Your store might have a lot of traffic, but that’s no use if it isn’t converting into sales. There are many reasons this might be happening. We take a look at how to diagnose conversion rate issues and what some of the most common problems are.
There are various tools you can use to figure out why your store isn’t converting. These will help you understand what about your site puts customers off. Once you’ve established what the problems are, you can make changes yourself or employ conversion rate optimization specialists to assist you.
If you’re signed up to Google Analytics (which you should be), there are various metrics you can check. This includes how quickly your site loads, how many unique visitors you’ve had to your site, and the number of return visitors. It also shows how many sessions users have had on your site, the number of page views, the average time spent on each page, the bounce rate and a wealth of other metrics that are invaluable to your understanding of your customer's interactions with your store.
Go to your Shopify Analytics dashboard for a wealth of information on your store’s performance. Here you can see what your conversion rate is (how many of your visitors are making purchases), and how many people add something to their cart and then leave the site without buying it (cart abandonment rate). You can also see what types of devices shoppers are using to access your store.
Install heat maps on your site to monitor customer behavior. These apps use colors to show where the most customers are clicking (red) or not engaging (blue). They can also take recordings of how customers engage with the site. When using heat maps you can see how customers navigate your store, where they hesitate and get stuck, and where they drop off.
Running A/B tests allows you to present different versions of a page to similar sets of visitors at the same time. You could present a product in different ways to see which one converts better, or compare a category page that has prices and ratings on it to one that doesn’t. The page that leads to more conversions is the version you will keep.
Outside of a blatant lack of market fit, lack of demand or even poorly targeted acquisition, low conversion rates can be caused by various other things. These could include:
If your site is badly designed and customers struggle to navigate it, they are unlikely to buy something. A site that considers a user’s journey and makes sure it is as easy and intuitive as possible, is more likely to be successful.
Customers won’t buy from a store if they don’t trust it. Any pages that don’t load properly or other glitches on the site will be off-putting to customers. Stores which use social proof, customer reviews, and trust seals to establish confidence will usually have a higher conversion rate.
Half of online shoppers make their purchases with a mobile device. This means that if your site isn’t optimized for mobile, you could be losing as much as half of your potential sales!
Shoppers rely on product photos to decide whether they should make a purchase. Small photos of low resolution, those taken in bad lighting, or with only one angle of the product, might discourage a shopper from buying the product.
Shoppers want as much detail about a product as possible, as well as information about shipping and returns policies. If your site has weak product descriptions, or information is difficult to find, a customer may become frustrated and choose to shop elsewhere instead.
In some cases, customers get as far as putting products in the shopping cart, but then leave the site without buying anything. This indicates that there could be a problem with the payment process on your store. Is it difficult for customers to make a payment, are there enough payment options, or do they need to make an account before they can buy something? These are all problems that could increase the number of abandoned carts your store experiences.
If your call-to-actions don’t stand out on your site to direct customers towards a sales funnel, this could be contributing to your low conversion rate.
Many of these tests can be conducted by a merchant and some solutions are easy enough to implement in-house. Often though it’s worth consulting Shopify and conversion rate optimization experts, like ShopCreatify, to analyze your site and see how it can be improved. The benefits of this are drastically enhanced conversion rates bringing all round benefits to your business!
Photo by Dev Asangbam.
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