Tuesday, July 2, 2019

Tip #306: Optimize Your E-Commerce Experience




Looking for answers to these questions? Keep reading as RCI member, Theresa Packard with CommerceV3, offers answers and actionable strategies to start implementing in your business immediately.
HOW DO I BEST OPTIMIZE MY WEBSITE?
Optimizing your site should be done based on site metrics and usability, as well as site speed. I'll address how to analyze your site metrics and usability with regards to conversion, but for now, let's cover the bases of site speed.
If your site is not operating at an optimum speed, it may appear to be missing a few pieces to the puzzle. Measuring the site speed on your homepage and top category pages will allow to see if there are images or other code that could be significantly slowing your site.
Many site speed tools such as Google Page Speed Insights, WebPageTest and Pingdom, are free. A site is considered slow if it takes longer than three seconds to load. After running the site speed tools, you may find the top culprits that can affect website speed are often large images that need optimized, script that can be loaded at the bottom of the page versus the top of the page, and additional redirects on the page.
INCREASING CONVERSION RATES
This is the million-dollar question— how to convert browsers into purchasers? When consulting clients, I have found the best place to start is to ask a series of questions. The following questions can help you identify any barriers that may be affecting your conversion rate.
What do your analytics tell you?
The first thing I tell all retailers is to take a look at their analytics (we use Google analytics) to see if there are parts of your site that show the best conversion and parts that show the worst. How do you get more out of the things that show high conversion and high dollars? What’s wrong with the worst parts? Is there something on that landing page acting as a barrier?
Are your customers getting lost?
Are there places on your site where customers may be getting lost? Do they have to think about their journey through your site or is it intuitive? If you have a customer service agent, this may be a good person to ask, since they’re likely the one fielding questions about how to navigate your site. If not, try asking a loyal customer about their experience on your site.

Can customers easily find the products they want through search and navigation?
When a customer reaches the product page, how easy is it for them to see the pricing, count or size and, then, add their products to the cart? A shortage of important details like these is a common pitfall, that can quickly turn potential customers away.
Are there product reviews on your site?
Many online shoppers make purchasing decisions based on other customers’ reviews. Be sure your website has a user-friendly reviews program.
Have you tried to checkout on your own site?
When moving through the shopping cart to checkout, how easy is it for a customer to proceed through each step? We suggest making clear, well-defined steps through checkout. Make sure customers can easily enter shipping and billing information and also have certain already-known fields pre-entered (such as their email address and shipping information when logged in). To help with ease of checkout, offer alternative payment methods like PayPal, Amazon, Apple Wallet, Visa Checkout and etc.— these are especially useful for individuals shopping on mobile devices.
There's a lot you can do to optimize your website and improve your conversion rates, sometimes the best way to identify hang ups is by test driving your site on a regular basis.

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