By If you own an e-commerce website or manage an online store, you are most likely closely monitoring the conversion rate of your business. Conversion rate defines how successful your online business is because it determines how much of your visitors actually convert to become successful buyers or paying customers.
A low conversion rate means you’re getting enough traffic, people are looking through your shop and examining your products, but are not making a purchase.
They may be adding items to their cart, but will suddenly change their mind and not continue with buying. Does this sound familiar? Are you having trouble with your online shop’s conversion rate?
If you are using WordPress WooCommerce as your e-commerce plugin (or the backbone of your online store), but you’re not happy with the sales it’s bringing, you need to do some optimization tweaks in order to improve WooCommerce conversion rate.
Here are some tips, tricks, and tweaks you can do to boost your sales using WordPress WooCommerce.
1. Improve the speed of your website.
Believe it or not, the loading time of your online store affects the buying intent of your customers.
A survey made on this matter concluded that 40% of visitors choose to leave an online shop if it doesn’t load or open within 3 seconds. Furthermore, on Amazon, they found out that their sales decrease by 1% for every 0.1% reduced load time of the website.
In this regard, you have to make sure that your website loads quickly and that pages are not filled with lots of images or videos that make loading slow. To help improve the speed of your website, choose a lightweight theme, remove unnecessary plugins, and compress JS and CSS files.
Moreover, use performance testing tools Google PageSpeed Insights to help you identify your site’s speed and know which features to improve.
2. Shorten the checkout funnel.
The checkout funnel refers to the journey of your customers from the time they landed on your online store to the time they actually made a purchase.
The longer the journey, the more opportunities for the buyer to fall out in one of the funnels or stages. Hence, to improve WooCommerce
One way to shorten the checkout funnel is to let your customers checkout as a guest — and not require them to sign up for or log in to their account. As long as you get their basic information, you can give them a choice whether to sign in or checkout as a guest.
Additionally, avoid asking your buyer’s too much information as this may discourage them to continue with their purchase. Simply ask essential information for billing such as name, email address, location, and credit card information for payment.
3. Optimize your product pages.
The product pages are the heart of your online store. The content inside the product pages is what drives your visitors to buy or leave your shop. Therefore, you need to optimize each one of them.
By optimize, I don’t only mean to put keywords that will help you with the website’s SEO, but rather doing an overall optimization or modification to improve WooCommerce conversion rate.
This includes uploading high-quality product images, using catchy and descriptive product names, adding product description that plays on buyers’ emotions (why do they need the product, how can it improve their lives, etc.), and proposing similar or related products.
4. Highlight customer reviews.
Customer reviews, especially the positive ones with 5 bright stars, can dramatically improve your conversion rate. Buyers will get easily influenced or convinced to buy something that others have already guaranteed its worth or quality.
In fact, many online shoppers admit that when uncertain about making a purchase online, the deciding factor usually is the buyers’ reviews.
To highlight customer reviews, install a customer notice module on your online store. Make sure it appears on product pages and on areas that are easily accessible to potential buyers.
Some online shop owners, however, are quite hesitant about adding this to their website for the fear of getting negative reviews.
When this happens, use the negative feedback to improve your product offering or customer service, which if you think about it, will be for the service of your conversion rate optimization in the long run.
5. Use the scarcity effect.
The scarcity effect is an advertising technique popularized by Robert Cialdini in 1987.
It basically implies that a product has limited stocks available, making the customer think that he or she needs to “buy it now before they’re all gone”.
In e-commerce, you can use the scarcity effect in 2 ways. One is to show a quantity that refers to the number of stocks left for that item.
The other way is to include a countdown timer that implies that the product is only available up to a specific date or time. These approaches have been proven to be very effective in increasing the conversion rate of online stores.
There you have it! By following the tips above, you can optimize your online store on WordPress and improve WooCommerce conversion rate in no time!
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