Ecommerce CRO: Everything You Need To Know To Increase Conversion Rates

Driving more traffic to your ecommerce website is just one essential part of running a successful online business. The next step is a bit more challenging—converting your website users into paying customers.

There are many elements that can make or break your ecommerce conversion rate. Luckily, there are a number of things you can do to improve it using the process known as conversion rate optimization (CRO).

We’ll take a closer look at why CRO is so important for ecommerce businesses, as well as expert-approved tips to help improve your website’s conversion rates.

What Is Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization and Why Is It So Important?

Ecommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the art of improving your website to turn more of your visitors into customers and increase your revenue.

This involves improving many elements on your ecommerce website, including your homepage, category pages, search results page, product pages, cart, and checkout. 

Here are the main benefits of ecommerce CRO: 

• Increases the usability of your website so that more users purchase.
• Generates many more ecommerce sales on your website using existing traffic. 
• Maximizes your marketing spend ROI and lowers the cost of acquisition. 
• Gives you a much better understanding of your visitors and customers.

What is a Good Ecommerce CRO Conversion Rate?

A good conversion rate for ecommerce businesses is 2%, and if you are doing very well that could get to 4% or more. But that depends on what type of products you are selling, how expensive they are, and who your target audience is.

If your conversion rate is lower than 2%, you will have great potential to increase this by doing CRO.

Even small lifts in website conversion rates can greatly impact your ecommerce revenue.

Expert Tips on How to Increase Ecommerce Sales With CRO

Now that you know why CRO is so important for your business, you may be wonder how to make the necessary changes to your ecommerce store.

In this section, you will discover some expert tips that you can use to grow your ecommerce sales, conversion rates and revenue.

With over 15 years of experience, I have become an expert in this field and, by using these tips, I have helped many ecommerce businesses increase their sales and conversion rates.

Clearly display your UVP on entry pages

Your UVP (unique value proposition) outlines why your website visitors should buy from your website instead of competitors.

Many ecommerce websites don’t explain this well, meaning that their visitors may go to a competitor website that explains their UVP better.

The biggest problem is actually hiding it away on your website — don’t presume your visitors know your UVP! That is why it’s essential to show your UVP on your entry pages to ensure visitors always see it, no matter what page they arrive on.

One of the best ways to do this is by adding a UVP bar below your navigation menu with some key benefits/risk reducers, with engaging icons. Huel.com do this very well.

Always mention your UVP on your homepage above the page fold, either in the form of a headline or bullet points with icons. Huel.com do this well.

Don’t forget to promote UVP in your Google Ads and Facebook Ads too, as that will increase click-through rates, and improve message continuation.

And lastly, don’t be satisfied with your current UVP. You should always try to improve it to beat your competitors, for example by offering a 110% price match guarantee or a longer warranty.

Improve your category page and search results filters

Category pages and search results are very important for visitors to help them browse, particularly if they don’t know exactly what they want.

Having poor filters on your ecommerce platform often means that visitors have to scroll through hundreds of products which contributes to paradox of choice and much higher exit rates.

That is why it’s essential to improve your filters on category pages and search results so visitors can easily drill down and find exactly what they need.

This is what you need to do to optimize your filters:

• Don’t hide them away — make them always present in your sidebar or at the top
• Make them sticky at the top on mobile devices, so they can be used at any time
• Ensure you can choose multiple filters at the same time
• Check that your filters are easy to select and deselect, particularly on mobile
• Add more filter types — not just brand, price and colour, but also use types, etc.

GymShark.com do this well and have great sticky filters at the top of their category pages. 

Promote your shipping and returns incentives

Not only does free or low-cost shipping really help increase your ecommerce conversion rates, but many of your competitors are offering it.

And now many smarter ecommerce stores are also offering free returns to make it easier for visitors to try products with lower risk.

But don’t just improve your shipping and returns incentives. You need to make them much more prominent – many ecommerce stores make the mistake of hiding their shipping and returns promotions or not making them clear enough.

Therefore this is what you need to do as soon as possible:

• Promote them better by showing near your add-to-cart buttons, on your homepage and in your UVP bar below the navigation. This ensures they get noticed.
• Simplify long and confusing shipping and returns policy pages.
• Always include links for shipping and returns in the footer.

UnboundMerino.com do this very well by promoting their free shipping and returns, and money-back guarantee, right by their add-to-cart CTA.

Improve your product imagery and add videos

It’s obviously essential to show photos of your products. But the bar for quality and number of product photos is now very high on ecommerce websites.

Not only does this make shopping online easier and more appealing, but it’s also a great ecommerce conversion rate optimization strategy to increase sales.

If you only have 1 or 2 pictures, or they are low quality, you will lose ecommerce sales to competitors with more or better ones.

That is why its essential you do this to improve your ussage of product images and videos:

• Get more high-quality images of your most popular products — at least 3 per product, and include photos of them being used or worn.
• Increase the quality and resolution of your current photos, which also means your zoom will work better. I also recommend getting 360° photos created so visitors can see your product from any angle.
• Create short videos of your most popular products — a video is worth 1000 photos! These should be under 1 minute and highlight your product being used and the features and benefits of it.
• Get your customers to include photos with their reviews. To get this quicker you should email your customers and give anyone a gift certificate that submits a photo.
• Ensure your image carousel works well on mobile, including swiping. This is very important with such a high percentage of users now on mobile.

