71 Tips to Increase the Conversion Rate of Your Online Store

Published on September 15th, 2009 by Mitchell Harper

About the Author

Mitch (@mitchellharper) is the co-founder and CEO of BigCommerce. Way back in 2007 he built what eventually became BigCommerce as you know it. Today he runs the company alongside Eddie and along with our 100+ team members, is passionate about helping businesses succeed with e-commerce. Mitch spends time between our Sydney and Austin offices and is giving the keynote at TechConnect 2012 in Sydney on April 19th.

magnify-report WebmasterWorld.com is an excellent community forum which provides webmasters and online retailers with a great place to discuss their businesses, online marketing, search engine optimization and more.

As I was browsing their forums earlier today I came across a great post titled Top 100 Ecommerce Tips. I read through all 100+ of the tips listed and decided to pick and choose the best tips from that post and merge them with some of my own that I’ve come up with during my last 10 years of selling online.

Here’s the list of 74 tips I think are the most important when it comes to selling online. If you implement just 10 or 20 of these tips I’ve got no doubt you can increase your conversion rate by at least a few orders a week:

Never leave unanswered emails for more than 48 hours, or your customer is gone.
Let the customer see the shipping charge without registering! Preferably on the basket or a easy-to-find ‘shipping charges’ page.
Make sure your forms use common names for fields so that they’re recognized by toolbars that have an autofill function.
If you’ve got a country drop-down box, list the countries in alphabetical order.
Don’t just accept payment through PayPal. Many people have had bad experiences with PayPal and prefer to use alternative, simpler payment methods.
Make your site incredibly easy to buy from – no registration if possible, live chat, 800 # – make it friendly and easy to buy from.
Take a picture of your office and add it to your contact us page with your company phone number on it.
Don’t bury your products in several pages of clickthroughs, implement a working search mechanism so the user can get to what they seek in two clicks, three maximum.
Insure there are redundant methods of getting around and no point on your site is more than two clicks away from anywhere.
Keep your initial products pages light and clean, with links to product details if they actually want to read.
Build your site for the end user, not the search engines. This means leave off all the search engine-filled text on the initial products pages.
Give the user a sense of who you are. The web is a cold, anonymous place. Anything you can do to bring a sense of personality and assurance to your website will help.
If you use a site search, make sure it works better than expected. It should search more than product names. Make sure it can find products by SKU, model number and even misspellings if possible.
Be sure to include links to your privacy, shipping, returns & exchange policies right out where the customer can easily find them.
Keep the customer informed about the status of their order before they ask.
Use the same visual theme for every action required of the customer.
Make product options clear and comprehensive.
Answer every possible question on the product detail page.
Make sure your site search can also search by size and color. If I’m considering a green skirt or blue towels, make it easy to find other items that would match.
If you only ship to USA (or wherever) say that right off and several times.
Goes without saying that spelling must be perfect. On slow days, have employees proof read old pages.
If you’re new to ecommerce NEVER mention that. Invitation to scammers to hit you.
Get a real 800# (or 888), not a 866 or such.
Get the most web un-savvy person you know to test your site.
Customize product descriptions. Eschew text provided by suppliers which everyone else uses.
Listen to customers, invite their comments and criticism and act on what you learn.
Answer emails in 8 hours max (certainly not 48).
Give street address but never “we’re in Puppyland Center, between Tony’s Pizza and the Shoe repair shop”.
Show good sharp graphics. Learn to use basic photo editing software.
Remove all non essential navigation elements from the checkout process. Have a single page checkout if possible.
Calling your customer to thank them and confirm their order instills immediate trust.
Customers haven’t got time to read explanations about how you would like them to format the date. Make it easy and obvious.
If the customer has entered some incorrect information, let them know this without them having to type in all their details again.
Pay good money for a proper interactive graphic designer (not a coder, web ‘developer’, or print designer doing a bit of moonlighting). If your web site looks professional, people will trust it and buy stuff.
Add your 800# to every step of the checkout process with something to the tune of “questions or problems completing your order, call 800#).
