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Optimize Your E-commerce Website to Increase Sales, Revenue, and Profits

Shutterstock 2306262169 Optimize Your E-commerce Website to Increase Sales, Revenue, and Profits Vizion Interactive Reading Time: 10 minutes

You may already be optimizing your Ecommerce site for SEO. But is it optimized for selling to customers once they are already there?

If you want to increase revenue from your website, you must improve the overall shopping experience on it. You could be making mistakes that are hurting your profits and visibility without realizing them.

But don’t worry. Usually, once you figure out the exact reasons why your conversion rates are low or understand when and how people are falling off the sales wagon, you can fix it.

In this guide, we discuss tips that can help most ecommerce websites.

Tips to Optimize Your E-commerce Website

Once you’ve had an SEO agency help you with an SEO audit and addressed the issues, you’ll want to focus on your marketing funnel and look into optimizing the conversion path to increase sales.

Here are some of the tried and tested tips to optimize your e-commerce website to increase your sales, revenue, and profits:

Optimize Your Purchase Funnel

Optimizing the purchase funnel helps you turn visitors into customers by nudging them along the buying process.

It involves assessing leaks in the funnel, where people who should head to the next stage fall off the cycle. Afterward, you should address their pain points to encourage them to complete the marketing journey.

To do so, you must first study if you’re missing elements in the funnel.

The table summarizes how to construct the whole funnel. Use it as a lens to analyze your website:

Stage User Profile Optimizations
Awareness Users looking for more details about their problems and ideas Use paid ads.
Provide answers in posts.
Advertise your products and services on socials.
Use contests and giveaways to boost engagement.
Interest Users who know your brand name and products Continue offering detailed information in how-to articles.
Offer longer social media videos.
Find ways to evoke desire and action.
Desire Users with concrete product understanding who are comparing your offers with competitors Entice users through comparison posts, pricing information, and brand storytelling.
Use testimonials to assert credibility.
Action Customers ready to purchase from you Give all popular payment methods.
Make checkouts simple and quick.
Provide live chat for any queries.
Offer social share buttons on product, checkout, and resource pages.

Monitor your conversion channel with tools like Google Analytics 4 and Hotjar to identify areas to fine-tune.

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Such tools pinpoint the precise location in your purchasing funnel with significant customer drop-out rates.

For instance, Hotjar shows high-traffic pages where most customers leave. Its heatmaps indicate your most-clicked areas. Based on their scrolling habits, Hotjar heatmaps may hint at whether users need more information before converting.

Similarly, GA4 lets you build your funnel to identify steps like:

  • How many users reached the landing page?
  • How many clicked your CTA?
  • How many filled shipping information?
  • How many added payment details?
  • How many purchased the product?

The component with the largest percentage drop in users needs your attention first.

Create Urgency

Urgency is among the easiest ways to encourage sales. You can convince users to convert quickly by attaching a reward or loss depending on how fast they act.

For instance, websites like Agoda and Booking.com reward you for booking fast. And the prospect of losing a good deal prompts their customers to complete reservations quicker.

You can create urgency using time-related words like “hurry” and “last chance.”

Likewise, time-bound free-delivery options, like “Free Delivery This Weekend Only,” can increase purchases.

Another way to create urgency is to make users believe your products or services are scarce. You can highlight products about to go out of stock and tell users that X number of buyers are viewing them simultaneously.

Moreover, you should have flash sales during holidays. Use socials, email marketing, push notifications, and SMS to maximize the potential of flash sales. MadebySunday earned almost nine times more than normal and boosted conversions by 195% using this strategy.

Use Upselling Strategies

Upselling boosts revenue by increasing the order value of customers who are several steps into the buying process. By suggesting upgrades to their existing selection, or higher models to their current selection, they may decide to switch up to a higher priced product, which not only increases average order value and basket size, but potentially opens up new possibilities for complimentary products, accessories, or services.

Use Cross-selling Strategies

Amazon does this very well, by bundling accessories and complimentary products into a convenient display so all those items can be added to the cart with one click. Knowing that the products are “Frequently Bought Together” is also a great way to hint at social proof. Below is an example of a phone, which can be bundled with a screen protector and case. Creating these bundles can also be used to help bring awareness to and sell slow moving inventory.

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Recommendations are crucial as 71% of all websites do it, even the world’s most popular sites.

