How to improve E-commerce cart sales – Traffic to customer conversion tips

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I am a business consultant for e-commerce websites for over 7 years now. I can tell you with certainty that obtaining traffic to your website is easy to do, the hard part is converting that traffic into customers and clients. I would like to share some unique tips that can improve your website's conversion rate.

1. This first tip is often overlooked and goes unnoticed. The tip is quite simple. If you do not offer any discount codes or coupon codes or vouchers do not display the box for possible customers to input these codes in your cart or checkout area.

   I have seen time and time again, customers, leaving the checkout area to go surf the Internet for coupon codes. Some of the more aggressive shoppers have even contacted the website owner for coupon codes, going as far as to cancel their order and wait until there are coupon codes available before purchasing.

2. The do's and don'ts for required information during the account creation process – internet customers have an idea of what information should be required, this information should consist of : name, e-mail address, address for the product to be sent to and that's all. If your cart requires any additional information such as company name, phone number, date of birth, gender, etc. people will not enter this information and in the end they will be typically annoyed for the fact that they cannot continue on to the checkout process to purchase their goods because they have to enter in required information that they don't want to give and believe they don't have to.

   The truth is quite simply, you don’t need it and they don’t want to give it so don’t request it.

3. Too much cross-selling, overselling, pushing of products and additional services during the checkout phase. Potential customers prefer the concept of, okay, i'm ready to check out, please remove any additional and unnecessary roadblocks out of the way so that I may complete my order and be done with the shopping experience. Services to offer during the checkout process can include gift wrapping, additional notes and messages, minimal amount of relevant products or products that go together with items in the shopping cart eg; coasters and coaster holders, or/and specials such as; if you buy this item or purchase over a particular amount you will get a discount or you will get free shipping.

   The number one thing to be aware of is to not annoy customers when they wish to check out and make it as simple as possible.

4. If you do not have an on-site payment processor and you using a service such as PayPal, then I recommend taking advantage of custom checkout pages. Nothing looks more unprofessional than a PayPal checkout page, displaying your e-mail address at the top. You can easily create a header image or logo image and log into your PayPal account and click on your profile button and go to my selling tools and look down the page for custom checkout and click update. Then in the lower right-hand corner, click add, and then begin customizing the checkout page.

   Something as simple as making a JPEG image header and typing in your company name can dramatically improve the professional look of your checkout process. I cannot tell you the amount of clients I have found that have spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars making the perfect design for their website and then drop the ball during the checkout page when using PayPal or Express Pay Pal checkout.

5. Do not link to pages that are blank, incomplete or just not there on e-commerce website. A good example of this is having a news link on your website but the page is blank with no news or a link to a page to show specials offered on your website but displaying no specials. If you do not have a page that provides news or specials on offer on your website, do not display a link to these pages.

   If you do have a specials page and you do offer specials, then I recommend always having a special up. You will be surprised at how many people come to your website and check the link that says specials to see what you offer. The reason why you do not want blank pages on your website is because you want your website to appear finished, active and polished. If customers find incomplete, broken pages, link pages to nothing, or dead links they will consider the website to not be professional, and quite possibly make the assumption it is not in use and a dead website store. It does nothing for a customer’s confidence in you and they will leave without purchasing for fear of not being given the service they expect when purchasing online.

6. If you use advertising banners and specials on your website that you display prominently on your home page, change or rotate them monthly. Customers, much like Google and other search engines like to see updated websites. If they come to a website that has a special that is good for summer and it is currently winter, they will know the website is inactive or not updated, and much like number five, possibly not a good website.

7. This is another overlooked area with my customers. Always include terms and conditions, shipping policy, privacy policy and return policy on your website. It is also a good idea to put a pop-up link to your shipping and return policy in the shopping cart or checkout area of your website. Website owners do not understand that possible customers do read these pages and if these pages are not easy to find, are blank or are simply not there then chances of that customer checking out decreases dramatically.

   Granted, not every customer will read these pages, but I can guarantee that the customers that do are almost always confirmed sales on your website and they are in the final process of buying from you. If you deny them the information they are looking for, then you have potentially lost a sale.

After creating an e-commerce website that you have put considerable time and money into and then more marketing time, money and effort to obtain traffic to it, it makes no sense to fail at the checkout stage and lose sales. If you do not instill confidence to continue with the purchase by making the final stages of a customer’s online shopping experience professional, polished and easy for them to use ……put simply, they will not buy!

If you are in need of additional tips or advice on to how to increase your traffic to customer conversion rate, please visit my fiverr.com gig. For a limited time, I will Review your e-commerce website and will present you with five reasons and five tips for five dollars on how to improve your websites customer conversion rate.