In my last post I described what it feels like to build your own webshop from scratch. As a footnote to that, I have put together a few tips worth reading as a webshop owner if you want to get the most conversions out of your site. We will mostly look at what happens on the site itself – PPC marketing is Álmos’s territory – but there is one tip about that too at the end.
Marketing: bring back the people who have already visited
A returning customer is the best customer
Because they are “free”. You pay for every new visitor: in ads, in clicks, in campaigns. Someone who has already browsed your shop or bought from you is far cheaper to reach again – and they already trust you. Do everything you can to bring them back. A few ideas, by no means a complete list:
- Loyalty programme: points or a discount on the next order, so there is a reason to come back.
- Newsletter: new products, sales, useful content – regularly, but without being pushy.
- Targeted campaigns: based on past purchases, for example around the time the product they last bought is likely to run out.
- Abandoned cart emails: for someone who got as far as the cart but did not finish the order, a well-timed reminder is often all it takes.
Just make sure you do all of this with the customer’s consent: marketing emails need their permission, and a well-worded checkbox at checkout or sign-up makes it easy to ask for.
Build trust before you ask for their money
In an unfamiliar webshop, the first thing a customer checks is whether they can trust you. Help them: collect genuine customer reviews and show them on the product page. Use good product photos, make your contact details easy to find, and spell out the terms for shipping, returns and warranty. A review request emailed after the order goes a long way towards filling empty product pages.
UX: don’t lose visitors along the way
Where are you losing your visitors?
Track exactly how visitors behave on your site and rework the pages that convert worst. Are they not adding products to the cart? Do they stall on the cart page instead of moving on to checkout? Make the path clearer and your conversion rate will improve.
Google Analytics is your best friend here: from the shop’s events (product view, add to cart, begin checkout, purchase) you can build a funnel that shows exactly which step loses the most people. It does take some learning – we can help with that.
Two more tools worth adding alongside it:
- Heatmaps and session recordings (the free Microsoft Clarity, for example): they show where visitors click, how far they scroll and where they get stuck. What Analytics tells you in numbers, you see here with your own eyes. (With cookie consent, of course.)
- Your site search log: what are visitors searching for, and which searches return nothing? It is the most honest market research there is – it shows which products are missing, or which words people use for things you have named differently.
Click through your own webshop as a visitor
Place a test order. Then ask your friends and acquaintances to do the same. Is some element unclear? Can’t you find something? Is there a typo in the copy? Is the confirmation email confusing? You can fix a huge number of issues this way, and they matter, because this is all your visitors ever see of your webshop.
The most valuable test is the one run by someone who has never seen the site. You already know where everything is – they don’t. Don’t jump in, just watch where they get stuck.
Don’t forget the mobile view!
Most development and admin work happens on a desktop, but your customers are most likely shopping on their phones. That is where your webshop needs to be fast and easy to use first. Check that the add-to-cart button is comfortably within thumb reach, that product descriptions are readable, and that a popup or the cookie bar is not covering everything. We have a separate, detailed post on speed – on a phone with a weaker connection it matters even more.
No surprises at checkout
Unexpected costs are one of the most common reasons for abandoned carts. If the shipping fee only shows up at the last step of checkout, that is where many people turn back. Show on the product page what delivery costs and when the parcel will arrive. And keep the checkout simple:
- let people buy as guests – do not make registration mandatory;
- only ask for what the order really needs;
- offer the payment and delivery methods your customers are used to – in Hungary that means card payment, cash on delivery and parcel lockers;
- social login (Google, Facebook) spares returning customers from filling in the form at all.
Sales: more orders, bigger baskets
Time your sales
Do you run sales? Time them to create a sense of urgency, so customers are more likely to buy. It works for them, because they get the product cheaper, and it works for you, because your turnover grows. Put a countdown on the product page so they can see how long the offer lasts.
Two things to watch, though. First, the deadline has to be real: if the “today only” offer is still running tomorrow, customers quickly learn there is no need to hurry. Second, the rules: under EU price indication rules, when you announce a price reduction, the prior price you show must be the lowest price of the 30 days before the sale – so you cannot bump the price up just before the sale starts.
Show what else belongs in the cart
Raising the basket value matters just as much as raising the number of buyers. Suggest complementary products on the product page and in the cart – the ones that work best are those actually bought together in past orders. If you have a free shipping threshold, show in the cart how much is still missing: a “spend 2,000 HUF more for free shipping” message gets plenty of people to add one more item.
+1 tip to make your operators’ lives easier
How automated are your processes? How much work is it for an admin to list a new product? To reprice in bulk or set up a sale? To process an order? If the answer to any of these is more than a minute, that process needs to be simplified or automated.
Typical examples: importing products from a spreadsheet instead of entering them by hand, bulk pricing based on rules, invoices issued automatically after the order, and shipping labels generated through an API connection to the courier’s system. Every minute you save here repeats every day and with every order.
Finally, PPC: don’t burn your clicks
Do you use external partners for pay-per-click campaigns? You don’t necessarily have to hand your PPC partners a feed of your entire catalogue. Set up rules, or hand-pick the products you want to include. Don’t waste click costs on products that don’t end up being bought – that is how you improve your conversion rate and optimise your spend.
A good starting point is to leave out-of-stock and low-margin products out of the feed and group the rest with custom labels (such as “bestseller”, “high margin” or “seasonal”). That way whoever runs the campaigns can decide, product group by product group, how much is worth spending on what.
If you’d like help putting any of this into practice, get in touch. Which tip would you start with?