There are more than 7.1 million online retailers operating globally, and 1.8 million just in the US.
All these eCommerce websites just like you are trying to get their products to the right people and make them engage or buy.
So, if you want to succeed in this cut-throat competition – you need to be distinct.
You need to know the art of converting your visitors into buying customers. Because ultimately it’s the conversion rate that makes the difference – whether your store is a success or failure.
The process of generating revenue simply runs in a loop.
- Users visit your site.
- Discover products and add them to the cart.
- Make the payment and buy the product.
- Again, visit the site to buy some more.
So smooth. Isn’t it?
But unfortunately, online shopping doesn’t function that way. On average 92-98% of the visitors leave your site without buying.
Now that’s why you need “Conversion Rate Optimization”.
In this blog, you’ll learn everything you need to know about CRO, & 150 tactics to optimize it like a PRO.
What is an eCommerce conversion rate?
An eCommerce conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who visit your store to users who take the desired action—typically, that means to buy or act as per your conversion goal.
And it’s also common that the majority of eCommerce stores have multiple conversion goals.
However, all of them are about making some cash in the end.
How to calculate eCommerce conversion rate?
- Calculate the total number of visitors to your site through all devices and channels in a specific period.
- Calculate the total number of conversions that happened through the visitors. Eg. sales, downloads, signups, forms filled, etc.
- Use the eCommerce conversion rate formula and calculate the conversion rate.
eCommerce Conversion rate formula
eCommerce conversion rate = (Total number of conversions / Total number of visitors to the website) * 100
Example:
(500 conversions / 10000 visitors to your website) * 100 = 5% is the eCommerce conversion rate.
What is a conversion goal?
Conversion rate means the percentage of visitors who become customers while conversion goal is an action that you expect your users to take after visiting your website.
Every business has its own conversion goal – It can be anything from adding products to the cart to signing up the newsletter, downloading the ebook to filling out the contact form.
Setting a conversion goal gives direction to your marketing campaign, helps in measuring its performance, and setting benchmarks.
SMART conversion goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) ensure that your objectives are attainable within the specific time. Otherwise, it may become hard for you to know whether you’re attaining your goals or not.
What is a bad conversion rate?
Obviously, when your website is not performing enough to meet the investments made, it is a bad conversion.
Similarly, an eCommerce conversion rate of less than 1.74% can be considered bad and needs immediate attention and improvisation.
What are the best analytics tools for conversion tracking?
If your conversions aren’t tracked, you never know whether your marketing is generating real value or not.
Conversion tracking softwares help you find out what digital marketing activities of yours worked, measure parameters, and how to improve your ROI.
Fortunately, some best conversion tracking software and tools can help you work more effectively and efficiently. We’ve listed the top 26 of them for you to explore.
- Google Analytics
- Matomo Analytics
- Mixpanel
- Ruler Analytics
- Adinton
- Adjust
- Adobe Analytics
- ClickMeter
- Funnel.io
- Heap
- KissMetrics
- Webtrends
- Leadfeeder
- Visual Website Optimizer (VWO)
- Intercom
- PaveAI
- SimilarWeb
- Screaming Frog SEO
- Woopra
- Cyfe
- Chartbeat
- Parse.ly
- Flurry
- Facebook Insights
- Woopra
- Hotjar
What is a good conversion rate?
The answer to this question varies from one industry to another. Even with an average conversion rate of more than 50%, companies still want more.
Conversion rates can be highly contextual. The conversion rate of an eCommerce store selling gym equipment will surely not be the same as another selling apparel. In the same way, the eCommerce conversion rate of a multi-billion-dollar company will be far higher than an early start-up due to its brand value and recognition.
Many variables impact your website’s conversion rate such as website type, product, cost, competition, traffic source, brand value, promotion, platform, location, and more.
Thus the term “good conversion rate” can be misleading. The only way to figure out the best eCommerce conversion rate is to understand the industry’s average conversion rate and benchmark yours against it.
Anything more than the average conversion rate can be called “Good”. However, there is always room for improvisation.
Once you meet the average eCommerce conversion rate of your industry you can start focusing on leveraging it until you top your industry.
eCommerce conversion rate benchmarks based on product type
To determine the benchmark conversion rate, MarketingSherpa studied 25 retail categories.
