There are endless methods to increasing your eCommerce conversion rates and we’ll do our best to cover all of the popular methods in future posts.  For now, here are 6 tips that you can take with you today and start implementing as needed.

Payment Methods, Payment Methods and more Payment Methods

Still one of our most preferred strategies for improving our clients visitor to customer conversion rates.  It’s simple, the more payment options you have on your site, the more likely you have a method that agrees with your visitor.  If you want further proof of this, try checking out on major eCommerce sites like www.ajmadison.com (an Internet Retailer top 500 site). 

It all comes down to decreasing purchasing barriers for your visitors.

Yes, site load time is important!

You may think load time is only important for your customers experience while on your site, but it is more than just user experience.  Did you know that the SEO world widely speculates that Google actually uses (or will use) page load time in it’s algorithms?

Putting SEO/Google factors aside, page load time is extremely important to your visitor to customer conversion rates.  Just this last weekend we had a very large client of ours lose a larger B2B order because their customer couldn’t afford the 10 second + page load times.  Needless to say, we’re rebuilding their B2B site now!

Many eCommerce Shopping Cart Platforms, including our premier choice AspDotNetStorefront, offer access to code and allow developers to really optimize pages for faster load times.  When you deal with hosted/SaaS eCommerce offerings you are at the mercy of that company to not only developer fast software, but also host your site on fast/capable hardware.  I won’t name names, but there have been plenty of complaints over SaaS eCommerce offerings and their sometimes terrible page load times.

Write quality product summary and description information

This one is a no brainer for all eCommerce stores, but it’s one that requires time and diligence to get right.  Having quality product summaries and descriptions can really help with your store SEO efforts, in addition to providing a quality shopping experience for your customers.

Provide as much product data as possible

Taking the product summaries and descriptions even further, look to give your visitors additional value by including more than these 2 critical components.  Adding video, product manuals, specifications and more can both establish your site as an expert in your space while giving visitors less reason to leave your site to do their up-front research.

Have an extremely user friendly checkout process

This one should go without saying, but wow is it difficult to get right!  We spend a tremendous amount of time creating optimal checkout processes for our clients and it’s one of those areas that always pays dividends. 

When it comes to the checkout process, it all starts with your shopping cart page.  Invest in this page and get your visitors started on the right foot.  For a list of some pretty great eCommerce cart page designs, have a look at Noupe.com’s 35 Inspirational Shopping Cart Page Designs.

Next, you have to put some thought into whether your are providing a one-page checkout (became very popular a few years ago) or the traditional multi-step checkout.  What you use here can depend on several factors, including what type of product you sell.  Take amazon.com for example, the ultimate eCommerce powerhouse.  To this day, they still use a multi-step checkout and are obviously successful in doing so.

Going through the nitty gritty of shopping cart and checkout page design are massive topics that deserve their own respective posts.  We’ll get to these in the future, but for now have a look at Web Designer Depots usability tips.

Create a separate section for sales and promotions

Rather than relying on visitors going through your product catalogue through traditional menu navigation and discovering sale items, create a special category/section of products and put all of your sale and clearance items there.  This serves a few higher purposes. 

The first is creating a clean and simple user experience, giving your visitors back some of that browsing time and hopefully that turns into buying time!

The second being that it allows your “sale only” shoppers to quickly find what they are here for and not create a bunch of semi-useless page view analytics data. 

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Hopefully this gives you a few ideas on how you can continuously increase your eCommerce store conversion rates, one of the key metrics for any online retailer.  Always be focused on your store conversion rates!