8 Ecommerce Tips to Skyrocket Your Purchase Rate and Sales
If 2020 taught us anything, it’s how important it is for businesses to have an online-first model. Social distancing emphasized the need for owners to learn how to conduct business and sales online. But, even after stores open back up, it’s likely that consumers who have grown accustomed to their enhanced digital behaviors will abandon them.
If you have an online store or marketplace, check out these 8 tips that our Digital Gremlins put together to E-commerce owners win with users and make the sale.
#1: Make sure your site is optimized for mobile.
There were 5.22 billion unique mobile phone users in the world, as of 2020, which means that 75% of the entire world population has and uses a mobile phone. Facebook’s traffic is 90% mobile and 53.5% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices in 2019.
If your website isn’t optimized for mobile, meaning the images and text are dynamically sized, the text isn’t accessible on a small screen, buttons don’t adjust, you’re making your site that much less user-friendly. Beyond that, mobile users need speed. 73% of mobile users say they’ve encountered a site that was too slow to load, and every second it takes a page to load up results in an increased 7% traffic drop off.
Remember that online, speed and clarity are key.
#2: A/B test everything that you can.
You made your own brand and site for a reason , right? The best part of having your own site is to have full ownership over the data, processes, and products. Part of that ownership is flexibility to change whatever you want on your own site. So you’d be doing yourself a disservice not taking advantage of that to test, test, test!
From products to pricing, titles, product descriptions, upsells, email follow-ups, and primary inmates, you need to test everything. Heat-mapping can tell you where people are spending time on an existing page, but you never know what’ll work better (or even best) until you test it. Test your layout, callout, and checkout -- you never know where you’ll strike gold!
#3: Make checking out as easy as possible.
As we mentioned in tip #1, website load speeds are very important to site visitors and shoppers. A tangential aspect of that same preference also means that users want the checkout process to be as simple and easy as possible for 2 main reasons:
They’re impatient and expect as little friction as possible. The more clicks and fields it takes to take someone through a form, the less likely they are to complete it. Online, your checkout process is just a handful of forms.
They generally know what information is and isn't necessary to complete a transaction. Don't require anything unnecessary or you'll set yourself up for a lot of cart abandonments.
Don’t waste people’s time by asking for more information than is required to process the purchase, at the time of purchase. Ask for it at another time, such as in the confirmation email or post-purchase survey.
#4: Get Pixel and Analytics tracking on your site ASAP.
Even if you aren’t running ads at the moment, get those pixels on your site. The analytic data and insights you can earn from both Google and Facebook are always helpful (and often surprising). The biggest advantage of digital-first brands is their ability to gather passive insights from every user and site interaction, so ignoring that feature means you’re ignoring a ton of potential learnings and optimizations.
Track and quantify everything so that you can monitor information such as your checkout abandonment rate, your page dwell times, activity cohorts, and user paths to purchase. These are the kinds of conversion rate optimization insights that take a brand’s site and advertising design to the next level.
#5: Have a pre-launch and post-launch marketing plan for every product release.
There's a market for everything, so the only reasons a product should flop is if it's genuinely low-quality or you didn't put enough planning into positioning it to potential customers. Make sure you understand the need the product fulfills and the exact kinds of people who’d have that need.
You should have a new-release section that helps highlight the most recently added products for easy, consistent reference. You can also add a banner to the homepage to promote your new products. After they’ve passed the “launch” or “introductory” time period, you should still find ongoing opportunities to promote all your products. You can do this through upsell ads to previous customers, recommendation sections of other listings, or add-ons to the checkout process.
#6: Consider that CAC and LTV can be more important than ROAS.
CTR (click through rate), CPC (cost per click), ROAS (return on ad spend), ACOS (average cost of sale), CAC (customer acquisition cost)….those are only a taste of some of the dozens of KPIs that online business owners measure against.
There are so many different KPIs that people sometimes get lost in what they SHOULD pay the most attention to.
If you’re a prudent business owner, make sure you're always looking at the bottom line. This is especially important for This means that whenever sales volume growth accommodates for a loss in ROAS, you should continue to invest. Say your current spend is $10,000 and you have a ROAS of 300%, your ad revenue is $30,000. If you’re able to double spend and drop ROAS to only 250%, your ad revenue would increase to $50,000, resulting in an additional $10,000 in your pocket after deducting the increased ad spend.
Just remember that the rate of profitability should never outweigh pure profit; you'll always be able to do more for your business with more cash on hand.
#7: Give people free shipping.
Even if shipping is a variable cost for you, figure out a way to make it an option. It’s a standard that online shoppers have come to expect (thanks in part to the ubiquity of Amazon) and is not something you should skimp out on.
From a consumer behavior perspective, people would rather buy a product with a higher base price that includes free shipping than an identical product with a lower price and be charged shipping (even if the end cost netted out to be equal). That’s because the itemization of cost automatically puts customers in a more calculating mindset, which always puts brands at a disadvantage. Make the purchase package as simple and easy as possible to purchase.
#8: Add social proof to your website.
Social proof is one of the best indicators of trustworthiness digital brands have access to. Public reviews, testimonials, publication badges, and certification badges are all examples of top performing social proof that websites can and should employ to flag quality and efficacy to new users who haven’t acquainted themselves with the brand. Having these features actually makes it easier for new users who won’t actively do their own due diligence as well.
