Shopify Conversion Rate: How to Improve It

Opening an eCommerce store may be easy to do Shopify, but getting that first sale, acquiring customers, getting visitors--this is where the real challenge is at. The best results come when you optimize your Shopify store and support it with marketing efforts.

But even if you optimize everything, you might not be getting the results that you want. To figure out what’s causing this, you would need to measure your conversion rate.

First of all, what is a conversion rate?

Conversion rate is simply the percentage of visitors who made a desired action on your website. You can get it by dividing the number of people who converted (or did the action) by the number of people who saw your page or message (or visited). To make the percentage into a number, just multiply it by 100. Conversion rate = [Conversions / total visitors] x 100%

Let’s say 1,000 people visited your website, and your desired action was for them to make a purchase. If 150 people made a purchase, it would be 150 divided by 1,000 multiplied by 100 = 15%.

Simply put, a conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who took a desired action.

Your main goal of course would be to make a sale but there are many steps before a customer makes a purchase. First, you’ll need them to convert through different actions such as:

• Visiting your website
• Adding an item to their cart
• Clicking a product
• Clicking on a promotional voucher
• Clicking your ad

But the most important conversion rate is still how many people visited your website versus how many made a purchase because all businesses thrive on sales.

How do you know what’s a good conversion rate?

Right now, conversion rates for eCommerce stores worldwide is just 2.86%. So you can see how challenging it is. This small conversion rate equates to having 100 web visitors with only 2 or 3 of them making an actual purchase.

If you check cross several industries, the average conversion rate for landing pages is about 2.36%, and the top 26% industries convert at 5.32% or higher. You ideally want to break into the top 10% — with conversion rates exceeding 11.50%.

It may be especially tough for beginners because you’ll see how it’s already hard to get people to visit your website let alone make a purchase.

This is why, part of optimizing your store and investing in marketing, you should be tracking the conversions of each page on your website. Then you will be able to see which pages perform well and which ones do not. After that you can start to deduce what makes those pages work (did you put an ad, is there copy on it, are there photos, did you link to it, etc).

Now, how do you improve your conversion rate?

What you’ll first need to do is to track the conversions of all your pages. You may need to do a couple of A/B testing to figure out which ones make your page work and then tweak it from there. Doing so should help you get the best results. But it comes with a lot of hard work. Especially if you have a lot of products and a lot of pages.

Shopify does help simplify your life a bit as it helps calculate your store’s conversion rate automatically. You can check this out yourself by going to your dashboard and clicking Analytics. You should see a breakdown of your conversions in 3 stages: 

• How many people reached your shopping cart
• How many checked out
• How many reached the Thank You page

You can also opt to see only a specific date range or view how your Shopify conversion rate has performed to compare previous months or years. You can go to the “Online Store Conversion Over Time” to see a report. This will help you keep track especially as you make changes and tweaks to your store. You’ll be able to pinpoint any changes and if your adjustments made an impact.

You should also be able to see Shopify’s summary of conversion that gives you an outline of a client’s past visits and behaviour and journey when buying from your store. The summary of conversion shows up on the order page details and incorporates an overview of:

• Consumer’s overall number of orders in your store.
• Consumers total visits to your store for 30 days.
• Origin of consumer’s first store visit

But do keep note that the conversion rate is affected by many factors including the kind of products you’re offering and what kind of traffic you’re getting. For example, if you were running an ad targeted at the wrong market, you might see low conversion rates because these people are not interested in the product in the first place. This is why your marketing plan should be developed properly so it can support your conversion and overall website performance.

Some Strategies to Help Increase Your Shopify Conversion Rate

We find that there are numerous factors that can affect your customers’ decisions at various stages of your conversion funnel. There may even be external factors beyond your control that can affect conversion (losing internet connection, having to suddenly do personal errands, etc).

So to give a bit of structure when you’re planning out how to increase your conversion rates, we suggest for you to think of different factors in 3 groups, namely:

• Information (Are the most important details easily accessible?)
• Motivation (Do your customers feel like they gain anything from your product?)
• Friction (How easy is the customer journey? Were there any pain points?)

