Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
3 Simple Ways You Can Optimise Your ECommerce Website Today
When you are trying to boost sales on your eCommerce site, it can be challenging to know where to start. Where should you focus? What do you change? How can I do it in the quickest way? These are the common questions we get asked by clients looking to complete a conversion rate optimisation on their site.
Without knowing what you are doing, you run the risk of actually making the site worse and reducing the amount of sales. However, there are some really simple ways you can optimise your website to generate more sales. We run through them below, but if you want to know how you can really improve your conversion rate and push it to the max, check out how we’ve helped similar businesses in the past.
Increase Site Speed
No one likes waiting, especially not your customers. Don’t leave them waiting, or you risk them leaving your site and going somewhere else. Improving your site speed is the quickest way to improve the overall purchasing experience.
There have been plenty of studies into how site speed affects conversion rate and customer satisfaction. One study conducted by Crazyegg found that a 1 second improvement leads to an increase in conversions by 7%. Meaning that if your business makes £1,000 per day, then that’s an extra £70 per day or £25,000 of revenue per year. Not bad for one simple fix. There is one thing to consider though, shoppers will never wait for slow-loading websites.
So now you know you need to increase site speed; how do you do it? Firstly it’s important to make sure you are using the right platform. Hosted platforms such as Shopify or BigCommerce are generally quite quick out of the box but can easily become bogged down with too many plugins or add-ons. Removing any unnecessary add-ons reduces the amount of code and, therefore, the amount of ‘data’ the user has to load.
Another great way to reduce page size and load times effectively is to reduce the size of images. Naturally, eCommerce websites are known to be heavy on images so having large websites is common. However, plenty of online tools allow you to reduce the size of images without compromising the quality.
Both of the techniques above can quite easily reduce load times by 1 second or more, making that extra 7% of revenue within easy reach.
Keep Your Cross-Selling Relevant
Improving page load times is one thing, but we can also improve the customer experience in other ways. Often over-looked but equally as important & to implement is improving your cross-selling relevance. It’s a great way to increase the Average Order Value (AOV) and, ultimately, the conversion rate. Cross-selling leans on the impulse addition to an already planned purchase.
Cross Selling can be displayed in a number of ways, including
- Customers also bought…
- Goes well with…
- You may also like…
Improve The Checkout Process
You have got your customer this far; they have added a product to the cart and are ready to checkout. You don’t want to lose them now, but there are still some easy things you can add to make sure you get the sale.
Buy now, pay later options are great because they offer flexibility to the customer. If their only objection is the price point, then offering them the ability to spread the payments over a number of months could be enough to convert the sale.
Make sure the customer can use the browser autofill feature to make checkout really quick. It reduces friction and increases conversions. If you are not sure how to add this feature speak to your web developer.
Add a free/low-cost shipping option. Companies such as Amazon made next-day delivery a standard expected feature for most people’s shopping experience. However, that doesn’t mean everyone wants to pay to have the item within them so quick. They are happy to wait and save some money. You want to give the customer as many options as possible.
We have outlined some really easy ways to improve the conversion rate of your eCommerce store. There are many more possibilities, some more complex than others. If you are struggling to understand how you can improve your website, reach out to us, and we will be happy to give you some advice on areas you can improve.
