Recipe of a successful website with boosted ecommerce conversion rate

Recipe of a successful website with boosted eCommerce conversion rate

You can never launch a perfect website! Yes, that’s a truth, because there is no shortcut or fast track to success in eCommerce business at least. By working with a successful eCommerce site, I have experienced and learned some lessons that are important for every successful business. How can you measure the success of your eCommerce business? There is only one scale that is directly related to all the other scales of a successful eCommerce website- eCommerce conversion rate.

The most important thing that should be known to every eCommerce website owner is they are running the business for a reason, and this reason can never be the mere presence of a job to do in your life. An eCommerce business solves a problem and fills the need of the seekers who come to the website. I have written several articles

addressing the eCommerce conversion rate and eCommerce conversion optimization.

Here, in this article, I will concentrate on the determinants that decide the success of your eCommerce business.

Recipe of an eCommerce success-

The success of an eCommerce business is a dependent phenomenon that banks on business objectives and final goal. Profits, revenue generation, micro conversion rate, macro-conversion rate, marketing strategy, and so forth, all are the determinants that decide the fate of the business. Regardless of what is the ultimate goal or what path one chooses, the eCommerce conversion rate and business success are deeply interlinked.

Here are the key determinants:

Knowledge of your target customers- It is important to have a knowledge of:

what products your customers would want How they will search for those products on the Internet How they will search them on your website How they will choose a seller How they will purchase the item from your store and

What are the support they need post purchase These are the certain questions which you need to ask yourself on the first hand.

Moreover, it is your task to find the answer for the same too.

Choose the products wisely- The products you choose to sell on your website decide the route of eCommerce conversion rate. If you have an answer to what customers would like to purchase on your website, you are going in right direction. However, a lame selection of products without inspecting these aspects would only generation of distraction from the actual needs of the customers.

The products on your website should be wisely differentiated from your rival sites in some way. That is called the USP of the product on your website. For most of the times, you would be selling a product that can be found on every other eCommerce site. It’s your job to build an USP that claims a differentiated experience from other websites.

The USPs could be Product quality, Price, Presentation, Availability, Shipping time, Shipping cost, Reach of the Shipping service and much more.

USP of your offer- Every other website on the internet provides some offer to the customers. However, differentiating your products and business from them is what that you have to latch upon. If you are able to define your value proposition and can showcase the same across your offers and customer experience, that will be your USP. To do the same, you can latch upon marketing and promotion of your offers. For example, if your competitor provides 20 % discount on a product, your value proposition could be

not just the 20 % discount, but also a free shipping on the same.

The sale is the ultimate goal, but leveraging micro conversions can result in some real eCommerce conversion too. For example, A good comparison tool on your product page will improve the user engagement.

Leverage marketing tools to gain visibility in the initial phase- At the initial phase of your business, it might be real difficult to gain a proper visibility in the organic SERPs. However, it’s a truth and you should not depend on search engine visibility at the very beginning itself. It takes some time to make a proper place in the organic results.

You can opt for the paid listings in the beginning. For example Google Adwords, Bing Ads are the paid listings of Google and Bing where you can gain a visibility. There are other important ways to survive in the initial phase such as Social Media Marketing (Facebook Ads, SnapChat business, etc). Affiliate marketing is also an important and essential component that should be in your marketing strategy. You need to active all these channels to align your visibility across the population. Do not just depend on these approaches, constantly update your approach based on your analysis from time to time.

Use out of the box tools - Any CRO strategy is not complete without the mention of two very important tools. A/B testing and Heatmap tools have been in the CRO plans for a very long time and they seem to be in the same forever. The role of A/B testing and heatmap tracking in eCommerce conversion rate optimization is something that is known to every CRO professional.

During the initial as well as the established phase of your eCommerce business, A/B testing before any change on the website is a standard convention. A/B testing before a change will let you know if the change is good for your conversion or it will counter the conversion rates instead.

On the other hand, how the current elements on your website are performing and how visitors are engaging with the website are the two questions that can be answered easily by a heatmap tool. Moreover, you can leverage the analytics of the heatmap tool to decide the variations to be made in the A/B testing. Both the tools are complementary to each other and together they can be very useful for your eCommerce conversion rate optimization. I have written various article on A/B testing and heatmap tracking, you should have a look to know more.

The MockingFish tool is a free A/B testing and heatmap tool that you can use in your success plan.