3 Easy Ways to Increase Ecommerce Sales

There are a number of strategies online marketers use to increase sales from their ecommerce stores. Two of the most successful of these approaches is to focus on either increasing traffic or increasing conversions.

Since Australians spent $15.3 billion buying products online in the last 12 months, it is definitely worthwhile increasing both your traffic and conversions, but today we will focus just on conversions.

Bounce rate

One of our aims is to reduce your bounce rate, giving you more time to increase your conversion rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of visits where the consumer lands on only one of your pages and then leaves your website. The bounce rate is a good indicator of how engaged the consumer is with your site.

Now they could have landed on your website by accident, but if they intentionally visited your site and left after viewing only one page, then there is something wrong. Bounce rates tend to vary wildly, but anything above 50% is not good, because this means that one in every two visitors leaves your site after viewing only one page.

Average time spent on page

This measures the average time consumers spend on particular pages and is again, a very telling metric. Did you know that you have less than 30 seconds to interest a consumer before they leave your website?

Most will leave within the first 10 seconds, but if you can encourage them to engage in your site for at least 30 seconds, then they are likely to remain on your site for at least 2 to 3 minutes, which is plenty of time to make a sale.

Metrics

Go into your analytics package and check your bounce rate and the average time spent on your website. Once you have both of these metrics, you can recheck them again once you have made the following changes to your website.

3 simple and effective actions to increase conversions

1. Navigation:  If a consumer can’t find their way around your website and locate the products they want, they will become frustrated and leave. After all, there are plenty of websites that sell the item they want. What you need is to minimise the number of clicks it takes for your customer to find the product they want.

You do this by making sure that your products are easy to find and in the correct category and subcategory menus. The best way to achieve this is by using filtered navigation, which is pretty much essential to an ecommerce site. Filtered navigation allows the customer to locate their product by eliminating results that are irrelevant to them.

2. Mobile friendly: With a third of all online sales made via mobile devices, you need to make sure your website displays correctly across all mobile devices. This means that you need a responsive design, one that looks the same on a PC, a smart phone and a tablet.

Consumers expect to see the same website, regardless of the device they use (this is great for branding) so having to repeatedly scroll from left to right and enlarge the screen to view a page on their mobile phone, is frustrating and will increase your bounce rate.

3. Call to action: Make sure your call to action (CTA) buttons are easy to find (particularly for people who access your site using mobile devices). Your customer shouldn’t have to search for the ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Add to Cart’ buttons. Make them big, bold and easy to find on every page or alongside every product, if you have multiple items on one page.

These are only a few of the changes you can make to increase conversions. Once you have made these simple changes, check your metrics and see which ones you still need to tweak. For more information on ecommerce websites, contact us on 02 8097 7957, email us at info@flowinteractive.com.au or complete our online enquiry form.