Published on February 06, 2008 Increasing shopping cart conversion rates
How do you increase your potential for high ecommerce conversion rates?
If you’re going to be selling products and services online, you’ll want to make sure that as many people as possible come to your store and then buy something from it. The process of advertising, promotion and search engine optimisation can help you get customers to your website. But how do you keep them going through checkout once they are on your site? These are the things to think about before you buy a shopping cart website.
Four key things to think about are:
1. Ensure people keep moving through checkout
A fast and easy checkout process can help prevent carts from being abandoned. You need to balance up a choice in the number of payment options with being overwhelming or complex. You also need to ask yourself if the shopping cart software makes it easier for return visitors? Does it allow returning users to sign in and have their details automatically entered? Does it tell customers how many steps there are in the process and make it easy to go through? Ensure that you are not collecting too much information to put people off ordering.
2. How many levels of categories are there?
Any website that is easy to navigate is going to be more likely to hold the attention of your customers. So think about how you would search for products if you were a customer. How many clicks does it take to get to the products you want? How easy is it to add products to the cart? Can products be removed easily from the cart if they are not wanted?
3. Is it easy to get help?
If your site makes it easy to get help as you go through checkout, then you increase the chances of people buying from you even if they run into a problem with the checkout process (for example if they have custom shipping requirements or are unsure about something). Think about offering live chat or having a good knowledgebase and links to your contact us page – maybe even consider offering phone support. ozCart websites come with the ability to upgrade to a live chat facility if you wish.
4. Is your shopping cart secure and private?
If your shopping cart is collecting credit card information you need to ensure that you have an ‘SSL certificate’. This is a mechanism whereby the shopping cart is authenticated by a third-party authority allowing credit credit details to be encrypted as they travel over the Internet to the payment gateway to check.
If you have SSL in your store, tell your customers about it. Create a page about the security procedures you have in place to reassure them. Use security and privacy icons prominently in your store.
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