Are potential customers bouncing off your eCommerce site without making a single purchase? Do you have lots of visitors browsing your store but not plenty of sales? If your visitors aren’t converting at all, or there’s a sudden drop in the conversion rate, your bottom line will suffer from it.

In order to avoid such circumstances, the first step you should do is to identify the underlying cause. There are lots of reasons for people being hesitant to buy from you after they visit your online store. In this article, we will diagnose the most common issues for why customers would fail to make a purchase after they visit. You could then improve your store by avoiding all the conversion killers.

Long Website Loading Time

Website loading speed is very important. The faster your site loads, the better it is and every second account. Websites that load within 2 seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, while sites that load in 5 seconds experience a bounce rate that skyrockets to above 38%.

A slow loading site is likely to cause low user engagement and increase the bounce rate. Hence, it’s clear that your eCommerce site needs to load fast to not lose out on any sale opportunities.

There are various ways you can fix such a conversion rate killer and end up improving your site loading speed, such as downloading a fast and responsive theme, using compressed images, reducing the number of apps installed on your site since several apps running on the background your site is likely to get slower. And finally, minimize redirects and broken links.

Poor Product Image and Product Description

Images matter for conversion. The better your product images look, the more likely your product pages are to convert. Avoid tiny, low-quality, fuzzy images in favor of large, clear, and interesting photos if you want to improve conversion. You can also use product videos to win customers; video is proven to increase engagement, and the longer people stick around, the more likely they are to convert.

It’s not just the quality of the product pictures that are essential, your product descriptions matter as well. The way you write your product description is incredibly important. Writing poor product descriptions is a huge lost opportunity to draw your potential customers into buying your product since you lose the chance to tell your story and differentiate your product from your competitors.

The only solution to this is to write a better product description rather than having nearly meaningless words as your description. Additionally, good descriptions will help your SEO better and improve your ranking on search engines.

Inconspicuous Shopping Cart Button

It’s no surprise how often online shoppers forget about the items they have added to their shopping cart. According to Shopify, this is usually faulted for having a shopping cart that does not turn attention to itself. This is one of the most regular conversion killers with most eCommerce sites.

One way to fix this is by using a pop-up or a small animation to display and make the cart more obvious. You can also have a “continue shopping/checkout” call to action to remind online shoppers that they have items in the cart. Another solution would be installing a checkout button app in your store. This kind of app will alert shoppers once he or she adds items to their cart.

Disruptive Registration

If your store requires new customers to create an account before purchasing, you’re undercutting your conversion rate. According to consultancy, 25% of online shoppers abandon their purchases as soon as they are forced to create an account. To understand how much of a buzzkill this is, look at the issue from a buyer’s point of view. Buyers come to your site to buy products and proceed to checkout. Then they are asked to create an account, create a password, and link their email addresses. This act definitely becomes a turn-off and ends up with buyers leaving your site without completing the purchase.

To make your checkout process conversion-friendly, you should make the account creation optional. If persistent accounts are a part of your loyalty strategy, you can invite them to create an account through their emails after they have already made the purchase. Most online stores have the option of checkout as a guest/visitor so that customer doesn’t have to create an account before they buy. Below is Macy’s online store checkout page, and it is an example of this strategy.

Complicated Checkout Process

Many of your potential customers will abandon their cart and will navigate away from your website and never complete the process if the process is complicated and tedious. If you are able to improve your checkout process, you will definitely improve your sales with a huge margin.

Here’s how you can improve your checkout process and make it more customer-friendly:

• It’s okay to have a multi-page checkout process but keep it clear and simple.
• Make sure it’s clear where shoppers are in the checkout process, for example, with a progress bar.
• Remind people what they’re buying, with product images on the checkout page.
• Include trust seals and shipping information, so they know exactly what they’re paying.

Customers Have to Pay for Shipping

Shipping cost kills conversion. That’s why so many eCommerce retailers offer free shipping. A lot of people abandon shopping carts because of high costs, especially shipping costs. Customers don’t like to pay additional fees, if you’re charging for shipping, think about making it free (or even adding the shipping cost to the product cost). And if you already offer free shipping, make sure all customers can see it by putting it on every page of your site.

Lack of Payment Methods

Accepting different payment methods is crucial. Imagine a customer has added products into the cart and wants to check out, but then realizes he/she cannot proceed to pay because your store doesn’t accept a certain payment method. That would be upsetting for both you and your customer. Platforms such as Shopify always come with their own payment system so in case your site doesn’t have a payment method yet all you need to do is activate any of the available payment methods, which include: Shopify payments, payment by cash, and 3rd party payment providers such as PayPal.

Lack of Retargeting and Remarketing strategies

Remarketing is an essential part of any eCommerce conversion process. It’s a way to get the attention of people who come to your site and leave without completing a purchase. This is important because most people won’t be ready to make a purchase on their very first visit to your site. Ever noticed how when you leave a site and then go to Facebook, you see an ad for that same site in the sidebar?

That’s remarketing in action, and it’s very effective, increasing both engagement and conversions. You can also run an email retargeting campaign to make offers to people who’ve been to your site before, and showcase relevant upsells to people browsing your site. Putting the right offer in front of the right people at the right time will increase the conversion rate.

Last words

Getting traffic to your store is just half the battle. The other half involves transforming that organic or paid traffic into paying customers once they are on your site. And the only way to do that is by optimizing your website’s conversion rate and getting rid of top conversion killers. Please pay close attention to this article as it can help you to improve your store and your conversion rate greatly.