Vashi.com does a particularly well for showing many images from different angles and being worn by different people. They also include a video to show you what the product looks like in real life.

Fix your hidden website issues 

It doesn’t matter how well you improve your website if hidden issues aren’t discovered and resolved.

And I’m not talking about 404 issues or broken links — its the less visible things impacting user experience that you may not have checked very well.

For example, a Shopify app could be breaking your filters on some devices or not showing correct search results. Or your cookie banners may be blocking CTA buttons.

Here are some of the other most common ecommerce hidden websites issues:

• Poor or not understandable field error validation in checkout
• Broken/squashed layout on smaller devices with 375 width
• Mega menus that cover important content and CTA buttons
• Layout broken on tablet due to stretched buttons or images that are too large
• Product image gallery is not working properly on mobile
• Site search not working well or giving bad results

See more examples of hidden common website issues that you need to fix. 

The best way to discover these hidden issues is by using a tool like BrowserStack.com to check your website in the most common browsers and devices.

You should also do regular user testing with a tool like Userfeel to discover hidden issues.

Fixing these has a huge positive impact on the conversion rate and ecommerce sales for your online store.

Get Expert Help from an Ecommerce CRO Consultant

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) doesn’t have to be expensive to get good ecommerce revenue results, and you can do it quickly even if you can’t afford to hire a full-time CRO role for your team.

I’m an experienced ecommerce CRO consultant offering services with high impact and ROI on your ecommerce website revenue.

Why Use Rich Page to Boost Ecommerce Sales With CRO?

• I have over 15 years experience in CRO and have increased conversion rates and ecommerce sales for 100’s of ecommerce websites.
        
• I’m the author of two popular books about CRO, ‘Website Optimization: An Hour a Day’ and ‘Landing Page Optimization’ 2nd edition with Tim Ash.
• You get help from just me, a seasoned CRO consultant that focuses on ecommerce websites – not from an outsourced team or from rookies.

Recent Examples of Ecommerce CRO Success For Clients

• 44% increase in conversion rate for UnboundMerino.com, and $216K in annualized revenue.
• 164% increase in conversion rate for ManlyBands.com, and $988K in annualized revenue.
• 19% increase in conversion rate for JosephJoseph.com, and £260K in annualized revenue. 
• 66% increase in conversion rate for an online mattress retailer, and $2.6M in annualized revenue.

I Specialize In These High-Impact CRO Services

Expert Website Conversion Rate Optimization Reviews

Using my extensive experience with conversion rate optimization, I review your ecommerce website and give you many high-impact recommendations to quickly improve your conversion rate.

This is done live via an interactive screen share with you and your team. It also includes a website improvement roadmap with the key recommendations.

Here are a few examples of CRO teardowns for ecommerce brands that are short versions of my live website conversion reviews:

Product page teardown for Huel

In this teardown, we find many elements on their product page that could be improved. This includes:

• Fixing the most common DTC issue about subscriptions.
• Increasing usage of customer images and user-generated content (UGC).
• The issues with their unconventional product page layout.
• Using sticky sub-navigation to improve user experience.

Category page review for Allbirds.com 

Although the website has some good filter options, there are many ways the brand could improve their page. This includes:

• Improving filters and sort options.
• Showing their unique value proposition with content blocks.
• Adding lifestyle imagery when hovering over products.
• Making filters sticky on mobile so that they get used more.

Conversion Research For High-Impact User Insights

You cannot do effective ecommerce CRO without understanding your website user’s main issues, doubts and hesitations. Without this you will be guessing at what to improve and won’t convert them very often.

That’s why I focus on doing conversion research to discover this and generate much higher impact ideas for improving your ecommerce website revenue. This includes: 

• visitor and customer surveys
• user testing for your target audience
• session recordings and click maps

These factors are ignored by most companies that do conversion optimization services, who focus on A/B testing instead. Although they may use best practices, they often fail to get good results.

My conversion research gives you a comprehensive understanding of your website visitors to convert them into ecommerce sales more often.

Get My Free Expert Ecommerce Roadmap and a CRO Consultation

When I do an expert CRO website review for an online business, I create a CRO roadmap with all my recommendations in it, prioritized by highest impact. This helps them understand what to launch first.

To help ecommerce companies who are serious about increasing their conversion rates and revenue, I have created a free version of this CRO roadmap.

This isn’t a basic ecommerce CRO checklist. It’s an expert roadmap based on my 15 years of doing CRO for ecommerce websites. 

The Benefits of My Expert Ecommerce CRO Roadmap

• 75+ high-impact expert CRO recommendations for improving your ecommerce revenue
• Prioritized by highest impact so that you know exactly what to launch and improve first
• Covers not just your website, but also your email automation flows, Google Ads and Facebook Ads
• Examples from high-converting websites like JohnLewis.com, AO.com, REI.com and Harrys.com
• Conversion research recommendations to gain user insights, like customer surveys and user testing
• Ecommerce key metrics for you to measure your CRO impact and ecommerce success

Below is an example of 5 of the 75+ CRO recommendations in my roadmap.

To get my free expert ecommerce CRO roadmap, simply complete the form below. If it’s a good fit for your type of ecommerce website, I will then contact you and send you the roadmap. 

We will then set up a time for your free CRO consultation, where we will discuss your ecommerce website and how I can help you achieve conversion success.