Chapter 8: How to Improve Your eCommerce Landing Page Conversions

eCommerce vendors who aren’t actively improving their eCommerce landing page to convert more visitors are almost certainly leaving money on the table. 

The average eCommerce website — both globally and in the US — converted less than four percent of its visitors.

So even if you’re already converting at an above-average rate, more than 90% of your audience represents untapped market potential.

Now, some of the suggestions below will work for your products or brand, and some may not.

Any Conversion Rate Optimizer worth his/her salt knows that there is no absolute, golden tactic guaranteed to improve conversions on all of your pages.

Effective results come from consistently testing and getting to know your audience.

But that doesn’t mean you should test every little aspect of your landing pages aimlessly.

If you want to avoid ‘blind optimization’ (also known as “changing things just to see what happens!”), you’ll need to track how your changes perform when your site visitors interact with them.

Testing: The One Tactic To Rule Them All

Before we get into tactics to try, let’s take a step back and acknowledge how you’ll know if these tips are effective on your landing page: On-page testing.

When you apply some of the recommendations below, you’ll need to test the performance of the updated version of your landing page against the original version.

There are lots of tools and methods you can use — metrics from Google Analytics, split tests, and heatmaps, just to name a few — but the key is that you’ll need data to support your results before committing to the update.

With that said, let’s look at some ways to optimize your eCommerce landing page for more conversions.

Improve eCommerce landing page conversions

1. Categorize Your Products

Your site visitors will have a much easier time navigating your products if you categorize them in a simple, clickable hierarchy.

Like the aisle signs in your local grocery store, eCommerce categories make it easier for your visitors to peruse your offerings, run searches, and find more products that might fit their needs.

Categorizing your products can also make it easier to organize supplementary content, like videos and educational information, if they are tagged with the same keywords.

2. High-Quality Product Images

This might sound like eCommerce 101, but shoppers today expect high-quality images of your products as a standard part of the online buying experience.

Since your visitors can’t physically pick up what you’re selling and examine it, detailed images are the closest alternative you can provide.

3. Audit Your Checkout Process

eCommerce vendors everywhere share a common enemy — the cart abandoner.

Online sellers in every market typically lose at least half of all shoppers before they complete their purchases.

In some industries, abandonment rates hover around 80%.

And while each shopper has his/her own story for not sealing the deal, shops that make their checkout process too long or complicated will inevitably lose customers who would have converted otherwise.

There are plenty of tactics you can test to improve your checkout process (some of them are listed below), but first, you need to take a long and hard look at your current system to see where the biggest obstacles are.

If you address those problems first, you can work backward through your conversion funnel to close more gaps and make your entire process more effective.

4. Simplify Your Headlines

There’s an old saying in marketing that you may have heard before: “Be Clear, Not Clever.”

Keep in mind that your visitors are looking to solve a problem.

Your headline (and subheadings) need to communicate how you’ll solve that problem, clearly and quickly.

Writing new, simplified headlines can be easy with the right formula, and this type of change is easy to A/B test.

If your headline is more clever than clear, consider testing a simplified alternative.

5. Social Proof

Social proof means using third-party sources to indicate trustworthiness in your product or brand.

In the eCommerce space, you can use social proof on landing pages to:

  • Show off product quality
  • Highlight customer experiences
  • Promote further engagement
  • Reduce friction in your conversion funnel

Social proof can appear anywhere and everywhere in your conversion path.

You can add customer quotes near the top of your landing page, or a social share option after your users complete a purchase.

Just remember that you aren’t trying to show off — your social proof should provide value and persuade would-be customers to take the next step in your process.

6 Common Forms of Landing Page Social Proof

1. Reviews. Most eCommerce platforms include functionality for customers to write reviews.

You can pull snippets of relevant reviews for your landing page copy, display star-based user ratings for your products, and more.

2. Testimonials. Testimonials are different from reviews in that they usually offer a more complete, experience-based description of a customer’s interaction with your business.

Video testimonials can also engage shoppers who aren’t willing to read through a backlog of written reviews.

3. How-To Videos. Seeing your product in action — in videos created by your customers or via tutorials produced in-house — can reassure potential buyers that their purchase will provide value.

4. Case Studies. Case studies are especially useful for products or services with a long or complex onboarding process.

You can detail the timeline of the work and the results you produced, and supplement the explanation with data and a client quote.

5. Social Media Presence. You don’t need to be a Twitter or Facebook fanatic to engage your customer base, but establishing a presence on social media reinforces your credibility online and provides another platform to speak with your audience.

6. Trust Icons. For some specialized fields, including certifications or client logos on your landing page is a quick way to establish that you’re a credible vendor who will provide products or services that meet industry standards.

6. Out-Of-Stock Products

Keeping out-of-stock products on your page might seem like a faux pas, but it can actually spark more interest from potential customers who want what you’re offering.

Also, keeping out-of-stock items on your site shows that you’re a trusted source for other buyers, which can influence future purchases beyond the item in question.

Finally, you can offer automated notifications on your landing page so visitors will get a reminder when the product is back in stock.

And as an added bonus, you can use this tactic to collect email addresses to further your lead nurturing via email.

7. Include A Disclaimer

Customers making larger purchases — especially online — often want a trial period to make sure they’re happy with their investment.

To ease their fears, you can add a brief disclaimer near your CTA.

You may have noticed this in the “High-Quality Product Images” tactic we mentioned earlier.

8. Offer A Discount

Discounts are one of the oldest tricks in the sales book for a reason.

The feeling of getting something special or exclusive is often enough to entice a visitor to take the next step.

You can use discounts to acquire new customers, show your appreciation to existing customers, or create an incentive to increase spending per order.

9. Create Urgency

You can create a sense of urgency on your eCommerce landing page in a few different ways: Time-sensitive sales are one; announcing limited product stock is another.

If you go this route, however, make sure to clearly define both the value and the parameters of the deal so that shoppers don’t feel ripped off.

10. Clarify Shipping Info

Because Amazon and other large online sellers offer free shipping on most of their products, customers have come to expect zero or minimal shipping costs on their orders.

While you might not have the sales volume or infrastructure to offer free shipping, you still need to provide buyers with shipping costs and information at the right moment in the checkout process.

Saving it for the last step can feel like trickery when the final price goes up, but placing shipping information at the beginning of the transaction can turn some buyers off too.

11. Live Chat

Live chat systems, operated either by staff or artificial intelligence, are an increasingly effective way to support and assist eCommerce buyers.

Further, any worries about people rejecting these ‘chatbots’ appear to be overblown.

Chat options are especially useful for complex systems like accounting software.

After a round of testing, the chat prompt had generated a 20% conversion rate increase and a 43% higher average order value.

12. Micro-Conversion Tracking

Micro-conversions are actions visitors take before completing a transaction on your landing page.

A few examples of trackable micro-conversions include video views, partial form completions, cart abandonment, and time spent on site.

While these actions don’t directly connect to ROI, you can still use the information they provide to improve your landing page.

Conclusion

You’ve probably figured out by now that some of these tactics will be more effective than others for your specific eCommerce outlet.

Hopefully, you’re already excited to try a few out!

Your tactics and testing should produce measurable results that you can build on in subsequent versions of your landing page.

Chapter 9: How to Set Up a Facebook Ad Funnel for eCommerce Products

Chapter 7: Finding the Right eCommerce Niche that You Can Dominate