eCommerce Website Optimization Moves That Can Boost Your Conversion

Website traffic is a good metric to analyze the popularity of your eCommerce store. But what good is all the traffic if your visitors don’t convert or if your bounce rate is too high.

Some of the most successful eCommerce stores focus on optimization of their website to increase conversions. And since the average click-through rate is just about 2%, small changes and strategic tweaks can help you make a big difference.

Optimizing your digital commerce channels needs to have a multi-layered approach involving several steps and factors. Right from user flow optimization to using better images, CTAs and product descriptions, all elements must cohesively chart out an easy and unforgettable experience for your customers. Luckily you don’t have to reinvent the wheel but simply follow what the top eCommerce website is practicing to optimize their webstores.

Here’s a handy guide on eCommerce site optimization tips that improve conversions:

1. Category Navigation on Mobile Devices: Most eCommerce sites have implemented this tactic of category navigation in mobile devices. It specifically focuses on your website’s homepage. So, rather than just have a menu and header, you can incorporate categories listed on the home page itself, saving your customers’ precious time. As more customers turn to the smartphones for their shopping needs, it has become essential to optimize both versions – mobility, and desktop for eCommerce.

2. The Five Second Test: It is very easy to get carried away as a business and lose sight of what the customers expect and what the customers trust. So, take the 5-second customer test and pretend you are first time visitor on your homepage. Or get someone else to undertake this exercise for you without bias. There are two questions you need to address:

• Can the shoppers correctly guess what you are selling within a few seconds of landing on your home page?
• Would you as a shopper trust your website and more importantly credit/debit card?

If the answer is no or not sure, then you clearly have a task ahead of you to improve everything from the simplicity of design, clear concise text and information architecture, clever product descriptions and trust symbols like SSL certificates, multiple payment options, verified customer reviews.

3. Clean and Product-Oriented Design: The customer visits your website mostly to study, review or buy the products. The product has to be central to your design. Clutter-free, simple and clean interface, a navigation that helps customers reach their desired target easily – with lots of large, high-quality images.

A webstore that sports a busy, cluttered look with too much information and too many images ends up distracting the shopper.

On your home page, using a carousel to display your best-sellers or most popular items further drives the sales by raising visitor interest in your products and prompting them to click through those images.

4. Check Out Equals to Shopping Cart: When customers click on the checkout button, they expect a shopping cart but more often than not eCommerce stores ruin this simple expectation by introducing steps in between like signing in and onboarding. Usability expert Christian Holst found 30% of users abandoned their cart when confronted with a registration process.

Complexity in checking out aborts the shopping journey and disgruntled customers leave halfway, for what could be a simple two to three step process. Adding a progress bar so that shoppers know how close they are to fulfilling the sale helps them stick around. Clearly outline the multiple payment and shipping options in one step, helping customers decide.

Ensure that your checkout process is linear. A non-linear checkout process is a grave usability error that leaves customers confused and intimidated. One common mistake that eCommerce stores make is to create steps within steps during the checkout. The user flow should be defined and refined to make it logical and simple.

5. Product SEO: Typically people search for products and not eCommerce stores and they use specific keywords or a combination of those to get there. Keyword research is one of the most crucial aspects of optimizing your webstore. Choose keywords that are extremely relevant for product SEO because wrong or ill-thought-out keywords lead to low-quality traffic and drop in sales. Remember that each product page requires unique description text, meta titles and meta descriptions that make the best use of the product keyword. Adding social sharing widgets for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., to the product pages can help sharing of the product information with your customer’s friends and followers.

6. Speed: Last but not the last, slow loading websites are the number one cause for high bounce rates. Considering that several competitors sell the same products as you and at similar rates, your page load speed and usability can be the differentiating factor that makes the customers choose your website. Fast-loading websites also do well on search rankings. Speed up your site and reduce the load times with server computation, network transmission, and browser rendering.

eCommerce optimization will collectively enrich the “eCommerce experience” and help you attract more customers, address the common shopping pain areas and serve your online audience better. Essentially it is about creating a reliable and smooth shopping journey in the fierce digital competition where e-stores use dynamic pricing to push their sales.