Simple changes to your website’s shopping cart can give you more sales and more profit.
Improving the performance of your websites shopping cart can be an easy way to make more profit
In my experience, chances are if you have a shopping cart on your website there is a good chance you can improve how well it performs, or to put it another way, you can get more of your visitors to buy than currently are doing so.
The level of improvements you will get depends on a number of things, but even a small improvement can be an easy win in terms of making your website more profitable.
Encouraging more of the people on the website to buy
By improving the performance of a website shopping cart, I mean encouraging more of the people on the website to buy your products. This is measured in conversion rate as a percentage, and in simple terms this means if you have 100 visitors on the website and 1 makes a purchase you will have a 1% conversion rate for the period you measure (say a day).
So really performance is about profit – and very easy profit at that.
So if you increase the conversion rate from 1% to 2% you are effectively doubling the profit of your website. This doesn’t require any more visitors, more spend on AdWords or extra marketing, just small changes to how well your cart works. All you’ve got to do is work out what those changes are.
But what should a website shopping cart conversion rate be?
This is a question I’m often asked. In my time helping people with improving their website cart conversions I’ve witnessed conversion rates from 50% down to much less than 1%, and there are a lot of factors that can affect it such as, demand for the product, season and of course how well the site is designed.
I’ve found the average to be around 2%
From the clients I’ve worked with and after looking at the Google Analytics Goals results, I’d say the average is around 2%, which obviously means for every 100 visitors you’re going to get 2 sales.
It is important to understand that you can often improve that conversion rate, and often it is not as difficult as you might imagine. More on how to go about improving conversion rate later in this tutorial.
So what sort of things affect the cart conversion rate of a website?
Even the buy button layout & colour can affect the sales conversion rate.
The obvious thing is the cart itself and how support the whole checkout process is for the user. Don’t always believe that just because your web developer installed a well know cart system, it will perform at its optimum conversion rate, straight out of the box as it were.
In my experience they rarely do, and often need quite a lot of fine-tuning to get the best results. I’m going to look in a little more detail of how the cart process can affect the conversion later in this tutorial.
There are much more subtle factors that can affect conversion rate as well. I have found in the past that even changing the colour or size of the buy button, can add as much as 3% to the conversion rate (give that you can test out a range of colours and sizes and find the best).
You need to record cart conversion rate ongoing
The problem is unless you record and measure cart conversion rate ongoing you’re never going to know, a, what it currently is, and b, whether it improves following any changes in the checkout process.
Join as a Premium Member below to read the rest of this Tutorial. You’ll learn how to use Google Analytics to measure exactly how well your website’s shopping cart is performing.
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