The online shopping wave is growing faster than we can imagine. Just last year, in 2021, e-commerce sales were expected to account for 17.5% of all global retail sales. And then by next year, 2023, that number is expected to rise to 22%.
Naturally, as an e-commerce business, you want to take advantage of this opportunity and rising trend. For that reason, we’ve put together a few quick and simple improvements that you can make to your website to help you increase your sales and conversions, and lessen the burden of shopping cart abandonment. Let’s check them out.
1. Improve Site Speed
Besides making your website mobile-friendly, site speed is one of the most important things you have to optimise. This is because 40% of users will abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
You can use tools like PageSpeed Insights to check your site’s benchmarks and find ways that you can improve loading speeds.
Some of the most basic ways to improve site speed include enabling caching, reducing image sizes, or using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN helps by duplicating elements from your site and then delivering these to visitors from a server that’s closer to their physical location.
2. Organise & Clean-up Your Navigation Menu
One of the best ways to improve your e-commerce website is to clean up and simplify your navigation menus.
For shops selling clothing, for example, having an extensive menu that lists down different categories and styles of clothing can be daunting. Sometimes it’s better to keep your navigation menu simple, and instead optimise each of your product pages so that they’re easy to find using your site’s search bar.
3. Ask For & Display Customer Reviews
When it comes to closing sales for your e-commerce website, customer reviews are the primary ingredient. About 49% of users look at online reviews before purchasing. Make it a standard process to always ask for a review whenever you make a sale.
Send customers an email asking how they liked your product? If possible, ask them for a photo of them using it. The more user-generated content you can encourage and gather, the more authority you’ll bring to your products and your brand.
4. Review & Improve Product Copy
Your product copy and descriptions can sometimes make or break the checkout process. Too little information and customers can begin to doubt whether or not the purchase is worth it.
Always make sure to list down any measurements or specifications on your product detail pages. If a percentage of the profits go to some non-profit or charity, it’s good to mention that as well.
Also, make sure to list down any unique selling points your products might have. Are they handmade, locally made, crafted or produced? Can they be customised or personalised to fit the customer’s personality or purpose?
More than just specs, though, make sure that your product pages are also optimised for search engines. Only 37% of marketers optimise their product detail pages for SEO. That means that the rest are not showing up on search engines, leaving you with a tremendous advantage against the competition.
5. Simplify Checkout Process
According to Shopify, 69.57% of all shopping carts are abandoned. While 60% of these cases are due to shipping costs and issues, that still leaves 40%.
For one reason or another, customers end up leaving items in their shopping carts unprocessed. This could be due to a complicated checkout process. That said, make it easy for customers to checkout. Simplify and minimise the number of steps that they have to take.
Some stores require that customers create an account before checkout. The truth is, however, that 23% of visitors will abandon their shopping cart if they’re required to create one.
6. Be Available for Live Chat
One interesting thing to note is that most people (60%) prefer to use an automated self-service portal. This is why chatbots are also becoming increasingly popular. According to a report by Comm100, conversations fully handled by chatbots receive a satisfaction rating of 87.58%.
However, according to Microsoft, 30% of consumers say that not being able to get in touch with a human is the most frustrating part of a bad customer experience. Additionally, 73% of customers find live chat the most satisfactory form of communication.
This means that while it’s alright to have your site or social media pages be managed by chatbots, having someone on standby for live chat can make all the difference.
With all these changes in mind, however, you still have to think about the marketing and advertising of your business so that you can drive traffic and sales to your website.
If you feel like you need help getting more online exposure and really scaling your business to the next level, get in touch with one of our Search Marketing Experts and we can whip up a solid strategy to help you maximise your online sales and presence.