Annoyed that you put all that time and effort into building an ecommerce website when you’re not making any sales? Assuming that your SEO tactics are successful in generating traffic to your site, the problem with your conversion rate could be caused by poor customer experience. Specifically, a lengthy or annoying checkout process, poor site usability, and slow page speed can all be significant factors in explaining why your ecommerce site isn’t seeing any commerce.
Arduous Checkout Process
The average shopping cart abandonment rate for ecommerce websites is 66.22% (Baymard Institute). That means that more than two-thirds of online shoppers place an item in their shopping cart but never complete the purchase. While sometimes customers do change their minds about a purchase, more often they fail to complete the sale due to a problem with the checkout process itself. These can include:
- Too many steps in the process. The more steps you add to checkout, the more chances you give your customers to back out. The average checkout process takes 5.08 steps, and some – Amazon, for example – can take up to 9 steps. In order to decrease the shopping cart abandonment rate and encourage customers to complete the purchase process, Amazon has instituted 1-click checkout for its prime customers. Follow their lead by making your checkout process as short as possible.
- Requiring account registration. Many sites oblige customers to sign up for an account before they can make a purchase. This distracts customers from the purchase process and frustrates anyone who doesn’t want an account on every ecommerce site they visit. Instead, give customers the option to create an account after they have completed their purchase. This streamlines and shortens the checkout process, helping you increase conversions.
Poor Navigation
Imagine your customer comes to your site and knows exactly what they want, and has every intention of purchasing it. However, they can’t locate your product menu, and you don’t have a search bar. They finally track down the product, add it to their shopping card, and continue shopping. But now they can’t figure out where their shopping cart went. How likely is it that this customer is ultimately going to make that purchase?
Ecommerce websites have been around for long enough to establish standard practices for design and navigation. These include, but are not limited to: the company logo is in the upper-left corner; the menu bar is at the top of the screen or down the left-hand side; and the account login and/or shopping cart in the upper-right corner. If you deviate from these norms, customers are going to spend more time trying to navigate your site and less time actually shopping on it.
- Your site should have a search option. Put the search bar in a place of prominence on the screen – traditionally, it’s located with the menu bar – so that customers can quickly navigate to the item they’re after.
- Take the time to effectively categorize your products. Having a search option on your site is pointless if it doesn’t bring up the items that your customer is looking for – they don’t want to navigate through a maze of pages in order to find what they want. More likely, they’ll give up and go to your competitor’s site instead.
According to a recent study, the average time users spend on a site is less than 3 minutes. Users fulfill their goal and then leave. After 7 minutes on site, shopper conversion rates drop dramatically because users get lost, wander in the woods, and then they leave in frustration without fulfilling their goals or making a purchase.
Slow Load Time
47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. 40% will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load, and 52% of online shoppers state that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty. What does this all add up to? For every 1 second delay in your page’s load time, overall customer satisfaction decreases by 16% (Kissmetrics). If you want customers to stay on your site long enough to make a purchase, you need to ensure that your page load time is short enough not to negatively affect user experience.
- Factors that influence your page load time include number of images, size and format of images, object, Flash, and Javascript, and other elements that eat up bandwidth. Make sure that your site’s code and graphics are optimized for speed.
This goes double for the mobile version of your website. More than half of mobile device users expect a mobile site to load as fast as or faster than a regular website accessed through a desktop computer. Be aware that Flash, as well as eating bandwidth, doesn’t even work on Apple mobile devices – so drop it from your design lest you present your iPhone surfers with a broken mobile site.
If you use responsive design to optimize your website for mobile, be aware that the process of resizing your site’s full-sized images for the smaller screen occurs within the device’s processer. If your site has a lot of images, this can cause a noticeable delay in the time it takes your site to load for mobile. Be choosy about the images you place on your site, and tweak your responsive design coding to reduce the bandwidth and processing requirements put on mobile devices.
Customer experience has a significant impact on your website’s conversion rate. For example, a 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. A site that makes $100,000 per day could lose $2.5 million in yearly sales due to a 1-second delay. Look at your site from the perspective of a potential customer and identify any roadblocks to their successful purchase. To drive up your conversion rate, make sure your site is easy to navigate, easy to purchase from, and quick to load.
Bio: Megan Webb-Morgan is a business blogger for ResourceNation.com. She writes on a variety of topics including ecommerce software. Follow them on Twitter and Facebook!