Your e-commerce website sucks, here’s how to fix it!

Here’s the thing if you’re getting traffic to your e-commerce website but it’s not converting above the industry average of 2%, you’re leaving money on the table – there’s more opportunity for you to sell!

Many of my clients come to me because they’re not making sales and they have no idea why. More often than not, their websites do have traffic coming to them, but their conversion rate is way below the industry average of 2%.

Which means rankly there is a PROBLEM with your website, and it’s time to address it if you want to stop missing key opportunities to sell…

Your marketing is doing its job of getting browsers onto your site, but they aren’t buying, so there’s 0 point in you investing more money into ads, because you’ll get even more traffic on your homepage – that still will not convert.

I’m always shocked by the number of clients that come to me and tell me that their ads aren’t working and when I look into it this exact issue is their problem – my solution is ALWAYS to fix your conversion rate before you invest in more paid marketing if you don’t want to waste your opportunity to convert the traffic that is landing on your site. aka waste your money!

The Importance of Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is a key metric for any e-commerce business. It tells you how many of your visitors are taking action to make a purchase. A low conversion rate means your website isn’t effectively persuading browsers to become buyers.

So, why might your browser NOT be converting?

Through my experience with doing many business audits for my clients usually, it’s caused by one of these problems:

1. Poor User Experience

Your website’s first impression is everything! If visitors can’t find what they are looking for, find your site difficult to navigate, or slow to load, they’ll quickly become frustrated, confused, disinterested, and abandon the page.

2. Ineffective Product Merchandising

Your website’s merchandising is crucial to driving conversions. If your products aren’t displayed effectively, visitors may not feel compelled to purchase. One thing many of my clients always forget is that they can re-merchandise their pages at any time, and redirect the customer in the direction of the products they want them to buy.

3. Complicated Customer Journey

The customer journey should be smooth and warm your customers up getting them ready to buy. If it’s too complicated and takes too many steps to get to checkout, customers are likely to abandon their carts. Remember a cold audience is way harder to convert, so you need to incorporate some relationship-building/credibility-driving exercises into your website to get browsers closer to conversion.

4. Lack of Strategic Selling

You may not be selling strategically, which means you’re giving your browsers no reason to buy from you at that moment in time. This usually happens with my clients don’t have a sales strategy and are not looking at the data (aka the facts) to drive the actions they take to sell in their e-commerce business.

I share more of the reasons why and how to fix them in my FREE convert more customers checklist – you can download it here. 

Will Running More Facebook or Google Ads Help My Conversion Rate?

In short – NO! Spending more on ads won’t get you more sales IF your website isn’t already converting traffic into customers.

I’ve worked with many clients who were pouring money into ads but seeing little to no return. The problem? Their websites weren’t optimized for conversions, so you can spend all the money you like on ads, but it’s unlikely you’ll get the return on investment you’re looking for UNTIL you make some changes to your website to get your conversion rate closer to the industry average.

All you are doing otherwise is directing more traffic to your site, for them to not convert.

Some of my clients have doubled their conversion rates with just a few small tweaks that I picked up on from their business audit. Meaning they can switch their ads back on and convert more sales than ever before because their website is NOW OPTIMIZED!

Before you invest any more of your cash flow into ads, make sure your site is ready to convert. Fixing these issues can be the difference between a site that just gets traffic and one that generates consistent sales.

Analyzing Your Traffic and Conversion Metrics

If your website isn’t converting, but you are getting the traffic organically or from ads, it’s very beneficial if you can dig into your analytics to understand what’s happening. Use tools like Google or Shopify Analytics to start familiarizing yourself with your key performance indicators and track user behavior on your site.

Key metrics you want to start tracking:

• Sales revenue and units
• Conversion Rate
• Traffic
• Average Order Value
• Best Sellers (what is driving 80% of your revenue?)
• Top performing pages
• Search terms
• Abandoned carts

I totally get that for a creative founder of an e-commerce business looking at the data is probably not your zone of genius, which is why I’ve put together an online course to teach you how to utilize the data in your e-commerce business to generate more sales. I also have a template included in the course that you can use to track all of the metrics I mentioned above, and my nifty little Excel formulas will do half the work for you.

I break down how you can start using the data to drive more sales in your e-commerce business step by step with my ASTA framework. ASTA stands for:

Analyzing

Strategizing

Target Setting

& Action taking

Using this framework really helps you get clear on what is happening on your website based on the data (aka the facts), from your learnings and then you can build a more strategic approach to your website sales based on this.

Want To Start Getting More Strategic About Selling?

I hope this has inspired you to stop missing out on an opportunity to sell more in your e-commerce business, I can not stress to you how easy some of the fixes can be, and can generate you a huge return in revenue!

If you’re ready to take the first steps to getting a bit more strategic about selling in your e-commerce business you can enroll in my course “Step Up Your Sales” here! 

In the meantime don’t forget to listen to more of my best tips and advice on this subject in the latest episode of the commerce club podcast.

Listen here on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube