There is a tough competition among the ecommerce websites and if you own one it is eminent that increasing sales and withstanding the competition is an important goal for you. If the conversion rate on your website is low, then there might be various factors responsible for it.
So what can you do to improve the conversion rates? Pay attention to these 7 important factors mentioned below:
Trusted Website Security
You must ensure that reliable website security measures are in place. As there is a constant growth in the online ecommerce transactions, implementing proper security measures should be one of your top most priorities. As the percentage of online shopping has increased all over the world, this is also a lucrative target for the hackers and cyber criminals. In order to enable people to trust your website and in order to make them feel safe for buying from your website, you must ensure the aspects mentioned below:
- Work with a secure ecommerce platform that maintains PCI compliance
- Install an SSL certificate on your website and update it regularly
- Provide various payment gateways, easy refunds and provide a money back guarantee as well for increased recognition
- In order to curb phishing, implement a two-factor authentication process for customer logins in order to protect their data
- Include a link to the privacy policy of your business to promote business transparency and to enhance customer trust
User Reviews
Genuine user feedbacks and reviews can help in increasing the conversion rates of your ecommerce website. Even though you have informative and impressive product descriptions in place, people will trust the user reviews more than them. People are more likely to purchase from your website if you have genuine customer reviews and ratings displayed for the products. You can make use of various plugins and apps for displaying reviews on your product pages. Depending on the platform you use for reviews, you can pull the reviews from the websites like Facebook, Google, Foursquare etc.
Ensure Good Website Speed
Having a fast and an easy to use website is very important. If someone wants to buy a product from your website but it takes a long time for him/her to reach the checkout page, chances are that the customer will abandon the product and look for some other website that sells the similar product. Also, if your website is not backed with a proper ecommerce hosting platform, it might stop working at peak traffic times or it will work slowly, and this could be a major turn off for the customers. For ensuring good website speed, you can opt for ecommerce hosting or cloud hosting. Cloud hosting is an ideal option for a large ecommerce website as it provides automatic vertical and horizontal scaling in order to ensure that your website is up and running at all times.
Include An FAQ Section
Including a page for FAQ is highly beneficial for your customers. The prospective buyers that visit your website can find answers to their questions and concerns through the FAQ. In the FAQ, you might answer questions about manufacturing of the products, product usage, the checkout process, the refund process, questions about returning the products etc. this will make the customers comfortable and they will want to buy from your website. Ideally, you must consider adding a link of your FAQ page in your product descriptions in order to simplify the purchase process for the customers. It is not very difficult to create an FAQ page, you can analyze your customer support tickets and commonly asked questions by the customers on your online chat support or any other support medium to make useful posts in the FAQ section.
Allow Customers To Checkout As Guests
Allow your website users to checkout without signing up for an account on your website. Many people might just want to buy immediately and they might not want to enter a form for creating an account before they can buy from your website. Anyway, you are going to have the name and email address of the customer when he/she buys from your website. Forcing the users to compulsory create an account on your website might be a reason for the customer to leave your ecommerce website and look for an alternative.
Persistent Shopping Cart
A common behavior is that people add products that they like to the shopping cart on a website and continue to browse the website so that they can return later and decide what they have to buy and the products they don’t want. If they return to the shopping cart later and see that the products they added to the shopping cart have expired, it will be a turn off for them and they might not want to start from scratch again. The solution to this problem is having a persistent shopping cart. If the shopping cart on your website is created with a persistent cookie, the shopping cart will have all the products added by a customer and it will be the same for a day or for a week. An alternative option is to save the shopping cart contents so that the user can retrieve them later after they are done with browsing or comparing the products.
Display Clear Call To Action
The online buying experience of your customers on your website should be smooth. Here, smooth means that they should not search for options on your website but the options should be readily available to them. If people have to search for ‘add to cart’ or ‘checkout’ options on your website, then it is a failure. These two options are the most important ones on your store and they should be displayed prominently on your product pages. The font and color of the call to action buttons also matter.
Conclusion
If you pay close attention to some important factors, the conversion rates of your ecommerce website can be increased. Make your website welcoming and easy to use for the customers, and they will surely remember it the next time they want to buy online.