5 Tips for Creating a High Converting eCommerce Site

5 Tips for Creating a High-Converting Ecommerce Site

In today’s crowded online space, vying for your customer’s attention is more important than ever.

One second, your visitor is browsing your eCommerce store and the next, he or she is off to your competitor.

The question is, how do we keep visitors in our eCommerce site with the goal of them pressing the buy button before they leave? How do we design our website for conversions?

Below are five such tips to consider if you want an eCommerce site that is conversion-focused and value-generating for your customers.

1. Use Quality Images

The difference between buying something online compared to a brick and mortar is that we use only one of our five senses to gauge whether this product is a good buy or not.

Already guessed which one of the five senses it that? It’s sight. We only rely on our eyes to give inputs to our brain to come up with a purchasing decision.

Since only sight is a factor, it is imperative that you use only good, high-quality images on your eCommerce website.

Use Quality Images

Rather than relying on copy alone to sell your product, why don’t you rely on high-quality images instead? After all, according to the SSRN, 65% of our population are visual learners.

You can also take it up a notch and add videos showcasing your product. The type of product videos depends on what you’re selling.

If you’re selling gadgets, it could be a demo video showing how your product works. On the other hand, if you’re selling fashion items, it could be a video of a person modeling your product.

2. Optimize Site Speed

A drawback to using a lot of high-resolution images and videos in your eCommerce site is sacrificing your website loading speed.

If a slow website is a conversion killer in a normal static website, it’s a monster of a conversion killer in a dynamic site like eCommerce ones.

Kissmetrics sums it up perfectly when it comes to site speed for eCommerce websites – a one second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversion.

For example, if your eCommerce site is earning around $100,000 a day, a second of delay can potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.

Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to gauge the loading speed of your eCommerce store. The tool will also provide recommendations on how to get your website load faster.

 

PageSpeed Insights

For those looking for quick wins in optimizing their website loading speed, consider getting a good content delivery network or CDN.

In a nutshell, a CDN puts your eCommerce site in many places at once, thus reducing the distance information from your server travels to a visitor’s browser.

3. Use Schema Markups

An often overlooked tactic to increase conversions on eCommerce sites is to add micro-data to product pages, specifically Schema.

Schema includes additional information on a website that makes search engines understand it better and display relevant information on a results page.

Schema Markup Data

Taking the example above, which of these pages would you most likely click on? The one displaying its review ratings, right?

Displaying descriptive and relevant information on the results page from the get-go leads to more qualified and well-informed visitors which, in turn, results in higher conversions.

Some popular Schema markups most eCommerce sites use includes Product Name, Product Image, Reviews, Ratings, and Special Offers.

Additionally, if higher conversions aren’t enough, Schema is also known to be a future SEO ranking factor according to Google’s John Mueller.

4. Place Breadcrumbs

It’s easy to get lost in a large department store. In context, it is also easy to get lost in a large eCommerce website.

Similar to how Hansel and Gretel left breadcrumbs on the ground so they can find their way home if they got lost, breadcrumbs are navigational aids that help visitors determine where they are on a website and find their way back.

Place Breadcrumbs

For example, by looking at the breadcrumbs above, you know that you are in the computers and tablets section of Amazon.

Breadcrumbs help your conversion rate by enhancing the user experience of the visitor. Rather than painstakingly navigating your website with a lot of clicks, breadcrumbs provide a seamless alternative to help visitors find where they are.

A good user experience leads to lower bounce rates, and lower bounce rates are always a welcome sign that means visitors are having meaningful interactions with your website.

5. Integrate SSL (HTTPS)

In an age where people are more aware of where they share their personal information and credit card data, they are pickier on the websites they can trust.

Other than building trust through branding and using copy, a must for every website handling personal information and looking to build trust with its customers is to use an SSL.

An SSL, an acronym for Secure Sockets Layer, is a protocol that secures information between destinations on a network.

To know if a website has an SSL or not, the best way is to look if it has a green lock beside the URL on the browser.

Use SSL

Moreover, a website that uses an SSL starts with “HTTPS” instead of “HTTP”. The “s” in “HTTPS” means secured.

Well, how does an SSL help conversions? According to a research by GlobalSign, 84% of the respondents would abandon a purchase if data was sent over an unsecured connection.

That means that if they don’t see a green lock beside the URL or if the URL does not start with HTTPS, they are more likely to discontinue their purchase.

Aside from increasing your eCommerce conversion rates, an SSL can also help you rank higher in search results since Google now considers SSL as a lightweight SEO ranking signal.

Conclusion

Aside from increasing your sales, a website that’s designed for conversion is a website that is enjoyable to use in meeting your visitor’s goals, which is to buy something.

When customers have good experiences with your site, they can possibly become advocates. Advocates bring more customers, and more customers are always good for businesses.

Found these conversion tips useful? Have anyone in mind experiencing problems with their eCommerce conversion rates? Help them take their business to the next level by sharing this article.

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