Even if you have an incredible selection of fairly priced products, your eCommerce website isn’t guaranteed to convert the users who visit it. While big-budget eCommerce retailers have a lot of money and resources to devote to making their sites as user-friendly as possible, through great design, strategically placed widgets, and constant testing, even start-up eCommerce entrepreneurs can (and must) take advantage of certain best practices that get more revenue per site visit.
In this post, we’ll look at six best practices each eCommerce website must include to increase their odds of enticing users to convert into customers.
Know your audiences – and build segments for them.
Let’s say you’re selling clothing. The most obvious segmentation is gender: users will likely start by selecting either men’s or women’s clothing. Next, consider creating dynamic segmentation by geo – for instance, users coming from the Northeast in November should be shown options for sweaters and jackets, where users coming from Arizona might be looking for t-shirts and shorts. If you’re selling patio furniture, consider building a category for commercial furniture, since users looking to buy for bars and restaurants will be looking for more durable products with longer warranties.
Whatever your market, the idea is the same: know your users and relay that understanding on your site so they can identify the products that fit their needs more quickly.
Got colors? Show them off.
Go back to the patio furniture example. Users who are revamping their backyard set-up will want to make sure it looks good, and color is a big part of that. Make sure you have either images or, at the very minimum, swatches that clearly show each color option available, as Wayfair does here:
Note that Wayfair even goes the extra mile to offer free samples of fabric/color to make the user feel reassured of getting a product they’ll love.
Make check-out as painless as possible.
Consider either using a payment platform (or, for the more technically savvy, building your own) that auto-fills stored user data to make checkout easier. Especially when more and more users are browsing on their mobile phones, easier user experience like auto-fills and saved profile information reduces friction and leads to lower cart abandonment rates – and higher revenue.
Don’t make your users think.
When it comes time to purchase, don’t make users hunt for a “buy” or “add to cart” call to action. Amazon, of course, has this down to a science; both options are clear, obvious, and pop off the screen with bold, on-brand colors:
Gather – and show off – reviews.
According to research from Northwestern, “the purchase likelihood of a product with five reviews is 270% greater than the purchase likelihood of a product with no reviews.” While that stat is mind-blowing, it doesn’t mean retailers should plant fake reviews, since smart shoppers will know the difference and quickly move on. Instead, make sure you’re always following up with customers a few days after expected delivery to offer discounts or something else of value in exchange for honest product reviews.
Give users a way to contact you.
A frustrated user will very rarely become a customer. Whether through an easy-to-find phone number, a live chat feature, or both, give your users a way to contact you if they have questions about your product. (Bonus tip: make sure you have a feedback loop with your Sales/Customer Service teams to learn the questions users are asking, and try to answer those proactively on your product pages.)
None of these best practices requires a ton of money, and they should ensure an improved conversion rate (which means more revenue). Put them in place now to watch the value of your average user soar.
