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Often if your e-Commerce website has been trading for a little while improving sales is more of a matter of refining rather than forcing more traffic through your sales funnel. Our web designers and marketers have put together a list of 28 of the most profitable improvements to action for any e-commerce store.
1) Improve your eCommerce page loading time
Improving your sites loading speed has a 3 point effect. Firstly, it will improve all your processes when a user visits your website, which will enhance their UX. A large percentage of slower websites bounce rates are directly from slow loading pages. Secondly, many abandon carts are from slow loading or processing checkout pages. Consequently, if you reduce the loading time for your checkout page, it follows abandon carts will decrease and online profits will also increase. Lastly, Google is now actively penalising slow loading websites. If you can optimise your websites loading speed to under 4 seconds you will move those road blocks and your site will automatically start ranking better.
2)Improve your Magento Web Design
What we mean here is User Experience design improvements. After all ugly sites sell to if their content and user experience is good. Therefore, don’t just gut the old design, rather refine and improve your website piece by piece. Use a heatmap analytics program such as; heatmap.me , crazyegg or hotjar.com in conjunction with a user experience app like shoppimon which will give you long term slow down and sticking point data.
Improve the Mobile User Experience for your Magento Theme
Google is quickly moving to a mobile-first method of analysing websites. The reason is users are already mostly exploring the internet most via their mobile devices. If your eCommerce experience is clumsy, slow and difficult you will see a high bounce rate on mobile analytics. We suggest spending and designing your content specifically for mobile users.
Some key areas to look for are;
Make use of trust elements on your e-comm store
You one hundred percent should have an SSL certificate (https or green padlock in the address bar) or better yet an EV SSL Certificate (the big green bar). The whole site should be running under https if possible. You should also clearly display that your checkout is secured with XYZ encryption on your pages, again at the top of the checkout page and lastly next to the process this payment button.
You should also add organisation badges, awards prominently, don’t hide them in your footer as an afterthought.
Implement FREE shipping options
Customer surveys illustrate shipping is one of the biggest turn offs to purchasing online. Work your shipping into your pricing. You can offer express shipping options with a profit margin to help offset any loss from the free shipping option. Enable this and watch your sales increase. If you insist on keeping PAID shipping as an option you can add a free shipping give away to your abandon cart follow-up emails as an enticer.
Return Policy and Money Back Guarantees for eCommerce
Our own and external testing has shown displaying these prominently displayed increase conversations and retain customers long term. Remember short term loss for long-term gain.
Prominent Contact information
If you are hiding your contact information away on internal pages you need to ask yourself why!
Nervous shoppers look for reassurance before purchasing. Not clearly having your contact details is very off putting. The first thing prospects think is, what if something goes wrong how can I contact them? Make yourself highly accessible for sales, support and problems. It is a good sales converter and could save yourself an embarrassment if some posts a problem to your social pages.
Social Media Proof
What we mean here is, prospects will often police check your business via your social media accounts. If they have doubts in regards to your permanence, prosperity or popularity they will check your facebook, twitter, Instagram and Google or more. If you do have them make sure they are accessible and aren’t causing confusion between icons to share your content socially.
Ensure if you have social media accounts that content is posted regularly and is up to date. Nothing more off-putting than seeing the last post was made 12 months ago…users will think,
are they even trading?
Good content and social media pages, in general, do sell and generate enquiry, so keep them up to date. Hire a SEO Consultant. However, if you are not going to keep them up to date don’t have them.
Implement testominals
You will have a tiny amount of rank improvement if you have testimonials on your product pages. You will get a lot more conversions from having them clearly displayed near your add to cart buttons and your check out. Furthermore, if you add schema.org to your product pages you will get fantastic Google rich snippets showing on your search results. Customers do click on links in SERPs with the attractive 5 stars far more than those without. High click-through conversions from search will increase your pages rankings a lot!
Implement Trust Seals
Normally when you order an SSL certificate from Comodo or similar provider they will supply code for a certificate seal on your website. Ensure you install in a prominent place to improve trust and therefore conversations.
Live Chat
Having live chat will improve conversations. Users are normally in a rush and if they don’t see what they need in your web pages they will likely leave. However, if they can chat to someone in the moment you will likely earn their businesses. Also, we have seen much higher conversation if every person you chat to received some type of offer coupon if they buy within your normal customer sales cycle timeline.
There are lots of options for this available, typically the paid versions come with a apps for your phone which makes it easier to use. [Updated 05 June 2018] We have recently been texting chatfuel.com and Facebook messenger with great success.
