Top 6 Tips to Increase Your Conversion Rate When Using an eCommerce Theme
The average conversion rate for eCommerce websites across the board is a little more than two percent. Regardless of the amount of revenue your company generates each year, increasing this rate even a few percentage points can do wonders for your bottom line. Following these quick tips when designing the theme of your eCommerce website will allow you to achieve this goal sooner than you might think.
Make Your Search Line Easy to Find
The search line of your eCommerce website needs to be placed in clear, plain sight. Your customers should not have to scroll and click through multiple pages to simply access the search bar within your site. When deciding which theme to use or which design layout to develop, you need to make sure the search bar is easy to find within the first few seconds.
Whether your customers are visiting your site for the first time ever or simply the first time today, having your search bar readily available and easy to find will increase your chances of keeping their attention and preventing abandonment
Use Photos within Your Shopping Cart
Whether you decide to go with the shopping cart design that appears each time an item is added or a design that only notifies the customer that something was added doesn’t really matter.
The proper placement of the actual cart within your website design is of the utmost importance, right along with including photos of the products that have been added. To decrease shopping cart abandonment, you will need to use these pictures to retain customer interest and keep your prospective buyers hooked.
Otherwise, your custom eCommerce web design will be leaving the door wide open for them to head towards one of your competitors instead.
Keep Loading Time to a Minimum
When it comes to the loading time of your eCommerce website, you need to keep it to a minimum. Don’t make the mistake of believing that your prospective customers will be willing to wait several minutes for your site to load completely.
Studies have proven that you will lose at least 25 percent of consumers simply by forcing them to wait longer than four seconds for your website page to load. Avoid including such things as Flash media animation clips, music or an excessive number of images on each page.
It may seem like these additions are beneficial due to their visual appeal, but they can easily lead to a major decline in your conversion rate instead.
New Seasons Require New Themes
Don’t make the mistake of keeping the same theme all year without making any changes to the overall design, because it will make your website seem dull and boring. As the seasons change throughout the year, your website theme should also change just as frequently.
For example, during the Christmas holiday season, it’d be wise for you to create a festive theme for your website design. You can modify the homepage using Christmas colors and schemes along with a holiday-themed background in order to frame the site efficiently.
Doing so may seem to be an insignificant step, especially if you’ve never made this type of adjustment to your website in the past. However, quite a few case studies and confirmed reports have proven the exact opposite.
Minimize the Number of Web Pages
The last thing you want to do is force interested consumers to navigate their way through an excessive number of web pages just to make it to the checkout page. As mentioned earlier, time is of the essence therefore, the design elements should be such that the customer can get where he wants fast and can feel as if he is in total control of where he wants to be, keep that in mind while designing your website.
Once your customers have found exactly what they want, they should be able to proceed to the shopping cart immediately and finalize their checkout within a few seconds thereafter. Even if you have other products and offers
you would like to present to them, find a more effective way to do so instead of creating additional web pages and prompts that appear during this stage of their shopping experience. Remember, less is always more when it comes to efficiently designing a customer-friendly eCommerce website.
Use Videos to Convey More Information
Keeping in mind that the clock is running as soon as your prospective customers reach your website, your goal should be to convey as much relevant information to them as possible in a relatively short period of time. This is why it is imperative for you to include high-quality videos whenever possible.
Instead of focusing so much on developing readable content to market your products and services, for instance, you can efficiently convey the same information through strategically placed videos instead. This is especially important when you are covering complex information that is likely to be very confusing if it’s explained through printed words.