Not Getting Enough Customers? Turn Online Visitors into Actual Buyers with these E-commerce Tips

Imagine this: you own a local grocery store. A potential customer enters your store and picks up a bunch of goodies—cookies, milk, cereals, bath soap, toilet paper (you get the idea). Your potential customer acts as if she’s ready to go to the cashier and complete the purchase, but suddenly she leaves, abandoning her cart.

Whatever her reason was (perhaps the line was too long, or your products were too pricey), one fact remains: you lost out on a potential sale.

Tips to Stop E-commerce Window Shopping

Online stores face the same challenge of converting visitors into buying customers. In fact, online marketers know that the massive traffic they’re getting doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t result in an increase in sales and ROI.

As a marketer, how do you go about turning your web visitors into promising leads? How do you avoid falling victim to e-commerce window shopping? Here are a few tips from Marketo (@marketo) to help guide you in the right direction:

Keep your product page simple yet informational

You don’t need to impress your visitors with extravagant features and complex design on your product page. Visitors would feel overwhelmed if too many things were going on in your product page. Instead, keep your product page simple, including only the necessary features and information. Also, keep your “add to shopping cart” buttons prominently displayed and accessible. To further increase customer retention rates, you may consider using a co-browsing walk-through tool, such as Toonimo (@toonimo), to visually guide visitors.

Adjust to the needs of your customers to avoid cart abandonment

According to the latest statistics from Baymard Institute (@Baymard), the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is 69%. Compiling data from 31 different studies containing statistics on cart abandonment, Baymard revealed that the lowest abandonment rate is 65%. The highest? An alarming 80%. This means that out of every 10 online visitors, only two are actually completing the check-out process.

Marketo cited four reasons why the abandonment rate is this high:

Too many options. There are just too many e-commerce options available these days. Shoppers might get bored, abandon a cart, and toggle to a competitor’s site later on when they finally feel like completing a purchase.
High prices. Keep your pricing competitive. Review your competitors’ pricing, and as much as possible, make sure that yours is a bit cheaper, if not similar to theirs.
Expensive shipping costs. Offer low shipping costs, or even free shipping to incentivize shoppers to complete their purchases.
Lengthy check-out processes. Keep your check-out process seamless by following some simple guidelines, such as asking for minimal personal data, keeping fewer pages for customers to click through, and not obliging them to set-up a new account while completing the transaction.

Go for mobile-friendly web design

Everybody knows how important maintaining a mobile-friendly website is for businesses today. Many Internet users are using devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to search for information or find products online. Your potential customers expect to be able to buy products from your site using their mobile phones. Thus, to turbocharge your conversions, you need to cater to the growing number of mobile users and optimize your site for all devices.

There are other helpful online resources that offer effective tips on turning your site visitors into customers, like this blog article from Shopify (@Shopify). Evidently, there’s no magic formula to stop visitors from abandoning your product site in a snap, but you could gradually lessen the numbers by following these tips.

Are there any tips you’d like to add to this list? Hit us up with a comment!

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Marketing Digest Writing Team

The Marketing Digest Writing Team provides the content you need to keep you well-informed on the latest developments and trends in the digital marketing industry.