E-commerce companies continue to be the wave of the future. As society becomes a more disconnected world, we increasingly rely on the internet to provide everything we need. It provides dating options, pet product home delivery, used car shopping sight unseen, and any movie we desire in just one click. The faster technology changes, the more we will rely on companies to give us what we want without having to leave our homes.
With any small online business, customer experience isn’t king, but everything! Not only do you have to have a product that your customers want, but the shopping experience needs to be pleasant so that customers don’t abandon their shopping carts and assure they return for future virtual shopping trips.
There are two distinct ways to know right off the bat if your customer experience is what it needs to be in order to optimize their shopping experience and your profits:
- Are you reaching your optimal conversion rate? Conversion Rate Optimization is the number of sales divided by the number of website hits in a set number of time. For example, ABC Company has 237 purchases made on their website in one month. In that same month, they had 14,352 hits on their website. Their website conversion is 1.65%. A healthy e-commerce website conversion rate ranges from 3-4%, but an optimal conversion rate would be 4-6%. If your conversion rate is less than 4%, you are leaving money on the table.
- Is your website working for you? When sitting down and analyzing if you are reaching your optimal conversion rate an easy question to ask yourself would be “is your website working for you or are you working for your website?”. Do you seem to spend more time fixing customer check out issues that actually promoting your business on social media? Are most of your customer complaints about your site? If so, then your website is not working for you! Let me be honest here: You lighting dollars on fire with the time you’re wasting fixing issues caused by an inefficient website. While you might have invested in a new shopping cart platform in the past 3 years, it’s quite possible that it was the wrong one. Investing in your site now, will save your valuable time and money, and most likely increase your bottom line.Too often, small business owners allow their own personal desires get in the way of having a successful business. They choose what they would want to see on a website or their personal impression/vision of their brand, over customer experience. A businesses’ brand is critical to their message, but not at the detriment to the health of the business. Business owners have to decide what is more important: Satisfy the ego at the expense of the profit margin or to grow a thriving business? Money or ego?
Data driven solutions to website conversion optimization can’t be argued. As a business owner, is your website converting the sales that you want to see? If not, consider what changes you can make to your site to see your business grow.
