Top Tips for eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

You can’t just have a good website that generates plenty of leads, subscribers, and sales; you have to optimize your eCommerce conversion rate for it to happen. Therefore, here is a collection of practical eCommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO) tips and tricks based on industry best practices to help you upgrade your site.

Bruce Wright

Bruce Wright

VP of Sales & Channel

What are average eCommerce Conversion Rates?

The percentage of website visitors who convert is the simplest way to define an online or e-commerce conversion rate. This indicates that the visitor has finished the task you intended them to perform, which could be upgrading a membership, joining an email list, or completing a purchase.

Gaining insight into the thoughts, emotions, and actions of your clients improves user experiences, which increases the amount of conversions you generate. All eCommerce companies want to grow their sales, but not all of them know what has to change to make that happen. Rather than concentrating on a small portion of the problem, a holistic CRO approach takes into account everything that occurs before the final action.

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What is the typical conversion rate for eCommerce?

No single conversion rate may be considered “typical” for all industries. It can be somewhat overwhelming to make hundreds of tiny design decisions that add up to good conversion rates.

It’s easy to put off the changes that will have a significant impact on your website’s profitability and reputation if you have more important tasks on your list of priorities than “Improve UX for the website.”

But one thing is for sure based on popular studies of companies working with some of the largest eCommerce brands, such as Nike, eBay, Etsy, Amazon, and many more, that no website can achieve perfection. Making it simpler for your customers to locate the things they want, add items to their carts, finish a smooth transaction, and come back to buy from you should be the aim of every small adjustment you make.

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Sales will increase and cart abandonment rates will decrease when the issues that impede transaction completion are methodically resolved. However, the typical conversion rate for eCommerce is between 2.5 and 3%. You should still anticipate winning the transaction between two and three percent of the time, even if everything else is perfect. Your online store should aim for a conversion rate of at least 3%. After you’ve accomplished that, you can proceed to more sophisticated conversion rate strategies.

Why is conversion rate for eCommerce so important?

The following two are the biggest reasons why conversion rate for e-commerce is so important:

Cost Efficiency

To tell the truth, one of the least expensive growth tactics available is CRO. You will need to generate 100 visits from your PPC advertisements if your conversion rate is 2%. If the average cost of a PPC advertisement is $15, then 100 website visitors will cost you $1500. You can only make two sales at this point because your conversion rate is 2%. In summary, you will save a significant amount of money with CRO for e-commerce, and you will be happy to include that during your annual report.

Better Customer Understanding

You will become familiar with eCommerce A/B testing, Differential Testing, user division, surveys, and testing for usability by putting various CRO techniques into practice. These are additional tools that will help you comprehend your target audience and find out what they think of your items.

Increased Sales

Your sales will increase by 15% if you can increase your conversion rates by, say, 15%.

Your choice of strategy will largely determine how much your total CRO will improve.

Without a doubt, then, pop-ups can increase your sales, particularly if you’re using Shopify.

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Ways to monitor eCommerce conversion optimization

Here are some significant ways to monitor and gauge your eCommerce conversion optimization:

Exit Rate

Exit rate, which is sometimes mistaken for bounce rate, is the proportion of visitors to the page who leave. You may determine the final page visitors view before leaving based on your exit rate. One metric you can try to lower with optimizing landing pages is an extremely high exit rate on a particular page.

Bounce Rate

The percentage of visitors who depart after only reading one page is known as the “bounce rate.” A high bounce rate is bad since it shows visitors are abandoning your website right away after discovering they can’t find what they’re looking for in your business.

Reasons to Improve Conversion Rate Optimization E-Commerce

Here are some more reasons why you need conversion rate optimization:

Pages Per Session

An engagement indicator called average page depth indicates the number of pages a potential customer viewed before departing. This metric counts the number of page views in a given session. Keep in mind that if there are no conversions, more page views may indicate higher engagement or unclear conversion funnel design.

Average Session Time

An engagement indicator called average session time can help you gauge how long visitors spend on your website. Short average time on site indicates that customers aren’t spending much time online to ensure conversion.

Click-Through Rates

The quantity of users who click through from an email or advertisement to your website is known as the click-through rate. The goal of optimizing email marketing campaigns or AdWords is to drive more traffic to your website so that visitors can take action or interact with you on social media.

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How to Calculate a Good Conversion Rate For E-Commerce?

Divide the total number of visitors to your website or landing page within a particular period by the number of conversions you receive to find your conversion rate. After that, multiply the outcome by 100% to obtain the percentage.

Monitoring your conversion rate is essential since without continuous measurement, you cannot increase conversions. Recall that management is based on measurement!