You need to think about the customer journey and your marketing funnel. First, there’s awareness. Your customer may not know what you’re selling and it’s up to you to make it clear to them what your products are. Some key items may be categorizing your navigation bar properly, or having proper product names and complete product descriptions.

Then a customer will have to think about why they should buy it and if they do decide to buy it, how easy will it be for them to checkout? As the seller, you need to make these processes feel seamless, intuitive and easy. This will help people purchase more as it lessens the amount of friction, and chance that they close your website.

Do a systematic approach so that you can study clearly how your website is performing and always check your key metrics.

Now, let us share with you some tried and tested ways to improve your conversion rates.

1. Improve the user experience

All steps your customers need to take before they receive your product is part of their experience. So all these steps must be user friendly and intuitive. You should basically be holding their hand albeit virtually.

There are many ways that you can improve the user experience. But we’ll list some for you:

• Organize your product categories
• Make it easy for your customers to find your products. Create the proper categories in such a way that customers need to take less steps to find a specific product
• Provide true and accurate images of your products
• No customer wants to be fooled and since you are selling on an online platform there is that risk. Customers want to be sure that what you’re showing them is the real deal and what they’ll be getting is exactly what you posted
• When writing product descriptions and titles, try to think of words your customers use
• Think about how they talk and if they were trying to search your item, what would they type?

2. Optimize for mobile

Most people these days are browsing on their phones, tablets, iPads or laptops. When people shop online, some of them will browse on their mobile phones before they check out on a laptop. So all your content and photos should be consistent.

Optimizing your website for mobile helps ensure that your content and everything on your site works the same way as it would on a desktop. It should be consistent in performance and the way images are displayed.

3. Optimize your product pages

As you run your eCommerce store, you might notice that even though you get website visitors, there may not be too many sales. What’s important to consider is that maybe there is something along the customer journey that is stopping them from purchasing.

Think like a customer and you should be able to experience your website yourself. As a customer, you would usually search for a specific product over Google then find a web page related to your question amongst the results. A customer may open a few tabs and then start to trim it down as they view each website. If yours stands out from the rest, then that’s when they settle. That’s why it would be good for you to keep your product pages updated and informational as possible.

4. Upsell/cross-sell

Some tactics to reach better sales conversions are upselling and cross-selling. Upsell is when you motivate customers to buy a higher priced product over one they are considering.  When you cross-sell on the other hand, you request consumers to purchase similar or free items. How does this help you?

• It can widen the product/service preference
• increase longer association value
• Provides flexibility and comfort
• Stabilises growth linking novice and existing clients
• Increment of customer satisfaction

5. Simplify the checkout process

One of the topmost important pages on your site is the checkout page because this is really where potential customers turn into real, paying customers. This is where you get sales conversions.

You should create your checkout process in such a way that it’s really easy for customers to purchase. Most stores will add a “buy now button” somewhere near the product name so one can instantly purchase and checkout an item if they’ve already decided.

This also makes it easy for them to explore other products and if they are satisfied, click the buy now button on that product page.

You can also make things easier for customers by allowing automatic checkout, and fill in the order forms. This helps minimize the checkout process and gives your customers a better shopping experience.

To conclude, your conversion rate can drastically improve if you keep track of it and do a number of tests to really see how your store performs. Some strategies don’t always give the best results which may be because of external factors or the products you have. By employing the right conversion strategy, you will be able to better optimize your pages, see real results and get sales.

If you need the help of a Shopify expert, contact us at Webinopoly! We can provide you with services and solutions from setting up your Shopify store, developing or designing it, developing apps, or even migrating your inventory.

Here at Webinopoly, we create solutions that can help entrepreneurs like you build and expand your online business. If you need help optimizing your Shopify pages, building or designing it, we are here to help! 

Webinopoly is an Award-Winning Digital Agency and are experts in Design, Setup, Development, and Marketing. Our services range from building your Shopify store to theme customization, website development, migration to Shopify, SEO, and marketing.

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