FAQs
Having a detailed frequently asked question page is a great selling tool. Instead of having it hidden away make it easy to access from your product pages. They are a great way to over come common objects and users seek them out and use them.
How good is your FAQs page? They are well worth the time and effort to make them great.
Remove Distractions and De-Clutter
I’m all for upselling. However, make sure your sales message and on-page call to action are clear. The last thing you want is a Las Vega looking page that is a total distraction. Upsells can be done in popups or other pages…they don’t have to be screaming distraction on your sales page.
Detailed Product Information
Often when we get a poor performance ecommerce store we will commonly see very poor content for the under performing product pages. Having a title, image and a sentence is not going to sell your product. Take the time to write at least 500-1500 word description. It should be the best and most detailed product description of all your competitors. Also, make sure you have high-quality large images, description tables, videos displaying the product [promo], videos using the product! and testimonials.
Implement Product Videos
Every product should have a video. Even if it is nothing flash it will help with your on-page conversations and your rankings.
Create a specific offer
Do regular promo offers. Market them in social media, on-page, in your title links. Make it simple and available. [Updated 05 June 2018] Using exit popups we have found work very well. We suggest combining with an email subscription form for best results.
Implement Product Reviews
Create automated review funnels, which are sent directly to purchases. Direct the reviews to different review services so you have a solid review profile online. Copy and reference those reviews on the specific online store product pages. 
Implement A/B Testing
Test your improvements with A/B testing. Improvements for your eCommerce website store should be tested against your current pages. Redirect half your traffic to old page and the remainder to the new page. The page with the best results stays and the other goes. Repeat the test again.
You can also use a/b testing with paid ads, social post just about anything.
Note: Make sure you test with enough traffic.
Cart Abandonment automated systems
Cart Abandonment can represent 10-30% of all your checkout visits. Therefore, it is well worth creating a followup system to attempt to capture some of that business. There are extensions for Magento, which will automatically capture emails and automatically send a series of carefully designed emails and offers to capture and motivate that user to complete their purchase.
We also recommend some type of email ajax capture script and making the email be the first entry on your forms.
Persistent Shopping Cart
Users often come and go from a website up to 9 times on average before they purchase. Therefore it can be beneficial to keep their add products in the cart for when they return. We all know the less hassle and the quicker a customer can go through the cart the more sales you will get.
Customer Surveys
Send out customer surveys. Send them to your abandon carts, send them to completed sales. Ask real questions that will help you improve your services and sell more. Additionally, you can implement automated email list sorting based on customers survey selections.
Sample Custom Survey One
Would you like to receive offers on XYZ in the future
Seemless Checkout Process
If you haven’t already, skip the cart process in your payment funnel. It services little purpose and can easily be moved to a dropdown, tucked away out of view. Remove it and watch your sales increase. At the least remove it from your mobile views.
Furthermore, add widgets like paypal express, Social Media logins to speed up the payment process.
23. Track Sales Funnel Dropoffs
We suggest creating purpose build sales funnels for paid marketing and social media marketing posting. Design your pages to sell rather than direct traffic just to standard product pages. When you have these sales funnel pages in place use heatmaps, a/b testing and advanced analytics to refine them.
24. Discount / Deals Pages
No reason to hide your discounted products. Create a sales or deal page for all your discount deals. Then create lots of upsells and bait for addons.
25. Upsell / Cross Sell
Magento has basic upsell functionality by default, but so many store owners don’t use it. If you don’t you are probably missing 20% plus in sales minimum. I recommend using an advanced upsell and cross sell extension. Additionally, as soon as we finish our AI upseller you should grab that.
26. Add Top Sellers on your Home Page
Don’t make it hard to find your top selling products. People come to your store for them make it easy for people to buy, not hard. If you want to sell more use upsellers and cross sellers.
27. Good Search Functionality
If you have over 40 products you should have good search functionality. Regular users don’t want to crawl through multiple pages to buy their favourite things. Let them search and buy and make it easy. Additionally, having great search can enable users to find what they want, much faster leaving them time to buy more stuff.
28. Have a Great about page
An about page is often an afterthought. However, the logic is all wrong. Many users will go to your about page, so why not use the opportunity to sell. Make a great about page with a soft sell call to action.
29. BONUS TIP – Search Engine Optimisation
The difference a real SEO can make is profound. Appearing in the top 3 listings in Google can easily increase your website traffic 100%+ . For ecommerce rich onpage content, correct schema and lots of quality backlinks make a huge difference.
