Increase your conversions

October 7, 2007

A simple way of increasing your conversions on your e-commerce website is by looking at how many steps it takes your users to find and purchase a product.

Go through your website yourself and see how many actual steps it takes you to firstly find a product, this should be no more than three, i.e.

Home Page >> Category >> Product >> Add to shopping Cart

There are ways of arranging your navigation to try and get the optimum results from this, also think about your most viewed and sold products and show these straight away on your home page, this way you reduce the number of clicks i.e.

Home Page >> Product >> Add to shopping Cart

That’s the first step, next lets look at the purchase funnel. Regardless if you use your own payment gateway or a providers (Google checkout, Paypal etc.) this should be as simple as possible and you should let your users clearly know what part of the funnel they are up to; i.e. STEP 1 of 6 etc.

So the ideal funnel may be:

Shopping cart >> Enter Details / Address / Delivery >> Enter Payment details >> Complete

That’s four steps, nice and simple, if you analyse your Analytical information you can see where your visitors drop out of the funnel, then make subtle changes to your funnel pages to get the most out your website.

Small changes like the above are some of the fundamental factors which change a good website into a great one.

Neil
Head of SEO