eCommerce conversions

What is an eCommerce conversion?

An eCommerce conversion is what happens when a shopper completes a desired action on your online store. You may think that a conversion can only be a sale, but that’s not true. There are many other types of conversions and they depend on your website’s goals and objectives. A conversion could refer to a customer signing up for your newsletter, creating an account on your eCommerce portal, downloading an ebook, and much more. It is not limited to just making a purchase (even though these are the conversions that you would probably spend most of your time thinking about).

So, to simplify it, eCommerce conversions are the number of users who complete a desired action on your website or online store.

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How is ecommerce conversion calculated?

Every time a visitor on your eCommerce site or portal completes an action that you want them to complete, you can count it as a conversion. To calculate your conversion rate, you would have to divide the total number of online conversions (for that specific type of conversion, in a specific time frame) by the total number of website visitors or portal users that you had during that period of time.

Most of the time, when you are measuring your conversion rate, you would be focusing on the conversions on your product page(s) or on your checkout process. But tracking other types of conversions is also very important for your eCommerce store.

It is important to know your conversion rate, but it is vital for you to understand it. You need to figure out what is working for you and what isn’t, which would allow you to take the right steps to improve your conversion rate substantially.

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How can you increase eCommerce conversions?

Improve site speed

Google reported that if your website takes more than 2 seconds to load, 53% of your visitors are just going to lose interest and leave. If your pages load even 1 second slower, your conversion rate could go down by 7%. 

Check your site’s speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights, to understand what you need to improve. You should also see if you can get a better site hosting plan as well. You’d even want to optimize your images for web and mobile.

Make your eCommerce website responsive

You’d want to use responsive design which would enable your website to pretty much fit whatever device your visitor is using. This would create a better user experience by dramatically reducing the need for your customers to resize, scroll, or pan.

Your whole goal should be to make it possible for your visitors and shoppers to do whatever they want on your website, with the least effort possible.

Write better copy

The purpose of your website copy isn’t just to simply give your shoppers a basic understanding of what your products are. It’s supposed to catch their attention, make them relate to your brand, drive action (and conversions), and even foster long term relationships.

But you can’t just write half decent content and put it up, you need to consider the way in which your customers and shoppers would read it. In most cases, they aren’t going to actually read it, they’re just going to scan through it. And eye-tracking studies have shown that the scanning is generally done in an ‘F’ shape, so you’d want to format your content in such a way that it is engaging even when your shoppers scan through it in this manner.

Step up your visuals

You want to have a lot of high-quality pictures of your products, both on their own, as well as of them being used. You should also use lifestyle shots of your products if that is possible, so that your shoppers can picture themselves using those products. 

It would also be a great idea to include videos so that your customers can actually see your product in action and not have to imagine it for themselves.

Chase after abandoned carts

Cart abandonment is a major reason why retailer around the world are using billions in potential revenue. To increase your conversions, you should chase after those customers who abandon their carts, reach out to them, and get them to complete the purchase.

You could use email marketing for this, but only 40% of marketing emails get read, while 99% of WhatsApp messages get read. WhatsApp messages also have a 70% engagement rate, so driving a cart recovery campaign on WhatsApp makes more sense.

If your online store runs on Shopify, you could use an Engati WhatsApp chatbot to automate your abandoned cart recovery campaign as well.

Make site navigation easier

You want to make it easy for your shoppers to flow through your website and find everything that they’re looking for. Don’t bother reimagining the way websites are built, just make sure that a shopper can find all the site elements that they’re looking for in the place where they expect it to be.

And make sure to have a functioning search bar. Moz shows that 30% of eCommerce website visitors will end up making use of the site’s search feature. And there’s also the fact that shoppers who find the products that they’re looking for tend to end up becoming customers.

Back up your claims with social proof

People just believe reviews and testimonials from their peers much more than they believe the claims that a company would make. Include reviews and testimonials on your homepage and your product pages. Also, make them feel more real by mentioning your customers’ names and (with their permission) adding a headshot photo (since we humans are pretty much programmed to trust faces). 

Use conversion triggers

If you have a Shopify store, you could use the Engati app to deploy a chatbot which would shoot out a call-out message to your customers, along with a promo code to tempt your customers into making a purchase whenever they land on a page, scroll through it, spend a certain amount of time on it, or even add a product to their cart or remove it.

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Join our upcoming webinar on getting higher eCommerce conversions: 9 new techniques!