Earning an ecommerce sale sounds relatively simple, but a lot must go into each conversion. First, people must find your site—and stay on it long enough to find a product they’re interested in purchasing. Then they have to decide to add it to their cart, continue through the checkout process, peruse order fulfillment options and hand over enough financial information to complete the transaction. It’s important to remember visitors to your website can choose to leave at any point during this long funnel, especially if your website gives them a compelling reason to do so.
The last thing retailers want to do is inadvertently motivate people to abandon this journey toward conversion. Start by avoiding these four ecommerce conversion deal breakers.
Mandatory Signups and Sign-Ins
Of course you’re eager to turn website visitors into loyal customers. But hounding them to sign up for your email newsletter or create an account right away is akin to a dog jumping on guests in the doorway. Let people have a look around your website before asking them to commit in any way.
Requiring customers to provide more information than the bare minimum during checkout will drive shopping cart abandonment. One recent survey found more than half (52.4 percent) of respondents cited “mandatory email signup” as a valid reason for abandoning a website.
A more sustainable strategy is giving people the option to create an account or sign up for your newsletter rather than forcing them to do so.
Slow Load Times
People can choose to leave your ecommerce store almost immediately after arriving. There’s even a metric describing the percentage of people who view only one landing page before exiting: Bounce rate. People can bail out for a variety of reasons, of course, but slow page load times are fuel on this fire.
Online shoppers today expect increasingly quick interactions with online stores. Anything over a few seconds will motivate impatient visitors to try their luck elsewhere. As more people turn to their mobile devices to shop online, these baseline expectations only trend toward responsiveness.
Wondering how to make an ecommerce website responsive on desktop and mobile alike? Consider your options for hosting and building your store on platforms like Shopify. Using a customizable theme and hosting solution with unlimited bandwidth will help keep your store highly usable and responsive across devices.
Lack of Trustworthiness
You’d better believe people will be judging your ecommerce store’s trustworthiness from the moment they arrive. Any and all red flags will count against your website, from typos in copy to the absence of reviews from other customers. Do everything you can to exude legitimacy, like posting trust badges from reputable anti-virus software companies and payment gateways near checkout. Clean up your copy, utilize high-quality images and provide ample information about your company to alleviate visitors’ skepticism about buying sight unseen online.
Lack of Personalization
Is your ecommerce website making people feel like just a number in the crowd? Personalization is the antidote; lack of personalization can kill sales. As TotalRetail cites, the top frustration for U.S. online shoppers between the ages of 18 and 56 is lack of personalization, “wherein the retailer either cannot or does not remember the shopper was ever there before.” A whopping 86.4 percent of survey respondents cited this as a deal breaker.
This underscores how vital it is to understand shoppers on a personal level. Allow people to create an account that stores their preferences and personal information—then protect this data with all the cybersecurity tools at your disposal. Implement intelligent product recommendations based on purchase history and on-site behavior. Personalize marketing missives based on their recipients. These “little” touches go a long way toward deal making — rather than breaking.
Eliminating these four ecommerce deal breakers will go a long way toward increasing your conversion rates and earning customer loyalty.