The study found that the majority of the categories had a conversion rate between 1-5% and only a few categories reached higher rates.
| S.No |
eCommerce Industry |
Conversion Percentage |
| 1 |
Fashion & accessories |
1.60% |
| 2 |
Health & wellbeing |
3.21% |
| 3 |
Sports & recreation |
1.48% |
| 4 |
Cars & motorcycle |
1.46% |
| 5 |
Kitchen & home appliances |
2.93% |
| 6 |
Toy, games & collectables |
1.76% |
| 7 |
Arts & crafts |
3.26% |
| 8 |
Electrical & commercial equipment |
1.38% |
| 9 |
Food & drinks |
1.55% |
| 10 |
Home accessories & giftware |
0.95% |
| 11 |
Baby & child |
0.75% |
| 12 |
Petcare |
1.20% |
Why don’t eCommerce visitors convert?
Not just one or two, there are countless reasons why shoppers may choose not to purchase from your website. Some reasons may be specific to your website that you can improvise while others may be the shoppers’ choice.
A few common reasons why customers may not buy from you are:
- Your site wasn’t trustable
- Shoppers don’t know what you are selling
- Awful website design
- Bad first impression
- Website not mobile friendly
- Poor product range or quality
- No clear Call-to-action
- Unclear or unimpressive content
- Poor product images
- Distractive pages
- Poor shopping or delivery options
- Inadequate payment options
- Long & tedious checkout
- Sudden or hidden charges
- No proper marketing or remarketing strategy
- No brand visibility or recognition
- And more
How to improve eCommerce conversion rate?
If you’re looking for ways to improve your eCommerce conversion rate then you have hit a JACKPOT!
Below are 121 actionable tips that can be implemented within seconds to double your conversions.
150 eCommerce Conversion Tips That’ll Double Your Conversions
- Understand your target audience and position your product/services accordingly.
- Create your unique brand.
- Sell with a personalized touch.
- Communicate your brand value on various platforms.
- Promote your brand USP / Offer something unique or distinctive.
- Connect with your target audience, engage and help them.
- Create a long-lasting first impression.
- Make your website mobile-friendly.
- Build your own community.
- Include educative, interactive, and trustworthy content to your website.
- Make sure your website reflects your brand identity.
- Keep your website simple and easy to navigate.
- Give the visitors/customers a reason to stay on your site.
- Incentivize new shoppers with free gifts and offers
- Go for an interactive and interconnected approach when it comes to product search & discovery.
- Employ advanced techs such as search data, algorithms, and machine learning (MI) tech to offer more refined product discovery experiences.
- Have a clear and brief product page.
- Give eye-catching titles to your products.
- Support one-step/instant checkout or single-page checkout.
- Display a clear product summary on the checkout page.
- Allow guest checkouts.
- Automate for instant checkouts.
- Omit high delivery charges,
- Say ‘NO’ to hidden shipping costs.
- Offer same-day delivery or delivery within 2 days.
- Follow an easy return policy.
- Have vivid and transparent terms and conditions.
- Invest in referral marketing.
- Add authentic product reviews to your website.
- Minimize the number of unwanted fields during the checkout process.
- Constantly analyze consumer behavior and gain real-time insights.
- Employ automated processes and third-party technology services to enhance the shoppers’ shopping spree.
- Offer a tailored user experience based on customers’ previous browning history, actions, purchase behavior, demographics, and other factors.
- Include keywords that both sellers and buyers shall use.
- Post blogs, articles, online catalogs, ebooks, guides, and videos to educate customers.
- Promote your business on all social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
- Try online advertising and on-site ads with clear CTA.
- Analyze, design, position, target, manage and optimize your ads across platforms.
- Use Facebook to target a particular segment of people based on factors such as age or demographics.
- Conduct experiments for your landing pages, Call-to-actions (CTAs), & email campaigns.
- Keep track of baseline metrics – Click-To-Conversion (CTC), Click-through rate (CTR), conversions, and traffic.
- Incorporate omnichannel operation with real-time transparency.
- Have a robust, consistent data pass-back to all the channels driving traffic to your site.
- Pick a clean and easy page design.
- Simplify the transaction process.
- Add eye-catching CTA buttons
- Always test your call-to-action button color and design.
- Improve site speed.
- Include authentic social proof (reviews, testimonials, pictures) on product/landing pages.
- Offer free shipping.
- Always run experiments.
- Send automated reminders for abandoned carts.
- Use analytical tools to exactly know where and when a shopper left the funnel and redirect the purchase.
- Let customers know when and how to contact you.
- Provide clear contact information
- Add live chat support to your website.
- Provide instant support to your customers.
- Create scarcity to subconsciously influences shoppers to buy.
- Run A/B tests on your landing pages.
- Incorporate quality of product images.
- Give images zoom or 360 degrees rotate option for life-like visualization.
- List all the available colors or sizes in a product.
- Prominent display of product pricing.
- Price your products intelligently.
- Sell products in combo or bulk packages.
- Display the predicted delivery date on the product page.
- When products are on sale display the prices before and after discount.
- Add product videos, tutorials, live video & streaming.
- Include pop-ups/gamified email pop-ups on your site.
- Incorporate product snippets.
- Offer visual navigational assistance.
- Avoid having too many categories.
- Analyze & display customer-preferred categories.
- Create subcategories.
- Interlink category fields.
- Give appropriate tags & make it search-friendly.
- Start with “bottom of your funnel” conversion optimization efforts.
- Drive traffic to dedicated landing pages, NOT product pages.
- Include guarantee for products. Eg: 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Provide coupons encouraging repeat purchases.
- Make sure your discount code box is less prominent.
- Having customers’ desired methods as a payment gateway.
- Segment your traffic and personalize your customer journeys.
- Reverse engineer customer journeys.
- Write compelling product descriptions with precise product dimensions.
- Let shoppers know your website is safe.
- Put on a visually appealing design and copy.
- Make your homepage clickable with options and guide new visitors on what they are “supposed” to do.
- Customize the homepage for each customer based on his/her previous browsing and purchase history.
- Place the navigation bar at the top of the screen highly visible & easy to access.
- Include a prominent search bar on top of the screen.
- Include product recommendations and suggestions.
- Allow shopping via social media platforms.
- Incorporate an in-depth Frequently Asked Questions page or FAQs section for a specific product or category page.
- Use urgency & exclusivity to your advantage.
- Offer multiple discount options.
- Incentivize additional purchases with discount thresholds & free shipping thresholds.
- Implement upsells, cross-sells,& down sells.
- Let shoppers edit the cart or continue shopping
- Include “Quick view cart” feature.
- Streamline the process with a persistent shopping cart.
- Set customer expectations by showing shopper’s progress.
- Provide multiple chances to register with your company, both before and after a purchase.
- Provide multiple delivery options.
- Provide “FREE” cash on delivery option
- SEO (search engine optimization): Optimize content for search engines to be ranked higher.
- Include keywords in all types of content.
- Go for responsive designs.
- Highlight your return or guarantee policy on the checkout page.
- Highlight your security features, certificates, seals, and badges.
- Automatically pre-fill the city and state fields once the zip code is entered.
- Restrict navigation and exit points on the checkout page.
- Promote your sales section.
- Make your search box sticky, so it scrolls with the user.
- Use call-to-action text in the search bar such as “search” or “find” instead of an icon so it’s easy to recognize.
- Use autocomplete in the search bar to offer suggestions.
- Add filters and sort options to complement your website’s search functionality.
- Eliminate “No results page”.
- Make CTAs appear above the fold.
- Include a couple of options for CTAs. Eg. “Learn More” or “Add to Cart/Basket.”
- Prioritize “Checkout” CTA” over “Continue Shopping” CTA.
- Save card details to make the payment process easier.
- After order placement, send an automated email to customers with the order number& expected delivery date.
- Give an accurate delivery timeline.
- Allow customers to track the order through the app or website.
- Allow customers to choose a convenient delivery date/time.
- Keep customers informed, if any delay in product delivery.
- Insist your customers provide feedback and reviews after delivery.
- If contacted don’t put customers on hold for long.
- Have accurate documents prepared on common customer queries.
- Be polite & sympathetic to shopper’s concerns
- Send automated email responses to your customers who contact you
- Remove broken links, if any.
- Implement content delivery networks (CDN)
- Usability testing to be done on all devices
- Ensure one UX is maintained across all devices and platforms
- Send regular promotions/newsletters
- Have a dedicated column for ‘best picks/recommendation for you’ on the Homepage.
- Send renewal subscription/order reminders
- Send promotional offers or campaigns to users who haven’t revisited your website in a while
- Use retargeting ads.
- Include a social share button against every product
- Encourage shoppers to talk about your product & service.
- Run flash sales to grab attention.
