When you launch an online business, the first big challenge is driving traffic to the website. If you don’t have any visitors in the first place, you’re not going to make any sales. Unfortunately, getting people to the site is only half the battle, the real challenge is getting those people to actually spend their money which is why conversion rates are so important. So many businesses find that they can get the traffic but they have a low conversion rate so their sales just aren’t picking up very much at all. If you’re having the same issue, these are some of the potential reasons for low conversion rate and what you can do about it.
Poor Navigation
Poor navigation is one of the most frustrating things about a website. If you land on the homepage and you have to search around a load of confusing menus to find what you need, you’re not likely to buy anything. People aren’t that patient when they’re online so unless they can jump straight to what they’re looking for, they’re likely to leave the site after a minute or two. One of the main reasons that people struggle with poor navigation on their site is that they use templates which aren’t really suited to their website. When you use a template, you limit yourself quite a bit and while it’s fine for simple websites, it’s not always ideal for an ecommerce site. You’ll find that your conversion rate increases if you get a proper web design company to build you a custom website that is easy to get around. You need to make the menus as simple as possible and use clear headings so it’s immediately obvious where people need to go, and you need a good search function on there as well.
Bad Design
Sometimes, people won’t even browse the website before they decide that they’re not interested. Whether you like it or not, people do judge a book by its cover a lot of the time so if your website design and branding isn’t very good, you might be losing a lot of sales. It’s important that you put a lot of thought into things like the colour scheme, the fonts that you use, and the pictures and videos on the site. If it doesn’t have a professional design, people will get a bad impression of your business and they won’t want to spend their money with you.
Frustrating Checkout Page
Even if you manage to get somebody to browse your products and they decide that they want to buy them, you haven’t guaranteed a sale yet. Cart abandonment is a massive problem for ecommerce stores and so many people change their minds just before they make the purchase. There are a lot of different reasons for this but one of the most common is a frustrating checkout page. If you make it difficult for people to buy products from you, they’re not going to. That’s why you need to ensure that the checkout page is streamlined so customers can finalize their purchase quickly and easily before they have a chance to change their mind.
Poor conversion rates can kill an ecommerce business so it’s important that you do something about it now before it’s too late.
- This post has been written by an outside source – Please see my Disclosure Policy
