How to Convert More Prospects on an E-Commerce Site

If you have an e-commerce website, you know that converting your visitors into customers is your real goal. Traffic numbers are great, leads are great, but at the end of the day, you want all those leads and visitors to convert to sales since an e-commerce site that simply looks good, but doesn’t convert is useless.
To help you get a better understand of what you need to do to increase your conversion rate on your e-commerce website, here are a few simple suggestions.

Tweak Landing Page
Use Google Analytics to determine the entry pages to your website. Tweak the entry pages so that you make it easy for the customer to find what they might be looking for. Make sure there are links to similar products and that it’s highly visual to grab attention write away. Use A/B testing to test more than one version of the landing page. Move the graphics around, use different copy and see what works and what doesn’t. It takes time, but it’s well worth it.

Make It Obvious
If a customer can’t click and buy, you may lose a sale. The more clicks that a customer has to make before they find and buy what they came for, the less likely they are to finish the sale. Make it easy. Quicklinks to best buys, hot products, best sellers or recommended products are a great way to increase conversions and even impulse purchases.

Don’t Forget “Selling”
This may seem obvious, but an e-commerce site is a sales tool, so don’t forget to use some sales techniques. Sell the benefits and advantages of buying the product. In your product description, relate it to a problem that it will solve, don’t just spout of statistics. Rather than saying “comes with a 1500nah battery” write “1500nah battery for over 6 hours of listening pleasure.” No one knows what it means and they’re not interested if you don’t connect it to them personally.

Can Revamping an E-Commerce Webite Increase Conversions?
The answer to that is yes, and here a few examples where it has worked.

Emailing or Chatting with Abandoned Shopping Carts Users
Customers adding items to a shopping cart and abandoning it is a huge issue, with over 70% of shopping carts that don’t ever make it to a sale. WarehouseSkateboards.com for example, as added a live chat feature that can rescue abandoned shopping carts by engaging customers in a chat session. This addition managed to convert over 1% of their abandoned shopping carts into sales. On a large scale, 1% can add up.

There are many reasons why customers don’t complete a sale. They didn’t like the payment options, they didn’t like the shipping charge or they got distracted. Whatever the case, you can save the sale by emailing them and reminding them about their partially filled shopping cart. Movies Unlimited for example has done this successfully and over 26% of the emails that they send to abandoned shopping cart users convert to sales.

Changes May Be Small
In order to increase conversions on your e-commerce website, you may not need to do a major overhaul. Put yourself in the shoes of your users and think through what they want to know and give it to them. They want to know how much the product is with tax, how much shipping is, they want to find the product quickly and easily, they don’t want to be overwhelmed, they want good photos or videos.

It’s time to get detail oriented with your e-commerce website to increase conversions.
Do you have any tips that have worked to increase conversions on your e-commerce website? Tell us about it!

Author bio: Edwin is an experienced online marketer currently working at web design Toronto company 9th sphere – An award winning company specializing in online marketing and web design in Toronto. Edwin has a passion for great web design and helping businesses succeed.