You can’t expect website traffic conversion to increase without first targeting the most important areas on your website. As the old saying goes, “you must crawl before you walk and walk before you run.”
For example, focusing on the checkout process to increase sales will yield nothing if your website analytics show the majority of your visitors never make it that far. Why? Because if your visitors are not even making it that deep into your site, then checkout is not the problem. The problem occurs on a page (or pages) earlier in the process.
You must use your analytics program to find where your customer is leaving the process, but I can certainly give you a starting point. You see, although each ecommerce business site is unique, the pages visitors encounter that influence them to make a successful purchase remain fairly consistent.
If you are wondering where to focus your improvement efforts, try adding these pages to the top of your list.
Home Page
The home page should, at the very least, give visitors multiple options for accessing the products on your site and should have some room reserved for the latest promotion. If your website has a high bounce rate from the home page, you need to first focus your efforts on that page with the single objective of getting deeper visitor penetration into the site, i.e., increased page views, longer time on site, etc.
Product Pages
Make sure your presentation, placement, wording, descriptions, photos and customer assurances are in the best location to persuade action. The goal of a product page should be to get the user to add the item to their cart. You can’t make a sale if the item is not in the cart!
Checkout Pages
Once an item has been added to a visitor’s cart, the only way they can get out of your store with that product is through the checkout. If your analytics show a high cart abandonment rate, then you must find the stumbling block for visitors.
There are an almost unlimited number of areas on a website which contribute to higher conversion. In reality, the entire customer experience must be considered if a sustainable and profitable ecommerce business is the goal. The list of pages I provided here is just a starting point for organizing your approach.
Although these pages are important (each serving its role in closing the sale) changing just one will not always guarantee increased sales. You will need to interpret what your analytics are telling you in order to determine which page(s) to devote attention to.
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