How to Increase Your E-commerce Website Conversion Rate

How to Calculate Your Ecommerce Website Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is a really straight forward way of determining how effective your e-commerce website is at generating sales. Even better, calculating your conversion rate is simple.

The equation for conversion rate is as follows:

(Number of Conversions ÷ Total Visitors) X 100

Generally speaking, you calculate your conversion rate based on monthly results. In practice, if your website made 10 sales in the same month that it received 1000 visitors, then its conversion rate would be 1%. And that’s it. But despite being such a simple equation, you should still pay close attention to your website’s conversion rate as it says a lot about your digital shopfront’s current effectiveness.

There isn’t an industry or global standard for what an “acceptable” conversion rate is. While restaurants and dining spots may enjoy conversion rates as high as 10%, it’s perfectly fine for online jewellery stores to have theirs between 1-3%. Every e-commerce business should still be striving to improve their conversion rate, as there are always tweaks and adjustments that can be made to optimise your customers’ journey.

It’s likely you’ve heard about appealing web design before. This boils down to making sure your website is as eye-catching as possible, while not overcramming its pages with too much information that muddles the visitor.

But for e-commerce websites to convert better, you also need to implement persuasive web design. This strain of design is more nuanced and difficult to get right, but is essential for users to understand exactly where they need to go in order to make and complete a purchase.

A website that has been persuasively designed will compose the site in a way that immediately draws the eye towards the most important information or the next step in the purchasing journey. Even if a certain page has multiple buttons linking to multiple other pages, your site should still be designed in a way that makes it obvious where the user should go next.

Persuasive web design can be achieved through highlighting a CTA button, a line of persuasive copy, or an eye-catching image showcasing the product or service. Your user should never be confused about where they are supposed to go next whenever they click on any page of your e-commerce web design. By incorporating persuasive web design techniques, you will be guiding your users down a funnel that leads them to a completed purchase order for them, and an improved conversion rate for you.

Our web development team build all our sites with ecommerce website conversion rate in there minds. At the end of the day a high converting website is what we are all looking for regardless of how it looks.

Your e-commerce website should be designed with the same principles as any real-life store. It should be simple to navigate and avoid unnecessary clutter. If you were to walk into a shopfront with its items thrown around everywhere and no obvious path to take, you are likely to just turn around and find what you were looking for elsewhere.

The same goes for e-commerce websites. If a visitor clicks on your website and is immediately put off by too many things going on at once, they won’t be sticking around for long. Some common web design mistakes that can be confronting for potential customers include:  (These will all decrease your ecommerce website conversion rate)

• Images, text, and other design features strewn around everywhere with no discernible order or composition for the eye to follow
• Blurry images
• Text that is either too large or too small
• Unnecessarily stylistic typeface
• Colours that don’t complement each other or which make text difficult to read

Instead, keep the layout of your website simple and easy to move around, and your visitors will reward your design choices by following through with your desired pathway for them. Your conversion rate will improve as your visitors will be able to find your products easier and won’t be turned off by an unattractive website.

When it’s time for your customers to fill out the checkout form, to increase your ecommerce website conversion rate you want to make sure everything is clearly understandable and easy to complete. Your checkout form can be optimised to mitigate as many user errors as possible, limiting the frustration your customer may experience when completing their payment.

Remember, the more streamlined your checkout system is, the less chance there will be that your customer will click away before finalising the purchase.

Some ways to optimise your checkout system include:

• Ensure that the CVV and input formats are clear
• When the user types in their credit card details, automatically format the 16 numbers into groups of 4 to make it easier for the user to track their progress
• When choosing a date, have a date selector and/or dropdown, instead of the user typing in the date themselves

Finally, we recommend including digital wallets as a payment option such as PayPal, Amazon Pay, and Apple Pay. Signing into a digital wallet at a checkout pre-fills all the relevant fields and saves the user time and effort in their purchasing process and in-turn improving your ecommerce website conversion rate. Some customers may not bother going through with their purchase if they see your checkout system isn’t compatible with their digital wallet.