15 Steps to Better Conversion

It is an uneasy feeling when many people come to your online store and then leave w/o buying anything. Some percents are expected but others can be helped with. To better understand what makes too many visitors leave your site w/o buying, I compiled a list of factors that you can check against and see if some factor may be lacking on your store. Every online store owner with a conversion problem should examine it carefully.

1. Product Demand

As much as you think that some product is interesting, there may be insufficient demand from the buyers. There could be too many sellers already selling it, the price could be better on other sites, or the product is complex and new and people still need education. Whatever the reason, you need to understand what is happening before you allocate effort into traffic and conversion improvements that will not help. That is not to say that demand can not be changed but you need to simply know if this is the reason for lower conversion.

2. Product Price

While product's price is intimately connected to demand it deserves its own section. Price can be either too high or too low. If you set it much higher than can be bought elsewhere then buyers will obviously buy it elsewhere. But price can be also too low and will hurt the conversion. For example if you sell an otherwise $3,000 designer item, like a pair of designer shoes, but on your site they cost $300 without explanation, buyers will reasonably assume that there is something wrong with the item. Also, for items that are new and value is not easy determined, you need to provide enough information so buyers will know that the price is a good deal or at least fair. For example, I saw a nice wooden frame watch on some new site yesterday and it cost $49. Problem was that besides a pretty picture I could not tell from product description if the watch was worth $9 or $99. A few words on what mechanism is inside, who makes it, and what is its warranty would have most likely convinced me to buy it instead I decided to pass.

3. Product Description

Product detail page is a place where you actually sell your product. Good and informative description can make or brake customer's decision to place your item in the shopping cart. Description should include images, inform buyers about the use and the benefits, list features specifications and anything that you would want to now if you were the buyer. Not too long and not too short is the perfect length. Make sure images are of high quality and with proper background. good product descriptions is essential for driving traffic to your store through SEO as well.

4. Branding

Branding is a fuzzy topic to talk about but everyone sees it when its presented or when it is lacking. Branding is a visual, mental, and any other presentation of your business that is unique to you. You achieve it with logo, site colors, business cards, email templates, consistent messaging, tag line and anything else you can think of. If brand achieves a good status, the buyers form a relation and trust with the brand. Good examples are Apple, Amazon, BMW where everyone instantly forms an image once the name is presented. To develop a well known brand takes effort and time. As a store owner, who is just starting, you can however still make a consistent appearance and a nice logo. The absence of these is as damaging to conversion as is having a strong brand very useful.

5. Trust

When visitors come to your online store they must trust you if you want them to buy. In online world, trust is even more important than in physical stores. 1. You pay for your order with a credit card while you never saw anyone who works for the store. 2. You don't know if store owner has products that are on pictures. 3. You don't know if they will be shipped. 4. You don't know if the express shipping you paid for will be observed. 5. You don't know how difficult will be to return the products. There can be more but these should get point across why trust in online world is important. These are all obstacles a store must overcome, especially with first time buyers. Some techniques you can use is to make a secure site (SSL certificate or https), list testimonials, get a BBB (Better Business Bureau) certificate and place it on the site, become a Google certified store, get some press coverage, list phone number and address of your store, show picture of the store, offer live chat, and more.

6. Imagery and Visual Appeal

Picture is worth a thousand words. Nowhere is that more true than in online shopping. Beautiful imagery can make or break your site. If you sell apparel or shoes, the image is the main presentation and decision factor in making a sale. Images, site colors and other graphic design features work on conscious as well as subconscious levels. If you are not good at it, hire a graphic designer or at least have one to look at your site and tell you what they think. Looks may or may not break the conversion but if there are other factors present it may just make the difference.

7. Standard Policies

Four standard policies should be displayed on your store: Terms of Use, Privacy, Shipping, and Returns. While Privacy is more or less dictated by laws and some common sense such as not reselling customer emails and sharing their private information the Terms policy has an important Returns policy in it. Both, Privacy and Terms policies are expected on page by the customers even if many don't read them. Shipping and Return policies on the other hand are read by most customers. They should all be easily found in the footer of every page of your store.