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To monitor progress and assess the effects of your optimization tactics, you can assess the evolution of your website’s conversion rates over time.

How does eCommerce increase conversion rates work?

In addition to contributing to a company’s financial health, eCommerce CRO teaches teams about their customers so they can make better future website and product decisions. When devising strategies to boost your e-commerce conversion rate, keep in mind the perspectives of drivers, barriers, and hooks. Examine one aspect of the client experience at a time instead of the whole thing at once, which may be very daunting.

Three research techniques can be used to further deconstruct the eCommerce CRO process: interact, inquire, and observe. You can find possibilities more quickly when you combine quantitative research such as surveys and heat maps with qualitative information such as insights from customer interviews.

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Tips to increase conversion eCommerce

The following are some important tips to increase conversion of eCommerce sites:

Seamless Checkout Process

To ensure that your customers have a smooth and trouble-free shopping experience, your checkout procedure should be simple and intuitive. Increasing conversions from users who are nearest to making a purchase is a wonderful method to do this.

Displayed Product Reviews

Not only are user evaluations valuable, but they are also essential to consumers’ trust in a product’s suitability and their capacity to make well-informed purchasing decisions. Usually, they search for two essential pieces of review data: the average rating number and the total number of ratings with which the average score is calculated. A product should always have both shown.

Better Mobile Experience

Given how frequently individuals now access websites on smartphones, it is imperative to consider mobile user experience (UX). Making it simpler for visitors to browse your website on mobile devices and navigate your eCommerce funnel is one of the best methods to boost conversions.

Enhanced Product Photography

The photos on a website can reveal a lot regarding a brand to users. Product photos of the highest caliber provide customers with confidence that they are buying the right thing. They may therefore significantly affect your eCommerce conversion rates.

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How to increase eCommerce conversion rate

Here are some more tricks to increase eCommerce conversion rate:

Easy Website Navigation

Consumers anticipate using a website’s logical navigation to locate what they’re looking for with the fewest clicks possible. Make sure that users can explicitly view all of the things offered on the site (within a certain scope) by using the “View All” option. To save the user from having to hover on the desktop, also make product categories available at the top level of the main navigation.

Mentioned Shipping and Return Policies

Return policies are very important to customers. However, you might be shocked to hear where they are searching for this data. Many websites overlook this crucial e-commerce optimization step. A transaction can be made or lost by providing customers with simple access to shipping and refund information. Include links to shipping in each page’s footer.

Conversion Rate Benchmarks E-commerce

To assist you in understanding how it can improve your performance, below are some of the most recent e-commerce CRO benchmarks. The typical conversion rate for online stores worldwide in 2023 is 3.65%. To be very honest, you should be more than happy if your e-commerce conversion rate is more than 4 and roughly 2%. However, there’s always room for improvement.

It’s vital to note that, even if CRO marketing isn’t particularly expensive, it still involves some money and effort if you want to get deep into it. The marketing spend as a share of the whole corporate budget fell to 12.3% in 2023, almost back to pre-Covid levels. Still, a significant portion of the company’s ROI comes from CRO.

Moreover, conversion rates can be increased by up to 50% if you take advantage of digital marketing automation since it’s a great CRO tactic. However, Hubspot claims that including product videos on your web pages can increase your conversion rate by as much as 86%. However, we can be certain that the CRO tactics used by the three brands below had some impact, regardless of what the stats say.

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Ways to improve your CRO eCommerce

Some more crucial ways to improve your CRO e-commerce are:

Add Account Creation at The Right Place

When a customer registers for an account with you as opposed to checking out as a guest, your website benefits greatly. However, there aren’t enough websites that explain to the customer how it also helps them. Convincing users to register for an account might be difficult, particularly if this is their first transaction. Clearly stating how this purchase will benefit them is crucial.

Enable Categorized Searches

On an e-commerce website, allowing customers to search within a category can also increase conversion rates. This is especially crucial for mobile users, who frequently only want to view a lesser selection of product possibilities due to smaller screens.

Streamline Mobile Payments

Payment method is a stage where customers frequently run into usability problems when testing mobile checkouts. Although the majority of websites only accept one payment method (often credit cards), they do list a few third-party options. On a small screen, juggling all of those options can be difficult, leaving consumers feeling overwhelmed and perplexed. Therefore, streamline your mobile payment method to ensure a better customer experience.

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Bottom line

Ensuring better e-commerce conversion rate optimization is crucial for enhanced customer experience and company success. In addition to working on the tips mentioned above, you can also utilize efficient management tools to optimize the conversation rate. Contact us at Pimberly, for the best management tools in town.