You can place recommendations at several levels. There are listing page recommendations and product recommendations on the key pages like home page based on the user’s history.

Some of the ways to get the most returns from recommendations include:

  • Personalization: While 88% of users prefer personalized retailer websites, 60% return if you personalize the experience. So, make customers feel like you’re talking only to them to make them shop with you often. This can be as simple as changing the standard nomenclature in page and email templates from shoppers, buyers, customers, clients, or guests.
  • Listing page recommendations: According to a Statista report, only 20% of shoppers in the Nordic region saw recommendations on product listing pages in 2021. This is an opportunity to create recommendations on category and listing pages to help shoppers discover more products.
  • Upgrade recommendations: Place these on checkout pages while showcasing the additional perks. Users love new features and may be willing to pay more for better products.

Another way to boost upsells is to provide free shipping above a certain minimum value. Statista found that 68% of users were more likely to get products with free shipping.

The same report noted that 37% of customers were more likely to get products from brands with next-day deliveries. So, quick deliveries can entice more users to get products.

Furthermore, you can use product bundling to boost sales. The key to successfully increasing returns from product bundles is picking the right products. The next step is to include a suitable discount that encourages purchases, preferably +45%.

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Improve E-Commerce Website Layout

A good website layout improves retention, customer satisfaction, sales, and loyalty. And to ensure your website layout is sound, you have to individually optimize your product, cart, and category pages.

Here’s how:

Perfect Your Product Page Layout

Product page quality is one of the top elements consumers gauge to determine whether to buy from you. Incomplete or incorrect information drives buyers away from your site.

You must provide every detail users need to make an informed decision if you want your product pages to successfully convert buyers. Think of a product page as an online replacement for you showing the products to your customers in person. It should answer all the questions they may have during the process because they don’t have the option to find out more from a human.

Some of the most important aspects of a product page are:

  • Detailed product information: Include sizing, materials, colors, warranty, technical information, and care guides to help answer their questions about the product. You can also highlight recommended accessories and alternative products.
  • Persuasive CTAs: You should have product page CTAs that stand out from the background and be ideally above the fold. Make them crisp and short, i.e, “Add to Cart” and “Add to Wishlist.”
  • High-resolution videos and images with alt text: Use quick-loading visual formats to provide 360-degree product views. These allow customers to feel more confident about their purchasing decisions since they provide a detailed view, increasing their likelihood of buying.
  • Reviews and ratings: These offer social proof which can be powerful trust signals. Positive feedback makes customers feel confident about you and trust your provisions. Display social proof in multiple ways to encourage the most trust and conversions, for example, you can include star ratings on category pages as well as the product details pages. Include customer testimonial videos, photos, and text reviews at different points on your website.

An excellent way to tell whether these modifications are working is to A/B test two product page layouts. Once you’ve established which page layout performs better, continue testing a new challenger layout.

Create the Perfect Cart Page Layout

Cart page layout issues are among the top reasons for cart abandonment. Based on Baymard’s study, complicating the process for users can result in around 22% abandoning their carts.

Unfortunately, while suitable checkout flows include 12-14 elements, the USA averages 23.48 form elements.

Other key layout issues that cause cart abandonment, according to Baymard, include:

  • Website errors: 17%
  • Not showing the total order cost up-front: 21%
  • Not including adequate payment methods: 13%

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Here’s how you can lower cart abandonment due to layout issues:

  • Offer guest checkout.
  • Allow quick order editing.
  • Have minimal distractions.
  • Allow multiple login methods.
  • Include cart item summaries.
  • Only collect the necessary details.
  • Offer auto-fills for shipping details.
  • Outline shipping costs and durations.
  • Avoid third-party checkout providers.
  • Auto-save cart items or allow manual saving.
  • Tell users exact information fields with errors.
  • Mention savings and try last-minute discounts.
  • Have multiple payment and shipping methods.

Fix Your Ecommerce Categories

Category pages are like your store aisles. They provide the brick-and-mortar alternative for customers to check your products and services. Having a good layout allows users to find what they need with ease, lowering the need to bounce and find them from competitors.

Outlining them well provides a good buyer experience. Consequently, consumers can navigate quickly to what they need. So, you get fewer bounces and may receive more conversions.

