Among all retail industries, ecommerce is proving to be one of the fastest growing segments.

According to a 2016 report, US e-commerce sales reached $396 billion in 2016, and are predicted to grow to a massive 684 billion by 2020.

These statistics demonstrate the immense potential that e-commerce presents. But opening an ecommerce store is easy; a bigger challenge in this retail segment is getting the conversion statistics that you want.

Here are some quick ways you can improve your conversions:

1. Offer free shipping

The prospect of getting free delivery for your purchases are almost guaranteed to get customers to complete their online shopping process.

Essentially, by removing delivery charges, you are removing a big element of friction among online shoppers. According to an E tailing study, 73 percent of online users consider free shipping a critical deciding factor when they make purchases.

Offering free shipping removes a big element of friction among online shoppers.

If offering free shipping is not a financially viable option, try offering special shipping offers. Special shipping offers means getting people to order above a minimum amount so that they can avoid shipping charges. This prompts customers to order more. You can also try tacking on the shipping cost into the price of your services and products to avoid charging extra for shipping.

Basically, free shipping is a simple but relevant perk that has been known to entice customers and minimize cart abandonment. It’s been proven as an effective marketing tool that can benefit both the customer and yourself.

2. Build urgency

A tried and tested technique used by numerous ecommerce sites to build a sense of urgency among their shoppers is by highlighting the limited nature of their stock.

A countdown timer helps build a sense of urgency.

This is a psychological tactic that plays on the customer’s fear of missing out. By hyping on a particular product’s limited nature, exclusivity and scarcity, customers will feel more compelled to complete purchases immediately.

There are numerous ways to do this—

• Prominently displaying the number of available items left.
• Placing a countdown timer on the page.
• Announcing limited time promotions for a particular product.

3. Retarget shoppers

Shoppers who abandon their shopping carts do so for a number of reasons. Maybe they realized that shipping cost was too expensive. Or it could be that they just completely forgot about it.

For whatever reason carts get abandoned, a 67.5 percent cart abandonment rate is a pretty significant number of users that you can retarget in the hopes of being able to complete their purchases or even gain insight so you can improve the site’s shopping experience.

Reach out to customers who have already shown interest in your product or service.

Reaching out to customers who have already shown interest in your product or service will likely mean they are more willing to complete the purchase process. But it’s important that you determine what made them abandon their carts to begin so that you can deliver the most effective message that will prompt them to continue on through your conversion funnel. Could it be because they found shipping costs too expensive? Was it because they got confused with your sign up process? It could even simply be because they fort about it.

Whatever the case, here are some ideas on retargeting customers:

• Offer discount vouchers or coupons as customers are about to exit the page.
• Send a follow up email that will remind customer of the cart they left on your site.
• Provide additional information on the products on their cart.

4. Feature complimentary products on product pages

Thoughtful and intelligent product recommendations are said to help raise online sales by nearly 30 percent.

For example, people who are shopping for dresses online are likely to want to find accessories that will go with their latest purchase. This gives you an opportunity to display shoes, purses or even jewellery. Or if someone is trying to purchase a smartphone on your site, it might be a good idea to suggest accessories meant to protect their new gadget.

Feature related products to improve chances of upselling to customers.

They critical thing to remember here is that you should always upsell items that are relevant:

• Base your suggestions on their current purchases.
• Get to know your audiences to ensure the relevance of your upsell offers.
• Feature images of products and services that you want to feature.

Try out these four techniques and see how well they work to convert your existing traffic. These methods are simple and won’t be too expensive to implement. Once you do, we’d love to hear about how well it worked for you so leave us a comment below.

If you want us to help you improve your ecommerce conversions, visit our website and request a demo of what our company can do for you.