The good thing about an online shop is that everything is measurable. You can see exactly how many people reached a product page, how many added to basket and how many got to payment. The bad thing is that most owners look only at the last number and then try to fix everything at once.
Find the leak first
Open your analytics and find four numbers: visitors, product page views, add to basket, purchases. Work out the percentage between each step.
One of those gaps is usually far worse than the others. That is where to start. Everything else comes later.
A product nobody can work out how to buy
If people reach the product page but do not add to basket, the reason is usually missing information. Not persuasion, information.
- What it is, exactly, and in what size.
- When it arrives and what delivery costs.
- What happens if it does not fit.
If a buyer has to go looking for any of those answers, a large share will not look. They leave.
A basket where the price changes
The most common place a purchase breaks is the moment delivery cost first becomes visible. The person had one number in mind and is shown another.
State delivery cost before the basket, not inside it. If you have a free delivery threshold, show the buyer how far off it they are.
A checkout that asks too much
Every extra field at checkout costs you sales. Requiring an account before purchase is the most expensive of them.
Go through your checkout form and ask of every field: do I need this to fulfil the order? If not, take it out. You can ask for a birthday and a company name later.
A mobile experience nobody tested
Most ecommerce traffic comes from phones, but most shops are built on a desktop screen. Do the purchase yourself on your own phone, start to finish, with a real card.
Note every place you have to zoom, every button too small to hit, every point where the keyboard covers the field. Those are the places your buyers give up every day.
What to fix first
The order that produces results fastest:
- Show delivery cost earlier.
- Allow purchase without an account.
- Add delivery and returns information to the product page.
- Do the purchase on your own phone and fix whatever gets in the way.
None of these needs a new shop or a design project. They need one afternoon and a willingness to look at your shop as a buyer rather than an owner.
If you would rather someone walked through this with you
Book a free 30-minute call. We look at what you have now and tell you honestly whether there is anything to gain here. If there is not, you hear it on the call, not three days later in a proposal.