You have traffic to your online store, but sales are low – learn about 46 hacks to improve your eCommerce conversion rate.
Store Traffic is the first concern of eCommerce merchants.
How to attract visitors to your store? All merchants invest time and money to find the best way to drive traffic to their e-commerce websites.
Finally, after learning how to use some or all of the available online advertising options such as Google shopping, Facebook, organic search, Instagram and email marketing you may wonder why all efforts to attract store traffic produced no sales or sales are low.
It seems that is one of the popular topics among e-commerce startups: Here are few quotes that I found in Shopify discussion forums:
“The traffic are mostly from Facebook posts, but no conversion at all. I use to run a website 6 years ago and it made a lot of sales in a short period of time. I really don’t understand why I’m not making any sales even when my prices are very competitive”.
“Hi, I have a store now for 3 months in Shopify and, although I have visitors, I have had only one order in 3 months. Can you take a look at my site Anthoshop.com and tell me if something is wrong?”
“We redesigned our website and still have no conversions. We haven’t tried google shopping (can anyone recommend a good not expert for that?)Could anyone help with ideas/suggestions/ or maybe apps we should use?”
“I wanted to figure out my conversion rates and found this article useful. It’s easy to do. I found out my conversion rate is 4.5% and the ecommerce industry standard is 2.3%. So I am pretty happy with that.”
What is a good eCommerce conversion rate?
According to industry statistics the average conversion rate of shopper worldwide (1):
2.95%
But comparing your conversion rate with this number is not a good idea. It could be very misleading
In reality, the answer would be different by each retail category, product type, target markets, and traffic sources. It also changes from device to device. It is even unique for traffic coming from different operating systems.
To find out whether your conversion rate is bad or good you need to compare the performance of your store with more specific benchmarks related to your market and type of product. However, you may find new ideas how to improve your conversion rate even if it looks ok in comparison with average industry benchmarks.
The average conversion rate also changes by product type. (3).
It looks like the leading eCommerce sites have the conversion rate much higher than average.
The chart below gives an idea about the distribution of conversion rates by percentage of merchants (2).
Who are the conversion rates leaders?
The following data shows the top 15 converting online retailers for 2014. (1)
| Rank | Website | Conversion Rate |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Play.Google.com | 30.00% |
| 2 | MovieMars.com | 22.95% |
| 3 | DollarShaveClub.com | 20.00% |
| 4 | 1800Contacts.com | 18.40% |
| 5 | 1800Flowers.com | 16.90% |
| 6 | Coastal.com | 14.50% |
| 7 | Keurig.com | 13.00% |
| 8 | FTD.com | 11.70% |
| 9 | ProFlowers.com | 11.70% |
| 10 | PureFormulas.com | 10.74% |
| 11 | FreshDirect.com | 10.50% |
| 12 | TheGreatCourses.com | 10.04% |
| 13 | 1800PetMeds.com | 10.00% |
| 14 | AmeriMark.com | 10.00% |
| 15 | OvernightPrints.com | 9.95% |
You may look into your data and compare with the closest benchmarks in the industry.
What can you do to start moving towards top 5 or 1 percent of merchants?
Don’t expect an easy and fast process to get to the top. However, moving from 1% to 2 % may not be so tricky, and it will double your sales at the same traffic level. Because of that investment in traffic generation and conversion rate must go in parallel.
We may divide the conversion rate problems into three categories:
Marketing – your advertising may attract visitors that come to the site for various reasons other than purchasing your products. Your analytics tools and particularly analytics of your conversion funnel would help to diagnose marketing problems. For instance, having a high bounce rate or a low add-to-cart rate may indicate a marking issue.
Product merchandising and pricing – If you don’t have unique product selection then the price is one of the most common reasons for low conversion. You may need price intelligence tools if you have vast catalog when simple competitive price check is not an option.
User Experience and Shopper experience that we referrer to specific steps in the typical buying process. Assuming that there are no significant problems with your online marketing and your store offers products with competitive pricing; then the most significant opportunity is to increase conversion rate by improving the user experience of your store. Online shoppers expect a standard minimum set of features related to the type of products that they are shopping for. For instance, a fashion store and an electronic store have standard but also the product-specific set of features that are significant to the buying decisions. I always recommend doing a competitive review of leading e-commerce merchants in your category when you are planning your user experience renovations.
Below we posted the infographic that shows 46 Conversion Rate Optimization Hacks that was compiled by our friends from websitebuilder.org. The list has recommendations that apply to many retail verticals. You may also consider custom features that provide a unique and innovative shopping experience and make your store more competitive.
You may find additional articles about eCommerce conversion optimization best practices here.
References
-
- The Average Website Conversion Rate by Industry (updated for 2017), https://www.invespcro.com/blog/the-average-website-conversion-rate-by-industry/.
- Ecommerce Research Chart: Overall conversion rates, https://www.marketingsherpa.com/1news/chartofweek-07-29-14-lp.htm.
- Ecommerce Research Chart: Industry benchmark conversion rates for 25 retail categories, https://www.marketingsherpa.com/1news/chartofweek-08-12-14-lp.htm.
