6 Rea­sons Why Your On­line Store Is­n’t Converting

You have cre­ated a bril­liant on­line store. It is high on fea­tures and has a very ap­peal­ing design.

• But the prob­lem is that your ecom­merce site isn’t converting.
• Vis­i­tors are com­ing to your store but most of them are abort­ing it within a few seconds.

This is of­ten a re­sult of poor cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence. You have scratched your head enough but you are un­able to find the rea­son. Many on­line store man­agers have a sim­i­lar story to tell and don’t seem to find the rea­sons for low con­ver­sion rate of their shops.

There are many rea­sons that can lead to low con­ver­sion rates in ecom­merce sites and to un­der­stand these you need to step into the shoes of a cus­tomer. Here we look at the six most com­mon rea­sons why cus­tomers aban­don on­line stores. 

Slow Load­ing Store

An av­er­age user spends just about 8-10 sec­onds on a page and thus your store needs to ren­der pages at a fast rate to keep the user hooked on. If your pages are slow most of the cus­tomers would jump to an­other on­line store ir­re­spec­tive of your prod­uct inventory.

To start with cre­ate a store which is light in size and do away with all the un­nec­es­sary el­e­ments. In fact a page with white spaces at­tracts cus­tomers more than a page cramped with in­for­ma­tion.  Host your site on a fast server which has very lit­tle down­time. You might need to spend a few ex­tra bucks for this but it would be a wor­thy investment.

Poor Check­out Process

You might be sur­prized to know that more than 60% of the cus­tomers aban­don a site af­ter com­ing to the check­out stage.  A few among them might change their minds at the last mo­ment but ma­jor­ity of this aban­don­ment hap­pen due to a poor check­out process.

The most com­mon rea­sons for these are too many steps in­volved in check­out stage, in­ad­e­quate pay­ment op­tions, no se­cu­rity cer­tifi­cate and no op­tion to shop as a guest.

To in­crease your con­ver­sion rate you need to cre­ate a sim­ple check­out process in max­i­mum three steps and al­low them to shop with­out reg­is­tra­tion. Also dis­play the se­cu­rity cer­tifi­cate such as VeriSign or any other and of­fer cus­tomers with mul­ti­ple pay­ment options.

Aw­ful Navigation

Your search en­gine op­ti­miza­tion might be spot on and may at­tract thou­sands of tar­geted cus­tomers to the web­site but with an aw­ful nav­i­ga­tion in place you have lim­ited chances of suc­cess. Nav­i­ga­tion isn’t only about link­ing the dif­fer­ent prod­ucts but you need to cat­e­go­rize them well within your on­line store.

Cus­tomers should eas­ily find their way through your prod­uct in­ven­tory and know where they should be look­ing for a par­tic­u­lar prod­uct. Do fol­low the three-click rule where all your prod­ucts should be within three-clicks from the home­page. Try us­ing bread crumbs and search boxes to en­hance the ex­pe­ri­ence of the users who are com­ing to your website.

Out-Of-Stock Items

Don’t let a cus­tomer add a prod­uct to a cart if you are go­ing to tell him that it is out of stock. This hurts your cred­i­bil­ity and in the long run can cre­ate a neg­a­tive im­pact on your brand. Prod­ucts get­ting out-of-stock is com­mon and you need to be able to get back your sup­plies soon. Putting an ar­rival date along­side might keep the cus­tomers hooked onto the site.

If too many prod­ucts are ex­pected to be out-of-stock for too long it’s ad­vis­able that you don’t dis­play them in the first place and let your cus­tomers shop for what you cur­rently have in the inventory.

Ab­sence of Con­tact Information

Are you merely dis­play­ing a cus­tomer feed­back and query form in your ‘Con­tact’ page? If yes you are des­tined to have a low con­ver­sion rate. If the cus­tomers don’t see proper con­tact in­for­ma­tion they might mis­take you to be a scam star in­stead of a gen­uine ecom­merce store.

Just imag­ine a sce­nario where a cus­tomer wants to get some doubts re­solved with the pay­ment op­tion, would he or she wait for you to re­ply to their query. It is very im­por­tant for you to dis­play proper con­tact in­for­ma­tion in­clud­ing your phys­i­cal ad­dress, tele­phone num­bers and email id. In case a cus­tomer sends some query over email, be cour­te­ous enough to reply.

Too Many Recommendations

Too many sug­ges­tions tend to an­noy the cus­tomer and en­sure you lose them for ever.  Do you have too many rec­om­men­da­tions on your web­site? If yes please make sure that you don’t overdo with this thing. Of­fer­ing sug­ges­tions to the cus­tomers is the right thing to do but dic­tat­ing terms is annoying.

Keep in mind that your cus­tomer is ma­ture enough to know what to buy and won’t shop for a prod­uct un­less he or she re­ally needs it.