We already know that 27% of online buyers abandon their basket before finalizing their order. Simplifying UX and buying processes on your website is the starting point to avoid losing your potential clients.
Your E-Commerce success and longevity rely heavily on constantly updating your E-Commerce website to fit current customers’ needs.
Data collection, measuring and analyzing your E-Commerce customers’ habits is essential to improving and enhancing your online activity’s performance, optimizing your ROI on marketing actions, and evaluating how well you are meeting your business’ objectives.
Understand your clients’ buying process
Your customers’ purchase process is complex and isn’t only limited to a “simple visit on your website”. Understanding their journey will allow you to optimize your selling techniques to improve conversion rate and grow average basket value.
Knowing your customers is a central pillar regarding your business. Identifying which buyer profiles consume regularly and who your typical clients are is indispensable to enhance your UX and your conversion rate.
Thanks to digital analytics, you’ll be able to tackle the major steps of optimizing your conversion rate and taking good strategic decisions to enhance your E-Commerce sales revenue.
Digital analytics, the tool for knowing your customers
Digital Analytics is a powerful tool to help you take decisions. It combines techniques and practices for measuring audiences and customer behavior on different digital media (web and mobile, apps, TV apps, etc.).
Here are a few examples of what can be discovered with Digital Analytics:
- Which ad campaigns were most profitable?
- Which are the best-performing traffic sources?
- What performs well on my website (pages, articles, products, etc.)? What needs to be optimized?
- What client type is the most lucrative?
Analyzing visitors’ behavior using Digital Analytics will allow you to continually enhance your conversion rate.
An E-Commerce conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who’ve bought something compared to the total number of visitors who’ve visited your website. Your principal objective is to sell something at the end of every visit.
Knowing your clients is a key factor to improving conversion rate
Every day, hundreds of E-Commerce websites close down. To reach success with your online shop and stay competitive, you have to avoid critical errors that could be an obstacle to your conversion rate.
As we’ve just illustrated, by analyzing your visitors’ behavior with Digital Analytics processes, you’ll be able to continually improve your conversion rate by identifying areas for improvement. Download this guide to using Digital Analytics for mass E-Commerce conversion!
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Choosing online payment solutions
Optimizing the payment step will allow you to minimize your cart abandonment rates. It is the first obstacle in finalizing the purchase process:
Indeed, 40% people trust a website more if it allows them to pay via multiple solutions. Clients should be able to easily access different online payment solutions to finalize their purchase.
Before choosing which payment solutions you will offer, you must analyze your market, your objectives and your business’ needs. Then, you should look at your clients’ specificities and your offerings (length of your buying cycle, geographical location, types of products sold, etc.).
Paypal, which handles 60% of all online transactions, is the most popular online payment solution. Other solutions like PayPlug, Payzen or Payline exist too.
Many KPIs and metrics exist to evaluate your payment solutions’ performance, including:
- The breakdown of how different payment solutions are used on your website (it is possible to condition results with the margin indicated by your provider)
- Number of payment errors (typing errors, form submission errors, etc.) ;
- Number of payments executed with an online solution.
Impactful issues concerning shipping
Shipping cost is the second most impactful issue when it comes to cart validation. We also know that four factors are important to customers’ buying process:
- Shipping times
- Price
- Distance to the pickup point, if you offer this service
- Zones where your chosen pickup points are available
For example, Digital Analytics will allow you to check your visitors’ geographical location. Multiple strategies exist with regards to your shipping fees:
- Practicing a set fee, regardless of cart value
- Offering a reduced fee for larger orders
- Offering free shipping for orders above a certain amount
- Offering free shipping for all orders
The main goal is to retain your customer and make him validate his cart. To understand your visitors’ behavior, and the impact your shipping rates have on their orders, the ideal thing to do is to calculate sales revenue from orders, and the portion from shipping fees.
Digital Analytics will allow you to look at your shipping times and your conversion rate together. We know that express shipping can be a real asset to your conversion rate. But if we connect this parameter with shipping fees, we see that shipping price has an even stronger impact.
Indeed, in some cases, Digital Analytics highlights the fact that an average shipping time at a lower cost can generate a higher conversion rate than express shipping at a less attractive cost. The objective is to find a balance between these two elements.
Your website’s loading speed
Loading speed can negatively impact your conversion rate. After waiting for three seconds, 57% of your users will leave your website, judging it as too slow. Among these potential online buyers, 80% will never come back.
Google’s recommendations tell us that an E-Commerce website should load in under 1.5 seconds. Since 9 out of 10 websites take longer than 1.5 seconds to load, if yours has a quick loading speed, you’ll have a strong advantage and will be more likely to rank well on the search engine.
You should test your website’s loading speed, as it is an important parameter to take in account with today’s busy customers’ and their high expectations. Web analytics tools allow you to access a great number of indicators showing how your customers are equipped: device, OS, screen size, mobile apps, etc. When used the right way, this information will allow you to optimize your E-Commerce website’s technical performance.
Pages’ usability and clarity
Impatient online buyers prefer simple websites that directly answer their needs and questions without wasting any time.
Here are some simple tips to help you enhance your conversion rate by streamlining navigation:
- Offer responsive design and be mobile friendly / mobile-first
- Maintain consistent structure and design between your website’s pages
- Use a clear call-to-action that will encourage cart validation
- Display the progress rate to show the client where he is in the checkout process
- Keep 404 errors to a minimum
- Place your search bar in a visible spot – it’s indispensable
- Use practical and ergonomic filters to reassure customers all throughout the purchase process
- Make cart validation and payment steps as clear as possible
- Add a return button to allow your clients to edit their cart
By taking these key indicators into account, you’ll remove roadblocks on your customers’ paths to purchase and boost your order rate. Remember that you’ll need to continuously adapt to your clients’ perpetually evolving behaviors.
If you want to know more about Digital Analytics, the AT Internet team will be present at Paris Retail Week…don’t hesitate to meet them at their stand! You can also download their guide on Digital Analytics:
