This is the second post in a series about building and running an e-commerce website.

Stop losing sales, increase your website conversions

So you’ve decided that you are going to start an e-commerce website in 2020. You’ve spent the money and time to get a site built, customers start coming to your site, but no one is buying anything. What could be the reason people aren’t purchasing your products, and how do you find out how to fix whatever bugs your shopping cart must have. Today’s article is going to speak about abandoned carts, and how by collecting some stats on what your users are doing, we can fine tune your e-commerce website to be a money making machine.

What is an abandoned cart?

When potential customers come to your website, they can look around, see products they like which they will then add to their cart. But for some reason, they never complete the checkout process and you never see a sale. They for whatever reason, close the browser and go somewhere else. We build our e-commerce websites with abandoned cart tracking so we can figure out why your users are leaving, and turn them into paying customers. Some estimates are as high as 75% of people will abandon their carts.

Why do customers abandon their shopping carts?

Their are many different reasons, and they will vary depending on your industry, but the repeat offender is shipping.

Shipping Costs

The main cause of cart abandonment is unforeseen shipping expenses. This could mean you are charging to much for shipping, and the customer decided they will look to a competitor for a better deal. Or it could just mean you weren’t transparent in your shipping costs, and weren’t able to easily find out how much it would cost. The easy fix for this is to make sure your shipping rates are competitive. Are there other couriers, postal services you can use? Don’t try and overcharge on shipping, it’s a better move to undercharge slightly and to have made a sale, then to make no sale at all! Make sure you have a clearly visible shipping page on your website, or you have somewhere on your website your shipping costs. No one likes a nasty suprise when they check out. 

Shipping Locations

While your business may be based in Australia, the internet opens you up to the entire world. Our customer Chuckle and Wood only had shipping set up for Australia, but then they started getting messages about shipping to New Zealand and the United States. Using your abandoned cart information, you can see where people are trying to ship to. If you can see a particular area is prone to not checkout, first make sure you can ship your product their, then check your rates are affordable.

Payment Methods

You may have your preferred payment methods, well so do customers. All of our websites can integrate with many payment gateways such as AfterPay, PayPal and Stripe to take credit card information and Apple Pay. Sometimes people can have a bad experience with a provider and they refuse to use them again, what if that provider, is the only provider you provide! Making sure you make it as easy as possible for customers to give you their money is critically important.

Prices Are Too High

The internet is a big place, you may be the only business in your area that provides a service or product, but you aren’t competing with people in your local town, you are competiting on a nationwide, or global scale. Your prices must be worth it. Find new ways to add value to your products, offering free shipping can help offset high costs. Longer return periods can also ease consumers concerns.

Confusing Experience

Your brand new shopping website may just be too hard and confusing to use. This is where Google Analytics helps. You can see what type of devices your clients are using. If 90% of your visitors are on mobile devices, you better make sure you have a responsive website design, and the overal design flow helps mobile users checkout.

Trust

You may have all of the above, but your website doesn’t look right. Consumers don’t want to be scammed, make sure your website looks professional. Displaying reviews of your products for Google, or Instagram posts can help others trust your business.

That’s it for this article, we will keep putting these out, and hopefully you start seeing more sales on your new e-commerce website, and if you don’t, give us a call

This is the third post in a series about building and running an e-commerce website. 

Increase your ecommerce sales

Making your online store as easy as possible to use, is vital. The user experience of your website, must be a well oiled machine. If your shop is easy to use, it’ll be easy to make money. Don’t force users to read pages of information or wait for slow pages. Your website design should be clean and concise, ensuring max sales. 

What is friction?

Friction is the difficulty involved with using a website. Friction will slow down users and make them work far harder than they should to buy your products online. Customers behave like electrical current, they will follow the path of least resistance. If your website is hard to use, the path of least resistance for this customer, will be a competitor. I’ll give you an example, John Doe walks into a physical bricks and mortar store to buy a phone, but the shop is a mess. John finds the phone he wants to buy under a pile of other products. Now that John has the product, he needs to pay for it, but the register is in the middle of a maze. After spending ages finding the register, John finds no one working there to take his money. Frustrated, John leaves the phone at the checkout, and walks away. While that is an extreme example, it depicts many online shops. 

How to identify issues with your website?

Now we know the dangers of friction, how do we go about identifying them, fixing them and making money? 

Design

Design is a key creator of friction. If your design has lots of colours, or a confusing layout, it will stop converting a visitor into a purchaser. Understanding your audience will help you design your website. Younger audiences will prefer brighter colours. But more expensive products will need more white space and fewer colours. Look at the marketing of Mercedes Benz vs your local day care centre. An older audience may not familiar with common website features. Younger people who grew up with the internet will though. 

Mobile

If most of your visits come from a mobile device, you need to adopt a mobile first approach to your web design. Making sure your items are easy to access from a mobile device are essential. Mobile devices have limited screen real estate. Don’t waste what you have with needless graphics. Because of this, mobile website design requires a lot more effort to refine. With mobile shopping growing more and more every year, it’s well worth your effort. 

Speed

A slow website is a dead website. A wait 10 seconds for each page will be too much friction for 99% of your users, so they will go else where. Optimise your website performance on all devices. Seconds of extra load time could equate to tens of thousands of lost income. If you have to use lots of images, ensure that at initial page load, there is something for your viewer to see. Use lazy loading to load elements that the user must to scroll down to see. Load all the elements above the fold first, that way a user can read while the rest of the website loads. 

Content

Don’t drown your users in too much information. Our eyes can only process so much information before it becomes exhausting. Don’t force site visitors to work overtime to process the information on your website. Distill the content to its core message, avoid over complicating things. If you need to have lots of information, consider linking off to information on other pages. Give the user the option to choose what information they’d like to read. Everything on your website should serve a purpose. If your content isn’t trying to convert a visitor to a sale, you might not need it. 

Bugs

If you spend hours to get all that right, but fail to ensure your website is bug free, it was all a waste of time. Test your checkout process. You may have customers who want to buy from you, but your website doesn’t work Stay tuned for more posts on running your e-commerce business. If you need help growing your online business in 2019, please give us a call. We’d love to hear from you and share our expertise.