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5 Proven Tips to Max Out eCommerce Conversion Rates in 2023

5 Proven Tips to Max Out eCommerce Conversion Rates in 2023

Last Updated:  
March 18, 2024

Running an eCommerce store is like being on a never-ending rollercoaster ride. Even though it has lots of ups and downs, the thrill of seeing your online store grow keeps you on the edge of your seat.

From managing inventory to handling customer complaints, you and your team may be juggling too many things at once.

And of all the things that may be keeping you up at night, the most frightening is probably your store’s conversion rate.  

Maybe you’re at a point where your store is performing incredibly well, yet you’re looking to max out your conversion rate. Or maybe you’re struggling to drive conversions.

Since you’re reading this post, it’s clear that you aim to increase your store’s conversion rate in 2023. And there’s nothing I’d love more than to help you out.

Throughout this post, I’ll put in front of you:

Without further ado, let’s dive straight into it.

What is the Average eCommerce Conversion Rate?

The average eCommerce conversion rate in December 2022 stood at 2.13%. This number can vary depending on different factors like country, industry, device, cost, and channel.

For instance, the highest average eCommerce conversion rate in December 2022 was for arts and crafts products– 4.72%. On the other hand, the lowest was for cars and motorcycles – 1.07%

What is a Good eCommerce Conversion Rate?

A good eCommerce conversion rate is when the percentage of visitors you’re converting is higher than the average number. Again, it depends on different factors like country, industry, device, cost, and channel.

If you belong to the arts and crafts industry, your conversion rate should be higher than 4.72% - the industry average.

But what if you reside in a country where the demand for arts and crafts products is low? You need to take that into consideration as well while determining your store’s conversion rate. So, it’s important to make sure that you’re considering all the above-mentioned factors.

And since you’re aiming to increase your conversion rate in 2023, let me put a few innovative eCommerce conversion rate optimization strategies in front of you to help you generate more sales and increase your revenue.

How to Increase eCommerce Conversion Rate in 2023

Following are a few proven eCommerce conversion rate optimization tips to help you drive more conversions and increase your store’s revenue:

  1. Implement Video Shopping
  2. Offer Free And/Or Priority Shipping
  3. Focus on the Overall Customer Experience
  4. Identify & Fix the Barriers in Your Shoppers’ Journeys
  5. Optimize Your Online Store’s Checkout Process

Implement Video Shopping

The traditional online shopping experience is broken.

It has a lot of flaws, of which a big one is that online shoppers find it incredibly hard to understand how the products they’re staring at look and feel like in a real-world setting.

Ever ordered a dress online only to find out that the color of the actual one was vastly different from the one in the pictures? Or have you ever purchased a piece of furniture that looked smaller in person?

Most online shoppers have no other option but to make their purchasing decisions based on product images, lengthy descriptions, and customer reviews, leading to confusion. And when the actual products they receive are completely different from what was shown in the pictures, it causes frustration and dissatisfaction, resulting in a poor experience.

The modern customer’s buying behavior has changed. They don’t want to make purchasing decisions based on product images, descriptions, and reviews. They want more.

Imagine giving them the ability to see how your products look and feel like in a real-world setting using videos.

Here, I’m not saying that you should a video or two to your product listing. Sure, you can do that but there are a few problems with this approach:

  • Choosing the wrong video player can cause a poor user experience and compatibility issues, which is the last thing you want.
  • Customers are looking for a seamless and effortless process when it comes to adding products to their cart and checking out. They desire an immersive and interactive online shopping experience.
  • Tracking the performance of these videos is tough.
  • Producing videos is time-consuming and expensive.  

Video shopping platforms like Videowise can help eCommerce stores address these challenges and use the power of videos to deliver their customers an enhanced product understanding, improve engagement and generate more sales.

Implementing video shopping can also help them deliver a TikTok-like scrolling experience to their customers, with the added benefit of giving their customers the ability to select product specifications, read descriptions, add products to cart, checkout directly, and more.

RIFRUF drove more than $50k in added revenue and increased their conversion rate up to 7% within six months of implementing video shopping. Ava Estell, a natural skincare brand, generated more than £743K and added 4,498 hours of on-site time after implementing video shopping.

