Have you ever been in a situation where you’re just about ready to jump off the cliff out of your sheer aggravation of something?
Well, that’s pretty much how frustrated my client was when he talked about how terrible his ecommerce site’s sales conversion was.
He said that he worked with a couple of different online marketers in a span of 3 months just to figure out where the problem is, yet still to no avail — he’s still getting very little to no sales at all from his ecommerce business.
Friends, I know that my client isn’t the only person struggling with this kind of challenge. I for one have felt the same frustration in the past, and it sure isn’t easy. Considering how the problem can come from bazillions of different angles, you need to have persistence and a clear strategy to be able to figure out where the problem might be coming from, so you can find the best solution for the problem.
Instead of telling you how to fix your sales conversion problems, however, I’d like to share with you the six burning questions that you need to reflect on.
If you take the time to think about these questions, I am confident that you’ll be able to pinpoint where your sales conversion issues might be coming from, and be able to address them accordingly.
Let’s hop right in.
1. Is your checkout process turning off your visitors?
Have you heard of the $ 300 million button story? The gist of it is a major e-commerce site was missing out on $ 300 million worth of annual sales because of their checkout process.
Because they didn’t allow their web visitors to buy any of their products without registering first, this caused them all sorts of problem.
This cements the idea of how important your checkout process is. In the story above, they fixed the problem by simply taking away the “Register” button, and replacing it with a “Continue” button with a simple message saying, “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”
We’re talking about one button here. This one adjustment in their checkout process led to the major ecommerce site’s number of purchasing customers going up by 45%, which translated to $ 300 million on the first year.
2. Do you have a live chat support?
63% of customers said they were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat as opposed to one that doesn’t. – Source (Furstperson.com)
Pretty amazing, isn’t it?
The figure above is a clear indication of how powerful a live chat support feature is for your ecommerce site.
The thing about having a live chat support is it enables you to address whatever concerns your audience have that’s preventing them from making the decision to buy.
Imagine wanting to buy a nerf gun for your son’s birthday that’s going to be about four days from now. You already have the money on hand, but you’re thinking twice about buying the nerf gun because you aren’t sure if the merchant can send the merchandise via express delivery.
What are you going to do at this point? Will you still use the contact form or email them about your inquiry? We all know that most merchants would usually take 24 – 48 hours to reply. Or, will you look for other sites that sell nerf guns?
Your answer is probably the latter, isn’t it?
You’ll be amazed at how often missed opportunities like these happened to ecommerce site owners.
If you want to keep your customers from going to your competitors just because they have unanswered questions, then you need to install a live chat support feature on your ecommerce site now.
3. Have you been using your discount coupons effectively?
According to RetailMeNot, “96% of consumers use coupons.”
I was mindblown when I first saw the data. I mean, I’m sure everyone has an idea of how coupons are such classic workhorses for ecommerce sites, but 96%? Really? I would never have guessed the figure to have ballooned that much.
By now, I’m guessing that you are convinced at how fantastic discount coupons can be when growing your ecommerce sales. In fact, you’ve probably already added a discount coupon on your site at this point.
However, I hope you aren’t limiting the way you use your discount coupons by only adding them on your site. More than doing that, you can also add your coupons on high-traffic community driven sites that people look into to find discount offers.
I’m talking about reputable discount coupon sites like Dealspotr.com. A quick visit to their homepage and you’ll realize that the users are very active.
You’ll see people sharing, commenting, and upvoting each other’s coupons. These are the kind of user engagements that will help make your discount offers go viral. Of course, the more people see your discount offers, the higher the chances of people buying.
4. Is your ecommerce site optimized for conversion?
When you mapped out your ecommerce site’s design and functionality, I hope that making it easier for your users to buy any of your products was on top of your list.
I know it’s quite tempting to add all sorts of nifty features on your site, but you need to realize that sometimes, adding too many of these can distract your web visitors. Instead of them buying, they end up doing other things like sharing your product page or clicking away to read your previous customer’s testimonials.
While there is certainly some value in compelling your community to share your pages, you need to remember that having your page shared isn’t your goal. Your goal is to get them to buy. Anything else comes second.
5. Is your website traffic highly targeted?
There is no point in you getting hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors that are interested in learning about car spare parts if your ecommerce site is all about selling skin care products.
None of them are going to buy from you.
Not only will your bounce rate skyrocket (which may lead to you having all sorts of search engine ranking problems), but there’s even a chance the web visitors will end up bashing you for attracting them to your site.
No matter where you look at it, it’s a lose-lose situation.
That’s the importance of attracting highly targeted traffic.
One of the best ways to get highly targeted traffic is to do guest posting. If you aren’t quite familiar with the process, then you can check out the comprehensive guide that I’ve written about guest posting.
6. Do you have an amazing product? No Really!
There’s a reason why I added the “No Really!” bit in my subhead. There are those who choose to see their product as something more than what it is. This happens when the site’s owners are sick and tired of spending any more of their resources on product development because of the budget constraints.
Look. If you are truly serious about getting more sales out of your ecommerce sites, then you need to give yourself some serious gut check. You need to take a look at your product for what it is and evaluate its quality without any biases.
A good measuring tool to peg the quality of your product against with is your competitor’s product. If you feel that your product (or your business) doesn’t have a distinct advantage over your competitor’s, then you might want to address this obstacle first.
What’s next?
Is your ecommerce site on a sales slump? What do you feel is causing it and what are the action steps are you taking to remedy the situation.
Please share your ideas in the comments section below. Cheers!
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