Are potential customers bouncing off your eCommerce site without making a single purchase?
This is because getting traffic to your site is just half the battle. The other half involves transforming that organic or paid traffic into paying customers once they are on your site. And the only way to do that is by optimizing your website’s conversion rate and getting rid of top conversion killers.
An eCommerce site with a bad conversion rate can literally mean millions of dollars in lost revenue.
According to Baymard Institute around 69 percent of visitors leave without completing the purchase. And most likely they won’t come back unless you incentivize them to do so. This is what most successful eCommerce brands do so as to win back potential customers back.
However, there are simpler ways you can boost your conversion rate, one of which involves fixing the top conversion killers. Let’s go ahead and figure out these conversion killers and how we can fix them.
Table of Contents
The Top 10 Conversion Killers and Their Solutions
1. Disruptive Registration
If your store requires new customers to create an account before purchasing a product, you’re undercutting your conversion rate. According to consultancy, 25% of online shoppers abandon their purchases as soon as they are forced to create an account. To understand how much of a buzzkill this is, look at the issue from a buyer’s point of view. Buyers come to your site to buy products and proceed to checkout. Then they are asked to create an account and create a password. This act definitely becomes a turn-off and end up with buyers leaving your site without completing the purchase.
To make your checkout process conversion-friendly, you should make the account creation optional. After they have already made the purchase, if persistent accounts are a part of your loyalty strategy, you can invite them to create an account through their emails.
2. The Low-Key Shopping Cart Button
It’s no surprise how often online shoppers forget about the items they have added to their shopping cart. According to Shopify, this is usually faulted for having a shopping cart that does not turn attention to itself. This is one of the most regular conversion killers with most eCommerce sites.
One way to fix this is by using a pop-up or a small animation to display the cart’s content. You can also have a “continue shopping/ checkout” call to action remind online shoppers that they’ve items in the cart. Another solution would be installing a checkout button app to your Shopify store. This kind of app will alert shoppers once he or she adds items to their cart.
3. Shipping costs
No eCommerce store owner is a fan of discounts. Especially since they can as easily cripple your revenue stream and devalue your brand in the long run. However, there is a great alternative to such a method of price-slashing, which is free shipping. Taking into account how much customers hate paying the delivery fees of their orders. According to ComScore, 61 percent of online shoppers will cancel a purchase if not offered with free shipping. It doesn’t matter how small the fee is, a shipping cost is likely to disrupt the buyer’s journey.
Such a conversion killer can be fixed in three different ways which include:
- Making shipping free for everyone.
- Having a fixed shipping cost for everyone no matter where the customer lives.
- Offering free shipping on orders above a certain sum.
4. Long Loading Time
Website speed is very important. The faster your site, the better it is and every second makes a difference. According to Website Builder Expert, sites that load within 2 seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, while sites that load in 5 seconds experience a bounce rate skyrocket to above 38%.
When it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) a site with a fast loading time is destined for success, since speed is a key factor in the eCommerce world. When an online shopper comes to your site he or she expects the site to load as soon as they click on a hyperlink. A slow loading site is likely to cause low user engagement and increase the bounce rate. Hence, it’s clear that your eCommerce site needs to load super quickly to not lose out on any sale opportunity.
There are various ways you can fix such a conversion rate killer and end up improving your site loading speed, such ways include, downloading a fast and responsive theme, using compressed images, reducing the number of apps installed on your site since with several apps running in the background your site is likely to get slower. And finally, minimize redirects and broken links.
5. Not Mobile-Friendly
The widespread adoption of mobile phones to make online purchases is not something that you can just ignore. Mobile phones now account for 40 percent of all eCommerce traffic and sales happening through mobile phones. This means if you intend to open an eCommerce store that may be on a platform such as Shopify you need to start thinking about various design hacks that you can adopt to ensure your customers have an optimized mobile eCommerce experience. You can fix such situations through various practices such as: using a fixed navigation bar, positioning your product photos front and center since mobile apps such as Snapchat and Instagram have shown that mobile browsing is a visual experience more than everything else, and finally using a responsive website theme. At HappyPoint we can customize your theme so as to reduce the load time of your site.
6. No Product Reviews
In this time and age, there are so many scams online, many sites have become deceptive and lie about various issues, a good example, a company may tell its customers that their order will arrive in a few days but instead it takes several weeks for the product to arrive. By collecting product reviews you can use them to gain the trust of potential customers when they see positive reviews about your products and services.
The only way to overcome such a conversion killer is by installing a product review application or plugin so that you may be able to collect reviews from your customers.
7. Site Not Secure
When your Shopify store is not secure it will bring mistrust and no one will want to key in their payment details, this is likely to cost you thousands of dollars. The only way to overcome such a situation is by having an SSL certificate installed on your site so as to keep it secure. When you add your custom domain to your Shopify store, a new SSL certificate is created automatically. For any content that’s hosted on your .myshopify.com domain., SSL certificates are activated by default in Shopify for your store’s checkout. For more information about activating your SSL certificates, check out this article by Shopify.
8. Tedious Checkout Processes
Most of your potential customers will abandon their cart and will navigate away from your website and never complete the process. However, the main culprit of most shopping cart abandonments is having complicated checkout processes. If you are able to improve your checkout process, you will definitely improve your sales with a huge margin.
Here’s how you can improve your checkout process and make it more customer-friendly: Make your checkout process mobile-friendly, and request only for the most important information such as your address and email, and also eliminate distractions.
9. Lack of Payment Methods
Platforms such as Shopify always come with their own payment system so in case your site doesn’t have a payment method yet all you need to do is activate any of the available payment methods, which include: Shopify payments, payment by cash, and 3rd party payment providers such as PayPal.
10. Low-Quality Photographs and Poor Description of Product
In an e-commerce store, your potential customers want to have the opportunity to be able to examine your products from every angle and decide whether it’s a good buy. However, no one will be compelled to buy if you just snap blurry pictures that are poorly-lit and with weird shadows in the background. The best way to overcome such a conversion killer is by taking better photos in the best lighting possible or you could just have a professional photographer do it for you.
It’s not just the quality of the product pictures that are essential, your product descriptions also matter too.
The way you write your product descriptions is incredibly important. In fact, a study in the Journal of Consumer Research has shown that touching a product increases one’s desire to own it. And the only way to replicate touching a product online is by describing it in such precise detail that a potential customer feels like they are holding it.
Writing poor product descriptions is a huge lost opportunity to entice your potential customers into buying your product since you lose the chance to tell your story and differentiate your product from its competitors. The only solution to this is to write a better product description rather than having nearly meaningless words as your description. Additionally, good descriptions will help your SEO better and improve your ranking on search engines.
Conclusion
As an entrepreneur, your goal should not only be to get new visitors to your site and hope for the best. Instead, you should also focus on converting them into buying customers, by getting rid of conversion killers. As a Shopify store owner, you don’t have the time to fix all these conversion killers by yourself. Worry no more since you can always outsource from a Shopify Development Agency like HappyPoints. We can assist in getting rid of conversion killers affecting your eCommerce site. Don’t hesitate to leave any concerns or requests here.