You can optimize your category pages in the following ways:

  • Use the right keywords for category headings.
  • Add sections of text to category pages. This offers search bots more context on your offers, which may boost your category page ranking.

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  • Include descriptive image alt text. These help with accessibility and explain to search engine bots what the images on your category pages are about.
  • Use clear and descriptive URLs to ease user navigation. This will make it easier for search engines to understand the content of your page more easily.

Integrate Email Marketing

You should use email marketing as it can boost your return on investment (ROI) by up to 4000%. According to Omnisend, email marketing ROI is 4.5 times higher than Google Ads and 1.6 times better than SEO.

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That said, ensuring a successful email marketing campaign with such returns requires effort.

Start by creating a high-quality email list from scratch and only market to consenting users. If you purchase an email list, you risk higher unsubscriptions and demotion to spam folders.

First-time users are the best target audience for email marketing. According to Wordstream, consumers are four times more likely to read welcome emails than promotional emails. Additionally, welcome emails attract five times more clicks and thrice as much profit as promotional emails.

Email personalization is also an excellent way to get loyal customers.

Email marketing expert Ryan Phelan believes you can only reach the peak of email promotion by speaking to consumers “personally on a 1:1 individual level.”

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Market to users based on their purchases, gender, and previous interactions with your company.

One of the best ways to integrate emails with your e-commerce site for the later stages of the buyer journey is to send cart abandonment emails. You can also send them reminders when their favorite products are back in stock.

Find out what works best by split-testing email marketing campaigns.

Optimize Product Prices

Most customers are price-sensitive, especially regarding groceries (55%), utilities (36%), clothes/shoes (35%), and take-out food (30%). While competitive pricing is important we also need to consider the perception of quality, availability, customer service and your brand positioning, so just being the cheapest option is not always the only strategy.

That’s because 59% of consumers are willing to spend more for better quality.

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You can also consider a charm pricing strategy which involves using the psychology of how people read and process pricing and think you’re offering them a good deal.

The best way to optimize charm prices is by bordering them to fluent numbers depending on numeracy.

Let’s say you have two products, one that sells best at $20 and the other at $99. For a less numerate clientele, favorable pricing might be $20.99 and $98.99. Conversely, a high numerate segment responds better to $19.99 and $99.99.

Keep experimenting to find optimal pricing for different customer segments and products.

Gather More Reviews

Positive customer feedback boosts sales by highlighting your credibility. According to a study, one review can spike purchases by 10%.

Still, sales driven by feedback have logarithmic growth.

For instance, here’s the percentage increase in sales at different review counts:

  • 20 reviews: 21%
  • 50 reviews: 30%
  • 100 reviews: 37%

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E-commerce sites often receive the most review-driven sales (44% boost) once they reach 200 reviews, but it’s critical to get those first few reviews to get the ball rolling.

Here are some tricks to get more reviews from shoppers:

  • Offer incentives on subsequent purchases (free shipping, discounts, etc.).
  • Request a product review via email a few days after the sale.
  • Allow users to rate products in a single click.
  • Have quick, pre-outlined delivery times. 82% of consumers share and recommend businesses with satisfactory delivery times to family and friends.
  • Provide reliable customer service. About 40% of users are more likely to leave hotel reviews after positive experiences. Also, 34% of automotive service customers leave a review after a positive experience. And a positive dealership experience encourages 28% to review.

The most authentic way to get more reviews is to simply exceed expectations. Offer great service, easy delivery, flexible payment methods, and most importantly, durable and reliable products.

The better the products you sell, the better your impression on their minds. This also increases the likelihood of them leaving reviews versus not.

Don’t forget to use their feedback to improve your products further.

Conclusion

SEO isn’t the only tool you need to optimize your e-commerce website for sales. You also need to know how to use purchase funnel insights, set prices right, create urgency, and more.

Finally, don’t stop testing and making changes to respond to shifting consumer demands.

We’re Vizion Interactive, an eCommerce Agency with the expertise, experience, and enthusiasm to get results and keep clients happy! If you run an ecommerce site and are due for a redesign or have just launched a redesign, our SEO Audit Services identify problems with your site and lay out a plan of action. Then our experts will be right by your side with our ongoing ecommerce SEO Services to grow organic traffic and take your site to the next level. Get in touch with us to discuss more, we’re looking forward to hearing your story.