the eCommerce industry is thriving, the fact of the matter is that even the most successful businesses within the industry constantly need to improve their websites and look for new ways to improve conversions.
As you probably aAlthough lready know, setting up and running a successful eCommerce website is not a one-and-done type of deal. Instead, you will need to continuously reevaluate your pages, touch up on your overall website design, make sure that everything is well optimized and closely monitor your conversion rates.
By making sure you stay on top of things, growing your business, increasing your sales and reaching higher profit margins will only come naturally. However, if you fail to do so, you should expect your business efforts to stop yielding desirable results.
That’s why you need to make sure you know which areas of your eCommerce business affect your overall success the most and which features you need to pay special attention to, in order to boost your ecommerce conversions and – in turn – your bottom line.
User-friendly search features
As much as it is important that your website is easily-findable online, you also need to make sure that your visitors can easily find what they’re looking for on your website.
That’s why the first feature you need to pay special attention to is your search feature.
Think about it: just like you want your visitors to have a pleasant experience while browsing your website, you also want them to be able to find specific products quickly and easily.
So, first and foremost, you should make your search tool static. That way, no matter where your visitors are on your website, they can easily find and access this useful feature.
Moreover, you should also try to simplify the search process even further by implementing some advanced search features, such as predictive search, strong error tolerance and product sorting and filtering.
Wish lists
If you’ve ever been looking for products online, chances are you’ve come across various things you weren’t exactly looking for but you still end up wanting in the end.
However, you may not be able to afford them straight away as the products you initially searched for top them on your list of priorities. So, you end up buying the original product you were interested in and – very likely – end up forgetting about the rest.
That’s where wish lists come in extremely handy. By offering your visitors a chance to create their own wish lists of the products you’re offering, you’ll encourage them to return to your website once they’re ready to make a purchase.
What’s more, you can even use this opportunity to send newsletters each time one of the products from your visitor’s wish list goes on sale or use the opportunity to notify them if some of those products are back in stock.
Cross-selling
When looking for products online, people are usually interested in a particular item.
However, if they are offered another item that complements the one they were initially looking for – but they were not aware of its existence, they may end up buying it as well.
That’s why you should always try and implement a cross-selling feature on your website.
That way, not only will you be able to boost your conversions, but you will also improve your overall sales.
The best part is that this feature can be added to product pages, the checkout process and in lifecycle campaigns as well. And, aside from boosting your sales, you will also offer more value to your visitors, making them more likely to convert to repeat customers.
Up-selling
Similar to cross-selling, up-selling can also help you boost your eCommerce conversions.
Here, instead of offering complementary items, you will actually offer better or higher-quality items similar to the ones your visitors were originally looking for.
It’s extremely important that you manage to help your visitors visualize the greater value they will be getting if they choose to go for the higher-end item instead.
If you manage to do so, the fact that the item you up-sold them on costs more won’t often matter, as they will be aware of the greater value they’ll be receiving.
Real-time personalization
Similar to the previously-mentioned search options, you should also look for ways to implement real-time personalization in your offer.
With the help of a reputable eCommerce website development company, you can easily add this feature to your eCommerce website.
Here, the main objective is to try and reel in the leads you may have otherwise lost. In order to be able to understand how this works, we should look at these two examples:
- A visitor lands on your website and browses your products. However, they simply can’t seem to find what they are looking for – or they may not even be looking for anything in particular. But with the help of a machine learning software, your website may offer them products based on their previous browsing sessions. That way, you may either help your visitor find what they are looking for or pique their interest in a completely new product.
- A visitor puts several products into their cart, however, before they finish the checkout process, they are forced to end their session and abandon the cart. A few days go by and they entirely forget that they ever visited your website. By sending them an email to remind them of the abandoned cart, you can potentially encourage them to finish the process.
With the help of real-time personalization, you will significantly reduce the number of visitors that have abandoned your eCommerce website before they got a chance to convert.
Automated customer support
In the business world, user satisfaction is one of the key elements of success. That’s why you need to make sure your customers are satisfied not just with your offer but also with the way you conduct your business.
Having stellar customer support in place is just one of the ways you can achieve this. However, chances are that you won’t be able to secure 24/7 customer support with real, live representatives.
But what you can do instead is automate this process, so that your customers can look for and find answers to their questions and concerns no matter the time of day (or night).
Keep in mind that although automation is extremely helpful, it still works best when combined with the human workforce. So, you should aim at having a live customer support representative available during the work hours and switch to automated customer support the rest of the time.
Mobile-friendly design
If you consider the fact that nowadays almost every single person in the world has at least one mobile device, and that in 2020, 68% out of 3.2 trillion global visits came from mobile (3% from tablet), you’ll understand why implementing a mobile-friendly design is so important.
As a modern-day business owner, and an eCommerce owner at that, you simply can’t afford to overlook this huge chunk of the online audience.
Without making your eCommerce website mobile-friendly, not only will you be missing out on a huge audience pool, but you can also possibly deter your existing customers by not enabling them to access your page via their mobile devices.
So, make sure that your eCommerce website is fast, responsive and mobile-friendly to ensure that you’re not missing out on opportunities that will boost your conversion.
Final thoughts
If you haven’t already, make sure you give some of these features a go. Naturally, the only way you can actually see which of them work for your business is by closely monitoring their performance and analyzing the changes they’ve caused to your conversions.
That way you can easily identify the features that will help your eCommerce business grow and eliminate the ones that are only slowing down your success.
Author’s bio:
Ellie Northcott is a long-time marketer, currently working as a freelancer in Miami, Florida.
Editor at Find Digital Agency.
She is also a passionate writer and loves to explore new, innovative and digital news.
In her spare time, she is an eco-activist.