- Offer sign-up bonuses
- Give credits on each purchase
- Incentivize loyal/regular shoppers
- Create intuitive meta title and description
- Allow shoppers to build a wishlist
- Sign-up with google trusted stores
What are the testing techniques used in conversion rate optimization?
When your conversion rate suffers, your entire business collapses.
CRO tests help you safeguard your business and leverage conversions.
These crucial tools spot problems and fix the cracks in your conversion funnel. Their valuable insights boost revenue and benchmark your success.
Here are some commonly used conversion optimization testing techniques that you should try
AI-powered heatmaps
Heatmaps are a visual presentation of the researched or predicted data of customers’ interest. It presents how real-time visitors interact with your web page – what interested them, what they disliked, what they clicked, and more.
Using a hot-to-cold color pallet, a heatmap shows the high-to-low quantitative values of collected data. Red regions are the hot places that visitors focus more while the blue ones are the spots with the least interaction.
AI-Powered heatmaps get you factual information on visitor behavior (Clicks, scrolls, etc) on the web page.
It informs you about what visitors found interesting, what they noticed first, and what they ignored.
Heatmaps also help you understand the distractions and frictions on the web page, know where and when the visitors abandon the page or click on the CTA and take optimal user experience decisions.
In addition, AI-powered heatmaps are trained on previously recorded data from real eye-tracking studies. Within a fraction of a second, you get 90-94% more accuracy than regular eye-tracking studies that take days or even weeks.
Landing page analysis
If you’re not ready to test your entire website for conversion then try testing the effectiveness of your landing pages.
There are many landing page analyzers available in the market to test your landing page. They also provide you with personalized reports and actionable recommendations to improve your conversion rate. Few landing page tools that can be real lifesavers are,
- Crazy Egg
- WordStream’s Landing Page Grader
- Unbounce
- Optimizely
- Ion Interactive Landing Page Assessment
- Landing Page Analyzer
- Usability Hub
These tools check your landing page according to your current conversion rate, keywords used, the industry, the content, and also the page speed.
Panel-based copy testing
To know how effective your copy is, you can go for panel-based copy testing.
In this type of conversion testing, you evaluate the effectiveness of your copy in a specific web page, or a part of a page and whether it resonates with your target audience.
All you need to do is, select the page’s URL, audience type, country, age, and gender. The selected page or panel’s copy will be evaluated and insights will be provided.
Real-time user testing
User testing is a real-time test run on real users to evaluate software, website, or app.
Using tools like UserTesting you can run live conversion tests on your service, page design, and UX. It is quite similar to panel testing, but this time it’s not just the copy but all the parts of the website.
User testing improves product design, increases the chances of you resonating with the customer as it allows you to get customer feedback in real-time.
Five-second testing
As the name implies, the testers test the website only for 5 seconds. It is done to understand the fundamentals of the website rather than the drilled in details.
The test determines whether the users can understand the product or services of the website within 5 seconds if they can remember the brand name and the benefits of using the product.
Studies show that users leave a website within 10 seconds, the 5-second testing lets you see whether you can convey the basic details in half the time. To conduct the 5-second test you don’t need any significant traffic or data as it needs only the page design or the mockup.
User session recordings
User session recordings are all about monitoring how a user interacts with the website or web page. These recordings capture details like what elements the mouse clicks on, what they ignore, what interests them, what causes the users to leave or to buy, etc.
User session recordings are extremely powerful tools that can flood you with insights on user behavior and interaction. It helps you fix design and copy issues, optimizes the user experience, and accelerates conversions.
User feedback
No matter whether your website is big or small, user feedback is the direct opinion of your customers on what’s good or bad in it.
There are numerous methods by which you can collect user feedback.
- General feedback is directly collected on the website where users can simply leave their feedback in the feedback section.
- Contacting the customer directly and having a 1-on-1 conversation to know their opinion in depth.
- You can collect feedback at the point of conversion. i.e. right after purchase.
Customer effort score (CES): Collect feedback after a few days of purchase on ease of use of the product.
- Finding out whether the customer would recommend the product (why or why not) is the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
- Asking the customers about the support experience is the Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSAT).
- Surveys when customers close their account or degrade their product – Retention surveys.
Good gracious! We know that’s a LOT of information for you to process. But we hope you loved it all, especially the 150 conversion hacks that can double your eCommerce conversion rate overnight. Try our CRO Calculator to see just how much money you could be making after eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization.
