If you have an ecommerce business, or you reading this article, It’s probably safe for me to assume you know what the words “conversion rate” mean. But did you know that your conversion rate is one of the biggest indicators of success? Think about it for a minute,  this aspect of your online business actually determins your success. If it’s a large number than you’re doing great, alls you have to do to increase sales is increase visitors! But, if it’s to small or actually zero (Yes…I’ve seen a 0% conversion rate on a clients site before…) there is nothing that will improve your revenue until the conversion rate is addressed. The good news is that if your conversion rate is low, or even average, there are a few things you can do to improve on them. I’ve outlined a few of the ones I suggest here in this post.

Hack #1: The “Hello” Bar

The “Hello” bar as it’s commonally reffered to, is a brightly colored bar (usually red) that appears at the top of your website when it loads. The bar will usuall contain a call to action, such as joining your email list in exchange for a pdf version of your websites catalog. It can even be tailored to a specific page on your website such as a blog post, by offering an actionable pdf. Checklists of the steps mentioned in the post seem to convert very well. Having a service with many processes, like ecommerce app development, can benifit from this greatly.

Hack #2: Displaying Social Proof On Product Pages

I don’t know why, but this seems to be missing in almost every ecomerce site I review that’s struggling with conversions. It also seems like a no brainer to me as well. We are social beings, we’re hardwired to pay attention to social proof and recommendations. Luckily this is a quick fix. If you’re using WordPress as your content management system, there are a lot of plug-ins that display social likes, shares and recommendations on product pages for you.

Hack #3: Simplify Your Check-Out Process

You can actually increase your ecommerce by a large margin by simplifing the check out process on your website. Amazon.com is a great example of this. They implemented the “One Button Purchase” option on customer accounts. Now if you have this enabled, it asks you one time if you want to purchase the product and you’re done. No check out screen or any other hoops to jump through. Now You may not be able to do the exact same thing as Amazon.com, but, buy simplifing the check-out process for your website, you can increase conversions by a significant margin.

Hack#4: Send Abandon Carts An Email

If you are tracking your analytics (and you should be), one of the things you should be tracking is how many carts are abandoned at your check out page. This can be caused by may things, and this metric is great for watching out for checkout errors as well, as the time spent on your check out page will drop or rise depending on the issue. But even with no errors, every ecommerce website has abandonded carts. It’s a part of doing business online. You can however, turn a percentage of these abandoned carts into sales simply by emailing the customer and reminding them about it. Ebay is notorious for this, and if you want to see a great example of this in action, go ahead and abandon a cart in ebay.

So…We went over a few things here in this post, let’s recap quickly. The first ecommerce conversion hack that I told you about was the “Hello” bar with a call to action. This is fairly easy for any web developer to implement and it can account for as much as an 10% increase in opt-ins for your email list.

The second ecommerce conversion hack that I told you about addressed the widespread problem of the lack of social proof on product pages. This is also a standard activity for most web developers, so you shouldn’t have much trouble getting this implemented even if you don’t use wordpress.

The third ecommerce hack was simplifing your check out processes. This will most likly increase your conversions right away. Having the check out done in 1 page is preferred.

The fourth and final ecommerce conversion hack that I showed you was reaching out to potential customers that have abandoned a shopping cart at some step of the shopping process. This will likely increase your ecommerce conversion rate as soon as it’s implemented as well.

Raising your revenue can be as easy as increasing your conversion rates when you have an ecommerce business. If you are having trouble implementing any of these ecommerce hacks, I’d suggest working with  Red Dragon Web Media for your web development solutions.