Organizing a well-rounded and functional e-commerce website requires you to take many different aspects of the digital world into consideration.

Indeed, since online markets are so well-covered and competitive nowadays, every single detail counts – from the visual design of your landing page, to how your CTA is formulated. Also, you can have the best images and videos as well as killer CTA’s, but if your website takes more than a couple of seconds to load, you can forget about attracting a lot of customers. 

So, making it in e-commerce is a complex and demanding process that requires you to understand and get involved in many different ‘pots’ such as design, content creation, SEO, marketing in a broader sense, the list goes on. 

In case your e-commerce conversion rates are low, you might be doing something wrong, and considering a great many aspects of running an online store, chances are – you might be doing multiple things wrong.

In this article, we are going to list the most common reasons why conversion rates for e-commerce businesses get low, and we will suggest some ways to fix these situations, so you can begin making some progress with your online sales.

Here’s the deal. 

• Your Website Has an Ugly Visual Layout.

A website that looks disorganized, confusing, and just plain ugly is not going to be the best ambassador to your business. 

You see, no matter how high-quality your products or services are, if your website is an eyesore and doesn’t reflect your business’s identity, so to speak, the folks who somehow land on it will probably leave it shortly after. 

The thing is, the majority of online buyers and Internet surfers don’t have that long of an attention span, so if the web premises they’re in at the moment don’t look up-to-date and attractive, they may just assume you’re some sort of second-rate business and abandon their purchase altogether.

To flip this situation in your favor, invest in some website design. While hiring professional web designers to help you with this is often not cheap, doing so will definitely pay off in the long run. Also, the way your website is designed will speak volumes to a visitor about your company’s identity, so it pays off to put your best foot forward when website layout design is in question. 

• The Website Is Not Optimized for Search Engines. 

SEO, or search engine optimization, represents the cornerstone of modern-day online marketing, so failing to use it on your website would be a catastrophic move on your part as the business owner. 

The way customers find your website is partly through links they click somewhere online, someone recommends you to them, or commonly – the simply type something of interest to them in a search engine and then your website pops up. 

That is, it pops up if you’ve previously optimized its content for search engines. 

If you’ve failed to add this crucial piece of the puzzle to your overall website, you run the risk of producing excellent content and having a brilliant visual layout for your visitors you love, but not ranking high enough on search engines for people to find you.

The solution to this would be to optimize your content for search engines. Now, many business owners don’t have the time to learn how to do this and perform it efficiently, so if you are one of them, you can always hire an SEO agency to help you out. For folks from Australia, for example, an SEO company from Sydney may be an interesting solution here.  

Other than that, it’s worth pointing out that you can learn SEO yourself, but the process might take a while, so getting a little bit of outside help at first might be a good idea. 

• Your Website Is Not Mobile-Friendly. 

… which is bound to exclude vast seas of potential customers from your sales list. 

The thing is, more and more people nowadays prefer using mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets for surfing the Internet as well as making purchases, so not making your website available to this growing demographic would be a massive missed chance. 

The way you should approach this would be the following – if you’re building a website for your business, you should, at the same time, invest in building the mobile version of it. While this will inevitably increase the costs of site building and maintenance, opening up your business to the vast market of mobile users would undoubtedly turn out to be well worth any expenses you had to cover for the building and the upkeep of this additional mobile web platform. 

• Putting Out Low-Quality Product Images Is a Major Put-Off for the Customer

If you aim to make your website look dodgy and yourself as an owner disinterested in what you’re selling, putting up some low-resolution images of the products you’re intending to sell is a great way to go about it. 

Your potential customers will be interested in the looks of something that they’re buying from you, so what you want to do is post on your website the best images you can, so that your potential customers can see exactly what they’re buying. Optimally, you should include multiple shots from several different angles to cover the entire product. 

• Posting Poorly-Written Content Says that You Don’t Care About Your Business Integrity

Every once in a while, it happens that we post something we wish we hadn’t.

Whether it’s a tweet, an overly dramatic Facebook post, or a text with less-than-average content that’s supposed to promote our business, posting such a stinker is a minor faux pas that can be corrected fairly easily by simply removing the post or appropriately amending it. 

Now, making one mistake every once in a while is understandable, but doing it on a regular basis will show to your potential customers that you’re disinterested in your business and that all you’re looking for is merely a quick buck on the Internet. 

Posting excellent content on your website also means you care about your business integrity and how people perceive you, which your customers will immediately recognize and respect. 

• The Best Way to Mess up a Done-Deal Sale Is to Have a Confusing Checkout Page

Imagine having persuaded your customer in the worth of your product or service and made them go all the way from researching the product, finding it on your website, and then wishing to buy it. And then you mess it all up by having a checkout page that makes no sense, and that seems too confusing to be real. 

The thing is, customers nowadays tend to be wary of Internet scams and other online abuse, especially when money is involved, so your aim as an online business is to make sure your customers feel safe spending money at your place. This is why you need to organize a well-made checkout page so that your customers can follow the payment steps quickly and easily.

Final Words

All in all, if you’re struggling with your e-commerce conversion rate and would like to improve it, looking into your website’s visuals, content, and the degree of search engine optimization would be the first thing to do. With a little bit of an initial investment, effort, and a willingness to learn, you can turn your website from an obscure online venue into a bustling e-commerce platform where online visitors will love to shop.

Author Bio

Mia Ackerson is a Melbourne-based writer. Loves writing about technology, digital marketing, and online businesses. She’s also interested in home decorations, reading books, watching movies, baking, and gardening. You can follow her on Twitter.