With worldwide retail eCommerce sales expected to top $7.4 trillion by 2025, there is a large, growing market for innovative businesses to sell products online to. Your online store plays a critical role in driving sales and enticing customers to return, but getting the most from your store is not straightforward. This article covers five essential eCommerce tips to get better results (more qualified buyers!) for your online store.
Did you know that 1 in 4 visitors abandon websites that take more than 4 seconds to load? This statistic alone captures the essence of why speed is so critical for online sales. A slew of other statistics drive home the point—for example, a 1-second additional page load delay can decrease conversions by up to 7 percent.
It’s imperative to get on top of site speed if you want your eCommerce business to succeed. At a minimum, you should be running monthly audits of your site speed and taking action in between those audits that help to reduce loading times.
In today’s attention economy where businesses compete for a slice of dwindling human attention spans, delays can cause people to switch tabs, leave your online store, and even forget about their desire to purchase your product. You have a narrow window of attention to work with, and your site needs to load before that window closes.
Page speed is also important for your site rankings in search engines. While you can get prime positions on search engine results pages with paid advertising, organic search is a great way to attract potential customers to your website. Page speed is used as a ranking factor as part of Google’s Core Web Vitals, which are three metrics focused on speed, visual stability, and responsiveness. A competitor’s site with better Core Web Vital scores than your online store can rank above you.
For eCommerce stores, some common issues slowing sites down include:
The overarching goal for site speed is to get to a point where your pages load in two seconds or less.
Mobile usability refers to the felt experience of browsing through your online store. If a site doesn’t seem trustworthy or its user interface on mobile is clunky, you’re very unlikely to make as many sales as you could with a store that’s highly optimized for mobile browsing. Some hints and tips to boost mobile usability for eCommerce stores include;
Keep your product text concise rather than overexplaining what it is (e.g. running shoe vs traditional running shoe with heel cushioning)
Visitors who type search queries into an on-site search bar are twice as likely to convert as other website visitors. Not only are these users more likely to become paying customers, but analyzing what they’re searching for provides incredible insight into what your customers want. You might even get inspiration for entirely new product categories just from analyzing what people are looking for on your online store.
One pitfall to try and avoid is serving users with a page that says “there are no search results for this query” when they type in a certain query. You can get creative and upsell other products from these pages or you can tweak the wording to sound less off-putting.
Most importantly, make sure you set up
Site Search in Google Analytics so that you can track these search queries for all your online store’s visitors.
Cart abandonment is part and parcel of running an eCommerce store. In fact, seven out of every ten users don’t complete a purchase. Interestingly, 65 percent of users that abandon their purchase do so after initiating the checkout process. Examining the reasons for cart abandonment reveals some common friction points, such as:
Obviously, you can take action to rectify these common friction points. You can be more transparent upfront about shipping options, request fewer details from users, let guest users make purchases, and offer additional payment methods. Many users will still abandon their carts, but these actions can reduce the numbers.
All is not lost though if a user abandons their cart—this is where retargeting comes in as a useful strategy in getting those users back to your store. You can easily create retargeting campaigns through Facebook advertising or Google Ads.
Pay attention to the creative and messaging aspects of retargeting ads because both are important in maximizing the chances of bringing users back to your store. Coupon codes can work well in retargeting campaigns as long as selling at a discount is still profitable. Start out with basic retargeting and then gradually refine your segmentation and test different messaging to improve results. And remember that retargeting can recoup 26% of shoppers.
Amazon, the world’s largest eCommerce company, serves as a prime example of the power of social proof in eCommerce. A huge proportion of any product page on Amazon is dedicated to user reviews. Amazon leaders understand that potential customers almost always read through at least one or two reviews before buying products online.
Since it’s difficult to create unique content for a product page, another part of the power of social proof is that it adds user-generated unique content to a page without the need to do any work. You can also add review schema markup to your product pages so that when those products appear in search engines, they stand out with star ratings that can increase click-through rates.
There’s obviously a lot more to cover when it comes to powering better results in eCommerce stores, but these five tips provide a good baseline to improve your results. After you’ve nailed these areas down, you can move on to other added-value strategies such as diversifying marketing channels, refining your site’s design, and tweaking sales copy to make it more compelling.
