A Hustler's Guide: Turning Ecommerce Visitors Into Customers

I run a number of online stores, and there's nothing more infuriating than doing all the hard work of getting customers to visit a site, only to have them bounce off without buying anything - especially when I've spent my hard-earnt money on advertising just to get them there!

Over the years, I've refined my process a bit and the following are a few quick tips that you can implement to increase conversions on your own ecommerce site. Hopefully they help!

I'd also be curious - if any of you Steemers run an online store, post the link below - let's see if we can help you do better!

Offer Free Shipping

Thanks to large merchants like Amazon, online consumers (particularly in the USA) have come to expect that shipping will always be free, and additional shipping costs have rapidly become one of the largest driving forces behind cart abandonment.

You might not have a huge shipping and logistics infrastructure underlying your e-commerce store, but you can still offer free domestic shipping by working it into the price of the goods you’re selling.

Make Your Checkout Process Simple

A good e-commerce site will make it as easy as possible for website visitors to become customers, and simplifying your checkout process is an easy way to do this.

It’s the little things like:

• Making sure the “cart” and “checkout” buttons are visible at all times, even when a user scrolls down your site.
• Automatically directing customers to checkout after they add an item to cart
• Having a single page for checkout (rather than separating shipping and payment pages)
• Allowing users to checkout without having to register an account first

Re-targeting and Cart Abandonment

Have you ever visited a website only to have their ads follow you around the Internet for the next 3 months? It’s not sorcery, it’s just re-targeting, and you can do it too.

Most of the major social networks, as well as major advertising networks like Google Adwords, have tracking codes you can place on your site that allow you to later target your website visitors with ads. Some of the more modern ones even allow you to show ads for products they were looking at on your store!

Re-targeting is a super valuable weapon in your sales arsenal, because it allows you to show ads at people who have already expressed an interest in your store. And because visitors to your site may require more than a single visit to make a purchasing decision, re-targeting them helps you increase the number of visits, and makes it more likely they will buy.

Similarly, cart abandonment software will allow you to reach out to customers who added something to their cart, only to leave your site. Obviously they just forgot to checkout!

Show Customer Photos on your Checkout page

A fun little growth-hack we picked up along the way is to show photos on your checkout page of customers using the products that are in your customer’s cart.

This is a fun little psychological brain hack that makes the customer “see themselves in the moment” – where they subconsciously imagine what it will be like when they

Use Live Chat Software

Live chat software has been around for a while now, but it’s still implemented in surprisingly few online stores.

Having a live chat widget on your site adds the ability for customers to contact and talk to you without ever leaving your website, and with tons of free livechat options out there, there’s really no excuse these days for not having one, whether you’re a small business answering the queries yourself (with chat messages sent straight to your phone), or a massive organisation with a team of dedicated customer support reps.

Use “Exit Intent” pop-ups

Look, we all hate the 2016/2017 trend of visiting a website only to be instantly blasted with a pop-up inviting us to subscribe to a mailing list before we even have a chance to checkout the site, but exit intent pop-ups are completely different, and allow you a last chance to grab the user’s attention when they perform an action that indicates they’re about to leave your site.

You might offer them a discount code if they stick around, or some sort of other incentive to keep them engaged. Remember, it might only need to be something small to erode the tiny bit of willpower that’s making them not proceed to checkout.

Know Your Data

Chances are you have Google Analytics installed on your site, but are you really using it to the fullest?

Off the top of your head, you should know things like “How do most buyers (not just visitors) find their way to our site?”, and “On which page are people most likely to abandon a purchase?”

Knowing your data allows you to restructure your site to minimise cart abandonment, increase sales of complementary goods, double down on marketing with your most lucrative revenue sources and more easily guide customers towards a purchase.

Final Thoughts

Depending on how you source your web traffic, it can become very expensive to get people to visit your site, and if you’re not getting a conversion rate that justifies your cost of customer acquisition, then you're wasting your marketing dollars.

So, before you start looking at how to get more visitors, it’s important that you spend time working out why the visitors you’re already getting aren’t buying.

Want to interact with this post??

More and more, I'm seeing people post comments on Steemit that say "Great job" and "Well written!", that don't really add anything of value to the discussion. If you want to add a comment, I recommend:

• Telling us some ways you improved the conversion rate on your own site
• Ask a question about something that's been said, or something that you think needs clarification
• Ask your own questions about increasing conversion on your site
• Show us your site and ask for feedback

Remember, it's up to all of us to make Steemit better!