4 myths to avoid in an ecommerce conversion optimization

4 Myths to avoid in an eCommerce conversion optimization

E-Commerce market has gone too competitive nowadays. Gone are the days when only some countable number of sites ruled the online market. With the growing market, customers buying behavior is changing too. E-Commerce sites owners have to now consider conversion optimization as a must to apply the practice.

However, the conversion optimization strategies have developed themselves exponentially and newer ideas are being introduced each day. Meanwhile, just a tiny deviation from their original path have made these strategies buggy. Myths and misconceptions are the obvious elements to get included here. Let's get to know about these mistakes and try to find out how we are doing them wrong.

1. A/B testing helps you decide the best design for maximum conversionThere is no doubt, A/B testing tools can provide the critical assistance in improving the conversion rates. They help you decide the best website design that would be liked by most of the customers.

But, have you wondered, which are those designs? You feed two or more design options to your A/B testing tool and it tells you which one is best “among the two or more�.

If your customers will have only those two options, it is obvious that they are going to use either of them and result would come with reference to those two options only. So, it's a clear myth that a single A/B testing alone is enough to help you decide the best design for better conversion optimization. Following the right practices of A/B testing and giving your users with more those two options would definitely have a different result.

What you should do: Follow the right practices of A/B testing and perform multiple tests before adopting a design on the basis of a single test result. There are certain chances that your topper of the first test might not be able to compete with an another combination of choices.

2. CRO is all about changing designs and colorsIf it's not converting, I will change the color, Flip the design, and adjust the placement; it will start converting. That's the common perception of conversion optimization nowadays. The truth is they can hardly be blamed for a sick conversion rate on your website. For example, if people don't like the paid shipping on your eCommerce site, they are not going to buy from you. It carries no effect if your shipping CTA is black, blue, bigger smaller or anything.

Here, you have to understand that your website's conversion rate is directly dependent on your USP as well as leaks in your website. By leaks, I mean the fault on your website, policies, services; not the color of your elements. Imagine a bucket with a large number of leaks in it. It will keep leaking even you paint it with some different color or change its shape. It will keep leaking until you fill those leaks.

Same is the case with your website. If it has leaks, it will keep bouncing your customers from the other end until you work on the leaks.

What yo need to do: Make navigation on your website smooth.

Provide detailed and correct product information Use the signs of trust and security to make your visitors believe that your website is credible.

Do not force your prospects to go through an unnecessary process to get what they have come for.

These are just example of few leaks that you can work upon. It would be a perfect CRO if you can find such leaks and fix them; not just tweak your designs and colors.

3. You think you know your customers and do not need to interact with themYou must be having 101 ideas to tweak your website so as to increase its conversion rate. There are certain chances that can force you to think that you have been knowing your customers for a long

time. Now, you can do the changes without knowing their views. You are certain that your changes would be liked by the customers for sure.

That's called over confidence and a wrong approach to conversion rate optimization. You should keep in mind that, regardless the type of industry you are in, even if you sell just a few products, your are going to sell your products to a variety of customer profiles. These customers are not identical; they have different motivation factors and varied level of understanding. At last, it is the customer who is going to decide the fate of your CRO. You never know, which kind of customer would like which element from the site, and which element would not appeal them. The point is, there are different types of customers on your website and you have to consider each of them to survive in the market. If you want to convert, it’s obvious that you will need to gather feedback from them. Use the feedback data to decide the tweaks in your experiments. Going blind would just destroy your current conversions too.

4. Conversion optimization is all about sales improvementFor eCommerce websites, most of the marketers believe that conversion rate optimization is all about taking a leap in sales. However, the case is not true always. Depending on your business and objectives, there are many other conversion goals if you can track them.

Let's take and example a non-eCommerce site. These sites have blogs, news, and information. The conversion goal of these sites is to earn a visitor loyalty with reference to visitor recency. They bother about how often visitors come to the site and for how long they remain there.

For another example, you eCommerce site too can have some other conversion goals. Your email marketing campaign has two type of conversion goal. First is to get the readers (making sure they do not end up in the spam folder of the user), second is getting a click on the CTA button in the email so as to land the customer on your website.

Point is, even if you have an eCommerce site where sales id the major metric of eCommerce conversion, it is not the only metric. There certain other conversion goals and metric that needs your attention too.

Conclusion Conversion rate optimization techniques have been used by the marketer and websites owners for a long time. They have covered a long time. Meanwhile, there has been certain additions and updates to the core value which have changed their perspective a lot. Some of the perspectives that worked for its improvement while some of them are nothing but a myth. It is now, up to your understanding that you want to adopt the desirable strategies or want to live with these myths.