8. Shipping Options and Costs

Different customers have different expectations and needs about shipping. Some care about cost, some about speed, and some like a particular balance between cost and speed. Inadequate shipping options can be a deal breaker. Nowadays stores try to display shipping costs as soon as possible in the checkout, offering free shipping for certain orders, and a variety of delivery options. Th important thing to note is, that not all customers have same expectations or needs.

9. Returns, Exchanges, and Refunds

There is no doubt that customers want to be able to return things they buy in case they don't like or if something is wrong with the products they have received. Returns is a rather complex legal, operational, and selling topic. some items like downloaded software or food and other perishables cannot be returned or it makes no sense to return them. you should think about returns before you start selling. some sellers charge restocking fee or they don't pay for shipping when item is returned even if it is for good reason. Everything has consequences. Situation you need to think of and which require different actions are: returns because you shipped the wrong product, buyer claims that product description on your store was not what was delivered, product was defective, product was damaged in transport, item doesn't fit - frequent with shoes and apparel, or the buyer simply changed her mind and wants to return the product. In some cases product can be exchanged in other the only solution is to refund the money. Complete returns program is beyond the scope of this post but I plan on writing another post that will cover this interesting topic in more detail.

10. Payment Options

Payment options on store are similar to shipping options thought they address different needs. Some customers care very much about the security and prefer to pay with a PayPal. Dependent on the type of products you sell, other options may be appropriate as well such as electronic checks or even cash on delivery or COD, which is a very popular option in Europe.

11. Usability

Usability is part of the user experience. While an easy and intuitive web store is almost expected, it is easy to make it more complicated than it needs to be. A long history of issues and improvements associated with checkout pages is proof that there is always an easier way to do something. Not understanding what is the next step or how to perform it will frustrate the user who then decides to leave your store. Or a user may simply have a hard time navigating around and finding things. Steve Krug, an authority in the field of usability testing famously said: Don't make me think!. That is why usability is a very important factor on your store that can all by itself bring your conversions to halt. Usability can sometimes be hard to pin down since it is as much science as is an art. Many users need to be observed and provide their feedback to see what are most pressing problems to fix. Without proper testing it is easy to fix one thing and create another problem at the same time. Tools such as A/B testing, where 2 versions of feature are presented to 2 different groups of users and observing which one works better are commonly used in fixing and testing usability problems. Analytics tools such as Google Analytics are also used to pinpoint problems on your store in cases when observing users in the controlled test environment is not an option or simply as a complementary method. In blog post on usability we examine this factor in more detail.

12. Mobile Experience

Over 60% of online shopping is now done on mobile devices. Factors that affect conversion are the same as on desktop with an additional constraint that it is more difficult to type and fill out any forms than it is on desktop. Stores need to be designed in a way to look good on mobile and that usually means different than on the larger monitor. Thing to remember here is that more people visit your store from the phone than on any other device.

13. Abandoned Carts

Abandoned carts management is an attempt to bring back people, who already left your store, to complete their purchase. Emailing cart content and re-marketing -showing again cart content or other looked at products on other web sites as ads, are two standard approaches to improve the conversion.

14. Fulfillment

From customer's standpoint it is a post purchase experience and it comes down to whether the order arrived, undamaged, and in time that was promised. Needless to say, if this part isn't right, the customer is unlikely to come back to your store.

15. Mismatched Expectations

Last but not least are mismatched expectations. They can happen when you do a good job advertising your store but the store then does not match buyers' expectations. This can happen unintentionally when you don't understand well some of your buyers or when buyer for some reason did not understand properly the advertising message. Since this is not a store problem it is rarely mentioned but it is very real. Anyone who has done AdWords campaigns knows how much guessing goes into ads in hope that landing page will be exactly what visitor wants and expects. Mismatched expectation is characterized by a high bounce rate - that is visitors leave the site very quickly as they discover that it is not what they expected. You can prevent this by showing your ads to some of your friends and/or customers beforehand and see what they think. Just being aware of it is also often enough.

That's it. If you keep all of these 15 factors in check you will be in a better shape than if you don't.

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