All the money spent on promoting your site and products can go to waste if customers leave without completing the purchase. Many merchants throw money at advertising campaigns and SEO to attract visitors but don’t stop to critically evaluate the performance of their website.
Promotion is very important but is only one part of a complete strategy to make money as an online merchant. Conversion ratio is the proportion of website visitors that end up becoming paying customers. A typical conversion ratio can be around 1%. Some shops do much better, some do worse. The checkout is the final step in the customer’s journey through your online store but can account for large share of drop-offs (visitors that leave before paying).
Lets say your conversion is 1%. That means that for every 100 visitors you make one sale. All things being equal, to double your turnover you can do two things:
- Double the number of visitors
- Double your conversion ratio
Doubling the number of visitors is hard. It may mean increasing you advertising spend by more than 100%. And you may have to keep up that increased spend up consistently for a number of months before a sustained increase in visitor numbers is seen.
Some simple changes to your site, and in particular the checkout process can permanently boost your conversion ratio by lowering the number of customers that leave frustrated and without buying.
Here is a collection of tips that are easy to implement and can have a lasting impact on your shops performance:
- Build trust. Be open about your contact information, show off customer testimonials if you have any.
- Don’t hide information. Be upfront about the total price including shipping. Your customers don’t like to be surprised by a hefty delivery charge after theyspent time navigating through most of the checkout process.
- Make it easy to shop. Make the ‘Add to Cart’ and ‘Checkout’ buttons prominent.
- Simplify the checkout process. Don’t test your customers’ patience by collecting more information that is absolutely necessary. Ideally the checkout should be one or two pages at most.
As the checkout pages can be the worst offenders in driving potential customers away, here are a few more tips specifically on that topic:
- Don’t force visitors to create an account. Make it an option
- Offer assistance with form filling, add an address finder to speed up address capture
- Give an option to use billing address for shipping, or make shipping address optional
- Give assurance that your checkout pages are secure, display your SSL certificate
- Give some thought as to what information must be collected, make everything else optional
Hopefully you will find these quick tips useful. Making small tweaks to your website that improve conversion can drastically boost the return on your investment in advertising and promotion.
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