Videowise helps eCommerce stores sell more by empowering them to deliver a next-gen shoppable video experience with its interactive video player. In addition, you can track the performance of your shoppable video campaign with Videowise’s advanced video analytics feature.

Offer Free & Priority Shipping

Suppose your fiance’s birthday is tomorrow, and you want to buy her a purse. After exploring dozens of eCommerce stores, you find that one purse that she’d fall in love with. So, you go ahead and add it to the cart.

As you go ahead to check out your cart, you see the estimated delivery time as five days. But the problem is - you need the purse tomorrow.

Even though you really want to buy this purse, you can’t – because you need it urgently.

Kirthi Kalyanam, with two decades of experience in retail, internet, and multi-channel marketing, stated, “Today’s customers are more demanding than ever. They want shipping to be free and fast. And they will not hesitate to abandon their carts and walk away from brands that fail to deliver on both these fronts.”

If you’re like me, you’ve abandoned your cart several times because of high shipping costs or prolonged delivery time. A survey of 100 Amazon Prime users indicated that 67% of people purchase Prime Membership to get free shipping on their purchases. Along with free shipping, same-day, one-day as well as two-day shipping options on eligible products is another reason behind their purchase.

In a nutshell, shipping charges and prolonged delivery time kill conversions. Sure, shipping charges and priority delivery can reduce your profit margins. But if you’re still earning a decent profit after deducting these charges, it makes sense to offer free and priority shipping – because that’s what customers want.

Free and priority shopping influence buying and can seriously help you increase your conversion rate.

But that doesn’t mean you should offer them on all orders.

If you’re based in the US, you can’t possibly offer a one or two-day delivery to customers in Asia or Europe, unless you have a distribution hub in those countries.

Also, it’s not advisable to offer free shipping on all orders. Setting a free shipping threshold is important, especially if free shipping is seriously reducing your profit margins.

Elina Bumbiere from Zuper conducted an experiment for one of their eCommerce clients, which took place over the span of two years.

They ran a Black Friday weekend promotion with 20% off and free shipping on all products in 2019. The following year, they offered a 30% discount on all products and free shipping on orders above €70.

And here are the results (drumrolls…) -

  1. The average order value in 2019 was €46.88; whereas the number stood at €89.94 in 2020.
  2. They observed a 289% growth in sales in 2020 vs. 2019.

Setting up a free shipping threshold helps:

  1. Raise the average order value.
  2. Generate more revenue – your customers will add more items to their carts just so they can unlock free shipping.

Before you go ahead and offer free or priority shipping, you should ask yourself a few questions:

  1. How will it impact our profit margin?
  2. Can we offer free shipping to all our customers, both local and international? If the answer is no, to whom can we offer?
  3. Should we set up a free shipping threshold? What should it be?
  4. How can we handle the additional costs associated with priority or free shipping?
  5. How do we handle potential exchanges or returns?
  6. How do we measure the success of this strategy?

And if you’re offering free and/or priority shipping, don’t hesitate to promote it on your online store’s homepage, social media, email campaigns, and product pages.

You can also promote it using pop-ups or banners, but make sure this doesn’t affect the user experience.

Focus on the Overall Customer Experience

Sure, delivering top-notch user experience and selling superior-quality products can help you increase your conversion rate. But at the same time, it’s equally important to focus on the overall customer experience - from the moment they land on your eCommerce store to post-sales support.

Different customers are at different stages of their journeys.

Some may be first-time visitors curious about whether your online store is trustworthy or not. Some may be exploring your collection with no intention of purchasing. On the other hand, some may have already placed the order and are probably wondering when they’ll receive it or whether they’ll receive it or not (if they are first-time customers).

No matter what stage they are at, you should deliver a consistent and positive customer experience to all your customers.

Building automated workflows can help you achieve that.

For example, you can build an automated email campaign to welcome new customers to your store and provide them with information like your products, store and return policies.