Have a “best sellers” or “most popular” listing. The boost from this has been noticeable.
If your site ranks best in your niche, and If you sell something that is sold on many other websites (something drop shipped for you, for example), very slightly change the name — Tarenta to Tarento, Classica to Classico, for example. This helps deter people price shopping for the ‘product name’ elsewhere and in the shopping engines.
List your prices for every item clearly and upfront. There’s no space for a ‘price on application’ model online, none at all.
When using thumbnails to link to larger images give your customers larger images.
If your target audience is concentrated in one country, host your website on a server located in that country.
Keep the 3 P’s above the fold on a product page. Product name, Price and Purchase link should all be visible without having to scroll.
Know your visitors – if significantly more people are first-time-buyers, don’t hit them with a login screen with a small link to register to the site – reverse the process.
Never tell the visitor to “Hit your ‘back’ button to correct”. I haven’t found a valid reason to do this yet – any issue should be able to be handled within the system.
Have a “Help” link very prominently displayed so they have somewhere to go if there is an issue.
It is better to deny a suspected fraudlent order in post processing, rather than have the computer automatically deny honest customers due to AVS or CVV issues.
Ship fast. Preferably the same day and you are sure to get emails from appreciative customers.
Use a proper SSL certificate, not a shared SSL certificate which prompts the user with an alert before checkout.
If using paid advertising, don’t send them to your home page; send them to the relevant product page (or custom landing page) that is tied to the keyword you advertised.
If you sell software, allow immediate access to the full version and allow unlimited upgrades.
Have a list of “recommended products” and “other customers also bought” with each item.
Have a newsletter sign up and send out newsletters regularly with discounts and special offers.
If the product ships via a carrier, send an email to the customer with the tracking number with a link to the carrier to check status.
Use an XML Sitemap generator to create a sitemap to get a “big picture” of your site. Submit it to Google and they’ll help you find dead pages, etc.
On category pages don’t just list product names, but include some unique content about the category for indexing by the search engines.
If you sell the same object in different colours, offer them pictures of each colour.
Use a larger font (14+) for titles and product names to make them stand out and possibly increase conversions.
Sign up for Hackersafe, verising and your related trade associations and display their logos to improve credibility.
Have a person answer the phone, not a recording.
If you cannot exceed the expectations created by your site then rewrite your copy. Underpromise and over-deliver.
Hang in there with the difficult customers – they become the most loyal when treated correctly and given the time they deserve.
Know when a customer needs to be given to your competition.
Make the font on your product copy readable. 12pt at least. No funky fonts.
Make sure your buy button pops off the page and is big enough to be seen and clicked on.
Make sure the title tag on each product page is unique and reflects what is on the page. Make sure you have the product name first in the title tag, not your company name.
Offer a strong refund/return guarantee.
Add a 360 degree product view before the rest of the pack.
Play with the wording of your add-to-cart buttons. “Add to cart” is a nice non-threatening way to encourage adding items as some feel “order” or “buy” is too much of a commitment.
Be careful making a coupon field too prominent in checkout, especially in markets that are based on commodity goods such as electronics. Seeing the field may convince a shopper that was ready to purchase to exit and spend more time hunting for coupons. Consider relabeling as promotion code or something less descriptive (unless you are linking to a promo page with coupon codes to encourage larger sales).
Mine referral data of orders for search engine keyword queries encoded in the urls and further optimize for these terms for organic search or consider adding to your PPC campaigns.
If you’re going to ask customers to sign up for your newsletter during checkout, do it AFTER the payment is processed.
Amid all the costly free shipping gimmicks, 365 day guarantees, free return pickups and insanely low prices… don’t forget to actually turn a profit.
If everyone else is competing on price, compete on service, product range or faster shipping options.
Try changing your store design once a month, and everything else being equal, one will generally outperform the others by a significant amount.
Add a personalized “thank you” message to your email invoices. Include your name, email, phone number and a photo.