5 Proven Tactics to Increase Your Ecommerce/Checkout Conversion Rate

There’s no question about it: increasing your checkout conversion rate is the number one task you can do to grow your business' profits.

But how do you go about it?

There are dozens, if not hundreds of ways to get more ecommerce conversions. Go ahead and make a Google search; you will be overwhelmed by the options available.

Today, we don’t want to do another mashup of tactics so you get even more confused.

Instead, we’re going to give you five proven recommendations that have worked for other online retailers and that you can easily copy today.

Want to take a look? Let’s get started.

Tactic 1. Use guarantees to cut through objections

Every consumer goes through the same buying process:

1. They find they have a problem
2. They become interested in a solution
3. They research different solutions
4. They purchase the one that’s best for their problem

From all of these steps, the last one is perhaps the most easily overlooked. Digital marketers often focus on attracting large volumes of visitors; that’s what SEO, paid advertising, and content marketing is all about.

However, turning an interested visitor into a customer takes persuasive skills that usually copywriters and salespeople have.

The main difference between the two groups is that the latter know how to handle objections — the reasons why a prospect wouldn’t buy.

One way that they do so is through the use of guarantees.

As you surely know, a guarantee is a statement or promise wherein the seller will compensate the buyer if the latter doesn’t like the product.

For your buyers, a guarantee is the proof that your business stands by its products; it means it has “skin in the game.”

There are different types of guarantees your business can offer, which vary by their compensation method and the buyer’s value perception:

1. Money-back: Your business refunds the buyer if they don’t like their purchase. It proves your business is confident in the quality of its products.

2. Best-price: Your business refunds the difference between the buyer’s price for a product they bought from you and the same one they saw in another store. It proves that your company sells the lowest-priced products in the market.

3. Lifetime: Your business will refund the buyer throughout the customer, product, or manufacturer’s lifetime.

4. Try-before-you-buy: Your business allows a customer to test a product for a certain time without buying it.

As a rule of thumb, any guarantee is better than no guarantee. However, make sure to research your industry standard and what the customer values the most.

For example, UK-based watch retailer Express tested changing their “price guarantee” stamp with an “authorized dealer” stamp on product pages 👇

Considering that luxury watch buyers aren’t price sensitive (this is due to luxury watches ranging from a thousand to tens of thousands of dollars), the test version saw a 107% jump in sales compared to the control version.

Bottom line? If you’re a retailer in a luxury segment, or if you’re selling on platforms like eBay or Amazon, an authenticity guarantee may be a more powerful tactic to help increase your ecommerce conversion rate.

Tactic 2. Minimize distractions

No one likes to part with their money. But once a buyer decides to do so, the last thing a seller should do is get in the way.

It doesn’t matter if it’s the customer information, the payment, or the delivery pages (and god forbid an account sign-up/login page); the customer should be able to add their information and finish the purchase quickly.

There’s a principle copywriters use called “the most wanted action,” which states that every page has one goal.

Do you want a customer to sign up, add more products to their carts, and share your product pages with their friends? Sure. But the average buyer, especially the first-time one, doesn’t care about any of that.

Following the basic four-step process mentioned in the previous step, you could separate your pages into three groups:

• Pages that educate about the problems buyers have and potential solutions — let’s call them “educational pages.”
• Pages that show the different solutions you offer — these are your “product pages.”
• Pages that allow a buyer to complete a purchase — we’ll call these “checkout pages.”

Each page type must fulfill its one goal. Anything else can (and should) be deleted from the page. Get the buyer’s attention to what they need to do, and get out of the way.

Does it work in practice? It sure does. Consider the case of Taloon, a Finnish hardware brand that increased its ecommerce conversion rates by 11.9% by simply removing social buttons from product pages.

Tactic 3. Let consumers personalize their shopping experience

Personalization will increase your conversions. It’s not just a statement, but a fact proved by several studies:

• SmarterHQ found that 72% of shoppers only act on marketing messages when customized to their interests.
• Epsilon found that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase when brands offer personalized experiences.
• Evergage found that 55% of marketers see the highest benefits of personalization on their visitor’s engagement and customer experience, and 51% on their conversion rates.

Ecommerce personalization may seem like an afterthought, but with all the fanfare it gets, what does it really mean to personalize a shopping experience?

Such a broad question can lead to an equally broad answer, but to give you an idea, ecommerce personalization means:

• Showing a product or landing page that adapts to the visitor’s information taken in the “pre-click” stage. For example, running Facebook ads to Michigan residents and adding the keyword “Michigan” to the product/landing page.
• Suggesting similar products to the ones the customer has bought. For example, Amazon’s below-the-fold suggestions.
• Sending an email based on a customer's past behavior. For example: sending an abandoned cart email to people who, well, abandoned their carts.

To create a tailored (personalized) shopping experience, you need data; the more, the better. You can extract most of this data from tools you already know and use like Google Analytics, Heap, Mixpanel, and Clicky.

Email marketing platforms such as ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, and SendX can also take your existing visitor data taken from your ecommerce platform and use it to create post-purchase emails, abandoned cart emails, and so on.

Data enrichment tools like FullContact and Clearbit are other options that provide further data from your subscriber’s email address.

You can also use a tool like Getsitecontrol to conduct surveys and extract detailed information about your visitors. Even though this approach may only work on a small segment of your visitor’s base, the data you can extract will be priceless.

Finally, you can add a price filter to help customers personalize their experience and minimize the number of products to look through. A generic price filter looks like this 👇