A website without conversion rate optimization is like a car with no wheels — it will take you nowhere.

– Jeremy Abel

Let’s face it. If you’re in the ecommerce game, there is one and only one thing that matters most: it’s your conversion rate.

If we have to make an educated guess, you’re probably doing everything within your reach and budget to attract customers. Be it through discounts and promotions on google ads, targeted display and banner ads, social media campaigns or retargeting with facebook pixels, the list can go on.

Yet, your conversion rates are not increasing?

Here’s the thing: there are a number of reasons behind low ecommerce rates.

Reasons Behind Your Low Ecommerce Conversion Rate

And how to fix them

Unless you’re suffering from the obvious reason syndrome where your site is not optimised for mobile or you have a distracting layout or navigation, it can be hard to tell why your site is not selling as much as it should.

Hopefully, this list of often overlooked reasons for low ecommerce rates (and their solutions) will help you pinpoint the actual culprit:

1. Your category pages take too long to load

When it comes to ecommerce websites, every second counts.

Slow websites lose customers to faster websites. In fact, you lose a whooping 7% of your visitors for every extra second that your site takes to load.

Data Source

As statistics show, you are pushing visitors away the moment they land on a website that takes a long time to load. Sure, a fast loading site does not guarantee sales, but a slow loading one undoubtedly hampers your business.

In e-commerce, this is especially true for category pages where potential customers want to browse through your products, quick.

How can you fix it?

First, you need to check if and why your website is slow. Using a tool like Pingdom or Google Page Speed, you can easily run a free test to check what is pulling your site down. Depending on the report you see, you will probably have to take one of the following steps:

i. Choose fast and reliable hosting: Go for a performance plan which offers higher memory and bandwidth limits.

ii. Minify your code universally: Ask your developer to look into the code of your website and remove redundant or poorly coded html, css or javascript. Here, this minification resource from Google can come in handy.

iii. Make your hero images and sliders lightweight without compromising on quality: You can use any of the free or paid tools to find high quality, low-sized images. Tools like TinyJPG or TinyPNG can help you compress your images for free.

Another option is to use the LazyLoad script (ask your developer, they will know). This script serves low-resolution images on the first load. Then it automatically replaces them with higher resolution images, once the page has loaded.

iv. Use a Content Delivery Network(CDN): CDNs can be a boon for ecommerce websites that sell globally. CDNs simply put, distributes the content delivery load to servers closest to your visitor’s location. Cloudflare, Sucuri and KeyCDN are all good options.

2. Your product images or videos are not interactive (read:boring)

Gone are the days when conventional product images were enough to persuade online shoppers.

The modern shopper is looking for better ways to visualise products- that’s why physical retail stores still see higher conversion rates than online stores.

While images might speak a thousand words, when it comes to online shopping static product images are just enough anymore. Plus with most ecommerce product pages looking like carbon copies of each other, it’s hard to leave a mark or convince that conversion.

How can you fix it?

Off late (approximately since 2018) we’ve seen the rise of 360° or 3D product views and immersive augmented reality enabled product visualizations. Brands like IKEA, Adidas, Converse, Sephora, Ray-Ban and more are all using augmented reality and allowing shoppers to virtually try on products from the comforts of their home- and shoppers are loving it!

Make the most of this technology by replacing your static product images with 3D or AR enabled product views that let shoppers enjoy a try-before-you-buy experience.

Product visualizations like this increase buying confidence, that leads to more conversions. In fact, 61% shoppers prefer to shop in online stores that offer augmented reality experiences.

Today, there are a handful of tools that let you deliver 3D or AR experiences, some demand a learning curve, while the others need a dedicated app.

At Designhubz we’re making 3D and Augmented Reality accessible to everyone, across any browser and device.

Our platform makes it dead easy for you to convert your 2D product images into 3D or AR and embed them on your ecommerce website, social media channels or even your ecommerce newsletters. [/vc_column_text]

3. You're abandoning your cart abandonments

In a perfect world, your visitors would land on your website, find what they want, complete your checkout process and just place the order! But that’s not the case now, is it?

Customers drop off at every stage of the buying journey. Out of which cart abandonments are the number one reason behind incomplete ecommerce purchases.

Don’t worry though, because every abandoned cart is an opportunity in disguise to bring a potential customer back and get that conversion.

How can you fix it?

Use a cart abandonment tool or plugin to track visitors who are adding products but not completing their purchases. Tools like Vue.ai or plugins like Abandoned Cart Lite for Woocomerce can be used to lure visitors back to your checkout page with the right follow-up email.

Ecommerce giant ASOS does this wonderfully. Sometimes they even add a discount coupon into the mix.

4. Your competitors are promoting their products on your site

It’s no secret that there are countless sneaky (yet ethical) tools that help businesses snatch customers from competitors. In ecommerce especially, an age old tactic is advertising on your competitor’s website.

Google Display Network makes this extremely easy. One can target their competitor’s home page or product pages brilliantly.

Let’s look at the popular Dollar Shave Club as an example. Dollar Shave is a business that sells personalized shaving and grooming products for men. Now, if we’re running a similar or related business geared towards men, it would only make sense to target our product ads to show up on their website.

While this sounds like a great tactic, at the end of the day you don’t want your competition to lure your own site’s visitors away.

How can you fix it?

To give you control over the ads that your visitors see, Google Adsense offers several options to block competitors.

Login to your Google Adsense account and visit the ‘Blocking Controls‘ page. Here, you can either block ads from general categories like Apparel, Fashion, Electronics, etc or add a list of domains that you want to block.

So say, you run ‘The Online Fashion Store’ and your competitors are ‘Fashion Stop’ or ‘Fashion for All’. You can simply add these hompage URLs to block all ads from them. Similarly, if you’re unsure about which competitors are advertising on your site, you can simply select the category ‘Apparel’ to disallow all apparel brands from placing their ads.

Simple yet smart right?

Wrapping Up

There are countless reasons behind low ecommerce conversion rates and it’s okay to feel confused about where to begin.

If you’re seeing any of the reasons we discussed in this article and act on their solutions, you can definitely expect a high return.

Once you’ve resolved the issue, you can move on to optimising other parts of your site- to ultimately create a well-oiled conversion generating website.

Want to see how Designhubz is helping ecommerce brands deliver better shopping experiences and conversion rates? Schedule a quick demo and jump into the world of 3D and AR product visualizations.

‍