Imagine having a retail store that’s packed with people, but at the end of the day, no one’s bought anything. That’s what happens when you get traffic to your website through eCommerce SEO, ads, or social media but fail to convert visitors into customers. It’s not a traffic issue. It’s a conversion problem. That’s where
Imagine having a retail store that’s packed with people, but at the end of the day, no one’s bought anything.
That’s what happens when you get traffic to your website through eCommerce SEO, ads, or social media but fail to convert visitors into customers.
It’s not a traffic issue. It’s a conversion problem.
That’s where eCommerce conversion rate optimisation (CRO) comes in.
CRO is about turning visits into sales.
Done well, it’s the fastest way to grow revenue.
In this article, you’ll learn how we approach CRO with our clients, including the frameworks we use, the common mistakes we see to avoid, and with real examples and results to show how CRO for eCommerce works.
CRO is about improving the experience on your site so that more people buy. For eCommerce, this usually means product pages, checkout flows and campaign landing pages.
Working out your conversion rate is pretty easy, it’s just:
Conversion rate = conversions ÷ sessions × 100
So if 100,000 people visit and 2,000 buy, your conversion rate is 2%.
Which is good to know, but how do you know if that’s good compared to competitors or your industry’s average?
You can use benchmarks to help here.
In the UK, the average eCommerce conversion rate is 3.4%.
But this differs a lot by individual industry. For example, supermarkets and grocery sites convert at 11.1%, fashion at 5.2%, while baby & child stores sit closer to 1%.
Globally, eCommerce conversion rates are between 2-4%, with food and beauty brands often performing best with electronics and home décor on the lower end.
So generally speaking, if you’re under a 2% conversion rate, you’re on the low end.
Anything around 3% puts you in a stronger position, especially in competitive sectors.
Good CRO isn’t about great sweeping changes. Even tiny improvements can make a big difference.
Take this example from one of our own clients.
Their website was getting around 314,300 users a month with 3,900 conversions. That’s a conversion rate of 1.25% and revenue of £462,000 a month.
Over a few months of testing, we raised that conversion rate to 1.88%, which you might not think is much.
But that incremental increase improved their monthly revenue by 50% to £693,000.
And that was without the need to spend on attracting more traffic to the site, either with ads, social or SEO.
Add higher average order values on top (with clever cross-sells and upsells across the site) and you can see how these small improvements compound quickly.
So, instead of chasing more volume, CRO can help you achieve more sales from the traffic you’re already getting.
To improve CRO on your eCommerce website (or any website), these are the things to focus on.
1. Understand the motive
What’s the product? Why does it matter to the customer? If the core value isn’t clear, no optimisation will help.
2. Find opportunities
Ask sales and support where customers hesitate. Back this up with analytics. By understanding what is happening and why, you can start to plug the holes in website sales.
3. Make sure your site works
Before trying anything fancy, make sure you’ve got the basics right. Does your checkout work? Do forms submit properly? Fixing issues like these can get instant results.
4. Add motivators to pages
Urgency, scarcity, and social proof can nudge people over the line. If you use them in the right places. Use heat maps and recordings to see how people scan your pages, and where this social proof might help.
LIFT is a simple lens for judging site changes:
Like I’ve said, CRO isn’t about changing everything all at once.
So don’t spread yourself thin.
Start where changes deliver the biggest improvements:
Everything in CRO needs to be driven by data and real insights. But it’s not always done that way. These are the most common mistakes we see that you should avoid.
What works for them may flop for you. And unless you see their conversion data, you don’t even know if the changes they make are working. Don’t just copy competitors. Test your own CRO experiments to find what works for you.
CRO isn’t about getting more clicks. It’s about turning more of those clicks into sales.
CRO is all about testing and refining. But if you make multiple changes at once and something happens, you don’t know which change made the difference. Make small changes that are easy to track over time, rather than big sweeping changes all at once.
I get that you want as much information as possible about a customer. But they want to give you as little information as possible to get the thing they want. So don’t add too many fields to a form. You can use dynamic fields to change what the user sees each time they complete a form.
You want to give website visitors as much information as possible to help them make a buying decision. But overloading pages with words or pictures can distract from what you want them to do. Instead, research what matters to your audience and what they care about and focus on getting that across on web pages.
Page speed is an important one because it can impact your SEO rankings if you have a slow website (core web vitals), which means you’re less visible. But customers also aren’t going to stick around waiting for a product page to load. Page load speed jumping from 1 to 3 seconds can increase bounce rates as much as 32%.
We worked with golf retailer Clarkes Golf on a CRO strategy for their Shopify website. Sales were already strong, and they were getting plenty of traffic both from organic search and paid ads. But making small tweaks to above-the-fold content and banners, along with other page improvements, increased conversions and revenue even more.
CRO delivered for Clarkes Golf:
If you want to improve conversion rates on your eCommerce site, these are steps we recommend you take over the next few weeks.
As marketer’s we can be guilty of always looking to chase more traffic, rather than making better use of what we’re already getting.
More traffic without conversions is just wasted effort anyway. And CRO can plug the leaks in sales funnels, turning existing visits into sales without endless ad or marketing spend.
If you want to see how you can improve your website’s conversion rates, get in touch with our conversion rate optimisation experts.
You can get a free strategy session where we’ll go through your marketing and website’s analytics to see where we can help make improvements to get more conversions and revenue from existing traffic.
Speak to a member of our team and start your project today!
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