What to Enhance on Your Online Store to Improve Sales

Any owner of an online business surely craves for their website to perform well, attract clients, and drive sales. Yet what can you try to upgrade apart from the quality of your products and services to convert more customers? Let’s start with those elements of your website that can help you to trampoline conversions.

On this page, we’ll share five tricks that you may begin with when thinking about ways to improve your site. Furthermore, we’ll give examples of how this can be done on your website by showing you the implementation of these solutions by renowned brands.

1. Speed Up Your Site & Invest in Mobile Optimization

The absolute first thing you should pay attention to is your site’s performance. Your store must be fast, mobile-friendly, glitch-free, and easy to use. This is one of the major reasons why so many store owners are currently getting progressive web applications for their site as this technology really picks up mobile conversions.

The thing is that the behavior of your buyers is changing. Their expectations are very high and they continuously become more and more impatient with slow and unintuitive sites. This is exactly why you need to rethink your site design if it’s outdated, optimize it for mobile use, and speed it up as much as you can. Otherwise, your bounce rates (the rate that calculates lost site users who left the page empty-handed really quickly) will only grow, and these are your lost opportunities and wasted marketing money.

Just try to think about the following, according to the findings by Think with Google on page speed statistics:

“As page load time goes from 1s to 3s the probability of bounce increases 32%, from 1s to 5s the probability of bounce increases 90%.”

Frightening, right? Therefore before you start adding any new elements to your site, conduct an audit to figure out your store’s strengths and weaknesses. Then accelerate page opening times, optimize your site for mobile use (the number of users who prefer their smartphones and tablets constantly grows as opposed to desktop ones), and only then move on to incorporating new elements or boosting the currently used solutions.

2. Link Up Your Social Media & UGC

Now that it’s clear that performance and mobile optimization go first, let’s move on to other “hacks” that can assist your store growth. Customer image galleries that allow users to upload their own photos and social media widgets that automatically load tagged posts are a perfect start for you. User-generated content (UGC) is good for your business’s branding and is one of the ways to get more reviews and sales.

Such sections inspire both your acquired and new customers to share how they use or wear the product they’ve bought from you. This helps them to trust your brand and product quality, not to mention, that such content can urge spontaneous buys. What’s for social media widgets, such UGC use also helps you keep your social accounts “live” and gain credibility.

Take a look at how the official L’Oreal Paris site uses such a section. As you can see, they invite people to “Share their snaps” and tag the brand “#LOREALPARIS” to get featured.

Screenshot taken on the official L’Oreal Paris website

3. Give Attention to Gift Sections

The second recommendation for enhancing online sales deals with gift finder blocks. With so many holidays and occasions during the year, it’s often very hard to be creative and to find the ideal presents. This is why, as a store owner, you can share your expertise in the form of such a section. Pretend that you’re consulting a client on what to give someone and add this advice into easy to browse collections.

Here is a screenshot from the official Puma website. The main top menu has an entire tab devoted to presents. We can see so many categories that are broken down by receiver (“Gifts For Her”, “Gifts For Kids”), price, etc. For sure, this can make your customers’ lives easier and result in the growth of your sales.

Screenshot taken on the official Puma website

4. Cross-Selling Wisely Helps

Upselling is another “trick” for growing sales but only if it’s done right. A simple “We recommend” block won’t be too effective, whereas a clean-cut cross-selling section with things that actually match each other well and are often purchased together will.

The less random are the offered choices, the higher are the chances for these goods to be added to the shopping cart additionally. Actually, instead of just guessing, you can leave the choice of what to show your users to modern technology. As such, there are artificial intelligence-powered solutions that analyze product pairs and combinations based on user behavior and can automatically pitch the best-fit matches. Plus, you can make use of the web design best practices to organize the section as you wish.

For instance, here’s such a “Works Well With” block on the official MAC Cosmetics website. It offers corresponding best-match products in slider format. Importantly, the “content” and collections are different on all product pages.

Screenshot taken on the official MAC Cosmetics website

5. Uplift Your Loyalty Programs

The fifth point we’d like to cover deals with customer retention. Starting loyalty programs or “clubs” that your users can join can greatly improve your sales. This has to do with the fact that it’s simpler to sell something to those people who have already done business with you earlier rather than to convince new clients.

Case in point, below is a screenshot of a pop-up on the official DKNY website. The message allures customers to quickly sign up for their newsletter mailout by leaving their email address. Importantly, they offer a 20% discount off the person’s first purchase on the website which is neat motivation to start shopping. This can also help you (as a store owner) to obtain valuable client data and to increase the possibility of this person becoming a returning client.

Screenshot taken on the official DKNY website

To Conclude

Summing up the above, there are many things that you can do to improve your website with the aim of boosting your sales and conversions. Sometimes even a minor tweak can bring back outstanding results, therefore, don’t overlook optimization works. They’re essential for you to keep pace and be compatible.

Remember, site speed and mobile-friendliness are the first things to focus on. What’s for other elements, give attention to your customer journey from the first-seen screens all the way to the checkout, and, finally, consider making use of the tips given in this article.