There is no easy route to a stellar eCommerce site and with competition for online sales fiercer than ever, it can seem like it’s almost impossible to make sales via your website. If you are finding that you aren’t recording as many online sales as you’d like, or aren’t generating enough revenue online to justify your digital spend, it might be time to invest in your ecommerce operations. Read on to discover the critical mistakes that many ecommerce sites make, and how to rectify them to win more sales.
1. You aren’t A/B testing
A/B or split testing is absolutely vital to making sales online. If you aren’t regularly performing landing page tests, you are very likely making fundamental design and copy mistakes which send your shoppers elsewhere.
A/B testing allows you to create two slightly different versions on a page. One element will be different – such as the call to action, the headline, the image or the text. Both versions of the page are served to visitors and performance compared. The best performing page can then be tweaked further, allowing you to constantly eke out additional improvements to drive more sales.
There are lots of A/B testing tools available, most of which are available with a subscription. Try popular services such as Optimizely, VWO or Convert if this is new to you.
2. You aren’t following up abandoned carts
An average of 69.23% online shopping carts are abandoned, according to industry figures collated by the Baymard Institute. If you don’t have specific practises in place to recover those sales, you’re making a fundamental – and costly – mistake.
You can set up transactional emails to nudge shoppers back to site to complete their purchase easily using a service such as MailChimp. You’ll need to specify a few rules, such as how soon after cart abandonment an email should be sent. When a shopper adds to basket but doesn’t complete the check out process, an email will then be automatically triggered. Many retailers will send a reminder of what’s in the basket to the shopper as part of that email to re-engage them.
3. You aren’t proactively seeking reviews
Actively requesting reviews from customers can seem like a daunting task and the prospect of having reviews from clients publicly available makes some retailers squeamish. Reviews however are central to the online shopping process and, if you aren’t actively soliciting reviews and working to build a strong review profile, it is undoubtedly costing you sales.
Research by BrightLocal suggests that more than 8 in 10 consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Almost half of shoppers (49%) look for at least a four star review before they will do business with a brand online. This means that if you don’t have reviews or aren’t taking steps to manage your reputation and generate positive reviews, your prospective customers are much more likely to go to a competitor who does have customer reviews to share.
It’s easy to begin building a review profile to encourage online shoppers to buy from your store – register for an account with a trusted review service such as TrustPilot and set up an automated email asking shoppers to leave a review a few days after their purchase. Be aware that you’ll need to keep this process up – a steady influx of reviews is also an SEO ranking signal, so the more often new reviews are added, the better your Google ranking position is likely to be.