Pages From The Homepage
It is good practice to showcase your most desired products on the store homepage. But an eCommerce store that sells thousands of products may find it difficult in order to narrow down their inventory to just a select few products that can take up a premium space on your homepage.
A lot of stores tend to get around this challenge by linking to the various category pages instead. What these stores do it to display the images of the most popular products and upon clicking, the visitors are taken to the respective category pages instead.
This may however not be ideal from a CRO perspective, A visitor clicking on the image of a product expects to be taken to the specific product page and not to the general category page. This conversion optimisation fail is quite widespread and according to a study conducted by inflow, as many as half of the top twenty ‘best in class’ sites had failed to link directly to merchandise pages from their homepage.
No Way To Filter Features While Sorting on Price
Most eCommerce stores will let visitors sort their listings by price. This helps them narrow down the listings to only those selected products that will fit their budget range. One crucial mistake that a lot of stores commit however is in combining the price sorting feature with various other filters like customer reviews or even product attributes.
In doing these, the store restricts the ability for customers to make more meaningful purchase decisions. These customers may either view the cheapest products on offer or can view products filtered by certain attributes that may not actually fit in their budget. Since the cheapest products may not always come with the best features, this could potentially hurt conversion.
This can be fixed by allowing customers to filter listings based on specific product attributes like size, colour, etc. and then letting these filtered listings be actually sorted by price. This way, the customer can get the product of their choice within their desired budget range.
Using The Wrong Page Type For Listings
Should you adopt infinite scrolling (for example Facebook and Twitter) on your product listing pages? Or, is pagination better suited for eCommerce stores? The answer to this depends on the kind of products you sell and the audience you sell it to. As a rule of thumb, if the majority of your site visitors know exactly what they want, then infinite scrolling only confuses them more and will make your site even less usable.
However, on the other hand, if you are in an industry like fashion or apparel, then your visitors are far more likely to explore and discover new products. In these cases, it will make far more sense for a store to use infinite scrolling over pagination. But having said this, it needs to be pointed out that while infinite scrolling can increase user engagement, it can also make the customer feel rather lost.
An ideal workaround is to mainly replace infinite scrolling with lazy loading or “load more” buttons. So make sure it allows your customers to seamlessly add products to their wishlists while they carry on exploring. This helps them come back to the products they love and thus help with overall higher conversions.
Not Displaying Customer Service Related Trust Seals
Way back when eCommerce was still brand new, businesses found it important to showcase security-related trust seals. This is still largely the case with smaller eCommerce stores. From a CRO perspective, however, what matters a lot more is the trust from your customers, While you may or may not showcase your security trust seals, it is becoming increasingly important to showcase alternate trust seals that demonstrate customer experience. This indicates seals from the likes of BBB, BizRate and Google Trusted Stores.
Not Listing Availability Of Stock On A Product’s Page.
Unless you sell made to order products, it is always a much better idea to include information about the quantity of stock available. Doing this is so important for two reasons. First of all, showing stock availability can potentially save your customers from heartbreak when the product is finally revealed to be out of stock when they hit the checkout page. In addition to this, stock information also creates a sense of urgency that will drive conversion rates up.
So, there we have it, some top tips in order to hopefully help skyrocket your eCommerce store. If you also have any other useful tips you think our readers will find helpful then feel free to list them in our comment section below.