Sell your products or services is the main purpose of any eCommerce business. By adapting a suitable layout, posting a high quality content and selling the best products for the right audience in your eCommerce store, you can increase your conversion rate. But what’s a conversion rate and how to optimize it ? This is the main purpose of this article
Table of contents
- Conversion Rate definition
- What is a Good Ecommerce Conversion Rate?
- Conversion rate Vs Profit/item
- Conversion Rate Technics
- 1- Site speed
- 2- Avoid the site design mistakes
- 3- Make the main navigation menu simple and easy
- 4- Avoid using social accounts links on the top navigation
- 5- Avoid using entrance popups
- 6- Use high quality images
- 7- Use product videos
- 8- Use a filter sidebar for your collection pages
- 9- Clear product description
- 10- Allow guest checkout
- Final thoughts
Conversion Rate definition
Conversion rate is defined as the percentage of visitors that land on your website who complete a desired action. For example : If you have 110 visitors and 2 people made an order, then your Conversion Rate is 2/110 = 0.18%
What is a Good Ecommerce Conversion Rate?
Whether you are using Shopify as an eCommerce platform or you are using an another platform, and whether you are selling high demand products or seasonal ones, your conversion rate will be around 1 – 3%, which means for every 100 visitors you will make 3 sales, sometimes more if your products are really rare or unique.
In fact, there is no exact stats about the average conversion rate, but in general it stands for about 2%.
Conversion rate for low tickets
If you are selling low tickets (ex : screen protectors for smartphones, low quality clothing, …) and you have a small website with the basic pages (homepage, collections and product pages) or just a single product store, your conversion rate will be generally higher than if you are a big business selling high ticket sales.
The conversion rate for low ticket sales can sometimes reach 5%, because your products are affordable and almost anyone can place an order.
Conversion rate for high tickets
If you are selling high tickets (ex : massage chairs, high design clothing, original perfumes, …) your conversion rate will be in general lower than 1%, because not everyone can afford buying for example an original perfume at 250$, and most of the visitors lands on your page for curiosity and not for buying intend.
Conversion rate for big brands (enterprise)
If you are a big brand or a Shopify Plus merchant, and you have some pages like (blog, forum, affiliate program), your conversion rate will be in general lower than 0.5%, because some visitors will land on some pages which are not made to go incite visitors to go to the cart or the checkout page, like the forum, blog or affiliate page, and those visitors will decrease the conversion rate.
Conversion rate Vs Profit/item
before dinging into the conversion rate optimization hacks, you need first to distinguish between the conversion rate and the profit/item.
As described in the previous paragraph, the more your business is big and the more you have some pages tended to give your visitors enhanced details about your products and services, the lower your conversion rate will be, this is why you need not to focus solely on the conversion rate but you need also to focus on the profit/item.
In the below table, we showcase an example of the difference between low ticket and high ticket sales with the same number of daily visitors.
| Business type | Nbr of visitors/day | CR | Nbr of item sold | Profit/item | Daily profit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Low ticket | 300 | 5% | 15 | 10$ | 150$ |
| High ticket | 300 | 1% | 3 | 100$ | 300$ |
As you can see, even with 5% conversion rate for low tickets items, the daily profit is just 150$, whereas the profit is 300$ for only 1% conversion for high ticket sales, this gap is due to the profit/item
In addition to that, you need no to forget that the more you sell, the more you need to hire people to manage orders, returns, customer support emails, … we will not discuss about this in this article, but we will just focus on the conversion rate optimization Tehcnics.
Conversion Rate Technics
Besides choosing the winning products, which can let you sell your stuff relatively easy, some design and navigation Technics are the core to a better conversion rate, here are some of the most 10 important things to do to optimize the Conversion Rate.
1- Site speed
The site speed is one of the most importing factors to increase the conversion rate and the sales by consequence, so make sure your site is fast enough to let your visitors navigate easily and quickly on your site
2- Avoid the site design mistakes
Sometimes you feel that your site looks great, and your family and your friend are impressed about its looks and its layout, but in fact, your site may be not well designed to let the visitors easily navigate within the store, and may be not well structured to let the visitors easily chose their desired variant or select their variant, choice, so always get an expert advice and change the layout of your site if needed.
>> Learn more about the most important design mistakes and how to avoid them
3- Make the main navigation menu simple and easy
On any eCommerce store, the visitors will most likely paginate through the main navigation menu, if you keep the navigation menu simple and easy without crowded content and images, it will be easier for the visitors to click on the links and go to their desired pages, this simple tricks will undoubtedly increase your store Conversion Rate
Always remember to put your most important things at the top navigation menu, and insert the “secondary” thing at the footer, like the social links, legals pages, …
4- Avoid using social accounts links on the top navigation
At the moment of reading this article, you won’t see any link to our social accounts, is this a coincidence ? of course no . If we had for example a link to our Facebook page at the top navigation and if you click on it and go to Facebook, you will most likely not return to this blog, you will get distrusted by your Facebook notifications and may still there.
This is exactly how your store visitors will do if you put your social links at the top of your navigation menu, so in order to let your visitors stay the maximum possible on your site, you have better to insert your social links at the footer, and let the links open in a new tab so they can have a tab for your site to let them return easily. This is why Themes from Plak Theme are designed for Conversion Rate in mind, and this is the reason why we disabled the option to have social links at the top bar or the top navigation menu
5- Avoid using entrance popups
When you landed on this page, did you get any popups telling to subscribe or get a coupon or whatever? Indeed no. You don’t know it yet, but entrance popups belong to oldies, and are useless in the 21th century, in 2 words, they are just annoying, and most of your visitors will close the window and look for something else.
We live in area where we want things to be done fast and in the easiest way possible, so avoid using popups and let your visitors navigate easily without being embarrassed with popups.
>> Learn more about the disadvantage of using popups
6- Use high quality images
When someone lands on your product page, the first thing that will popup to his eye is the product images, if your products are in High Definition, this visitor will most likely turns into a buyer, so always try to avoid low quality images.
You can also use the zoom feature to let the visitors see the photo clearly
7- Use product videos
Product images are important, but videos are more catchy and can describe your products 10x times better than a static image, so try to use videos whenever you have the opportunity to
8- Use a filter sidebar for your collection pages
If you have lot of products and collections, it is recommended to use a filter sidebar, people can easily filter and sub-filter their research to select their desired products in just seconds, the more you make it easy for your visitors to select a product, the more your Conversion Rate will be optimized
9- Clear product description
Now that you have a good and simple navigation main menu, and you have optimized your images and videos quality, you need now to focus on your product details, this is the most important step before someone could hit the Add to cart or buy it now button.
For better conversion, your products description shouldn’t not be too short and not too long neither, you need to highlight the perks of your products and services to let the visitor chose you and not your competitor.
Besides the main product description, you can use some tabs to describe your refund/return policy and your shipping fees to let the visitor clearly see it without the need to go to another page.
Having clear product description won’t only increase your Conversion Rate, but will also decrease the return rate
10- Allow guest checkout
Unless you are selling digital products or you really need your customers to have a registered account for whatever reason, it is always recommended to let the buyers purchase your products without the need to registering, because some people will simply leave the checkout page because they don’t feel comfortable to fill their personal info, their email address and their phone number.
Final thoughts
We have highlighted in this article the 10 most important things to improve the Conversion Rate, in fact there are many other metrics to improve in order to the highest Conversion Rate possible, and they all depend on your business model, your targeting audience, your products type and your site design, it is always recommend to get an expert advice in order to optimize it.
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