Bernard Meyer, the Director of Content at Omnisend, shared an interesting example of an eCommerce store building an automated seven-part post-purchase workflow to allay new customers’ fears.

One of Omnisend’s customers runs a dropshipping business. They sell high-quality products; however, their shipping time is longer than usual. To allay new customers' fears, they have built a seven-part post-purchase workflow.

After the order confirmation is sent, they roll out emails every few days to stop their customers from worrying about:

  1. Is my product coming? Did I get scammed?
  2. Is my shipment lost?
  3. Why is it taking so long?

By keeping their customers in loop, they help alleviate these fears.

But that’s not all. They go above and beyond.

To excite their customers, they give them background on the sourcing and materials used in the products, how to take care of these products, and more.

By the time the customer receives the product, they're not just prepared for it but also excited.

But that’s one part of customer experience. It’s really important to think about every step of the journey and see how you can address people's concerns and then give them even more.

Identify & Fix the Barriers in Your Shoppers’ Journeys

What if a majority of your visitors are dropping off after reaching the checkout page? Or what if you have an extremely high cart abandonment rate? Maybe a significant number of your visitors are bouncing off after encountering a certain type of product.

Sure, Google Analytics can help you understand:

  1. How many visitors your store is attracting.
  2. Which pages they are visiting.
  3. How long they are staying on your web pages – you can do it for all web pages.

But the platform can’t tell you why they’re leaving.

Suppose more than 90% of your visitors who visit your product pages are leaving within seconds of arriving due to an issue with the video player. While Google Analytics can show you that a huge chunk of your visitors are dropping off after visiting the product pages, it can’t provide additional information about the specific actions leading to the drop-off; in this case, it’s the video player.

Using a product experience insight tool like Hotjar or Smartlook, you can easily track specific behavior and actions of your visitors, including clicks, mouse movements, and scrolling patterns, giving you a much better understanding of what your customers are clicking on, how they are exploring your store, and what their drop-off points are.

After an eCommerce store Wyldsoon started examining their visitor interactions using Hotjar, they were able to identify a big reason behind their low conversion rate, i.e., most of their visitors were facing challenges while trying to log into their accounts.

As soon as they identified and fixed this problem and made a few other tweaks, they saw a staggering 30% spike in their online sales.

Tools like these eliminate second-guessing and help eCommerce stores a concrete direction they should focus their efforts on.

Optimize Your Online Store’s Checkout Process

One big mistake many eCommerce stores make is they have a long and complicated checkout process. We understand that you:

  1. Want your customers to create an account before they can checkout.
  2. Want to collect as much information about your customers as you possibly can.

But here’s the thing – customers don’t want to submit unnecessary information during checkout. They don’t want to follow multiple steps while checking out. And many of them don’t even want to create an account – they just want to check out immediately.

Customers desire a smooth and streamlined checkout experience.

But at the same time, they want to feel safe. They want you to provide them with clear instructions. They want to know that their financial and personal information will be protected and safe with you. They want to have multiple payment options to choose from. And most importantly, they don’t want to face any kind of error during the payment process.

Give them what they want. You can make the checkout process smoother and streamlined for your customers by offering a guest checkout option, eliminating unnecessary steps and form fields, including trust signals, and offering ample payment options.

Some other strategies you can implement are:

  1. Enable smart form filling.
  2. Implement single-page checkout.
  3. Support multiple payment gateways and currencies (if you sell globally).
  4. Implement a live chat or support option for customers who have questions during the checkout process.

Bring All Your eCommerce Store’s Data in
One Place with Triple Whale!

There can be several reasons behind an eCommerce store’s low conversion rate. While the above-mentioned tips can help you turn a higher percentage of your visitors into paying customers, the first thing you should do is identify the issues bringing your conversion rate down.

Triple Whale can help you identify the root causes by allowing you to track all the essential metrics from one easy-to-use dashboard. Triple Whale helps you make sense of your data by giving you real-time insights needed to grow your eCommerce store.

Book a demo to see how Triple Whale can help you increase your eCommerce store’s conversion rate and improve performance.

© Triple Whale Inc.
266 N 5th Street, Columbus OH 43209