Reasons your eCommerce conversion rate is low

If you run an eCommerce site, you will know all about the importance of your conversion rate. If your visitors aren’t converting, or you witness a sudden drop in the rate, your bottom line is going to suffer. The first step to recovering your conversion rate is identifying the cause. There are plenty of explanations for a poor conversion rate, so you’ll have to figure out what yours is and how to solve it. First, we’ll look at whereabouts your conversion rate should be.

What is a good conversion rate?

Typical conversions on an eCommerce site will include adding an item to the basket, completing a purchase and saving an item to buy later. Problems arise when very few of your visitors do any of these things. Conversion rate benchmarks tend to vary widely, but according to data from Monetate, the average add-to-basket conversion rate is just over 9%.

Is your site making a bad first impression?

A common reason for a poor conversion rate is that people aren’t liking what they’re seeing as soon as they land on your site. If you’re getting plenty of traffic thanks to your SEO efforts, but little to no conversion, or you have a high bounce rate, it could be a design or website performance issue. Does your site take longer than three seconds to load? If so you should troubleshoot your performance to see what can be done to speed things up.

Who are you selling to?

When you’re thinking about ways you could possibly improve your conversion rate, think about whether or not you know exactly who your customers are. Have you been aiming your marketing efforts at the right people? Moving towards a big data strategy will help you identify who your core customers are if you don’t know already. Once you’ve identified them, you can come up with effective marketing strategies which should see your conversion rate move in the right direction.

Is your site optimised?

If you’ve witnessed your conversion rate decline, you should take a look at your content. SEO is all about optimising your content as well as your web pages so that you rank highly in search engines. It’s likely that if your site isn’t optimised you will have also experienced a drop in visitor numbers. You have to make sure you identify your keywords and anticipate what people are going to be searching for.

For help with everything from website performance to SEO and beyond, contact Excalibur Digital, we’ll be more than happy to assist with any questions you may have.