Shopping Carts and Categories - Navigating your way to conversion
We’ve been working on one of our shopping cart sites that’s just not selling. Whilst we are a web marketing company with years of experience in optimising conversion rates on shopping cart sites, we don’t always get it right the first time!
Now the first thing a really good web marketer does to solve a problem like this is look at the data. What we found is a low visits-to-carts conversion rate.
Shopping Carts Created / Visits to the shop = Visits to carts conversion rate %
Looking at the data was telling. If lots of people are coming to the shop but very few of them are putting items from the shop into the cart, then the questions arise:
- Are the items poor quality?
- Are the items too expensive?
- Is the conversion process too hard? Â
I can confidently say that the answers did not lie in points 1 and 2. The items in this shop are top quality desirable items. Price is only really an issue where there is no differentiation from other easily available alternatives. Not the case here.
So we looked at the conversion process. The question was: how do visitors to the site find items and put them into their shopping cart? After a review, we realised that having over 40 categories with multiple levels of navigation was just far to complicated. Seems we’d forgotten the KISS rule!
Flattening out the categories gave us more opportunities for search engine targeting, and made the cart conversion process far easier. The first key to shopping cart conversion is making the items easy to find. Of course, that’s just the start . . .
About the author: As the owner of a web marketing business, I’ve spent the last 7 years studying ways to boost the conversion rates of my clients’ websites. Today, our best websites convert up to 20% of visits into leads and 50% of leads to sales. The target for our clients is a minimum 5% conversion rate on visits to leads which is staggeringly more than the typical website at 0.1%.
Bitemark specialises in designing, building, writing, managing and marketing websites with high conversion rates.
