Eight simple e-commerce hacks to increase your online selling power

Testing, measuring, optimising – if you’re in the online retail space, it’s never been easier to get to the bottom of what works for your e-commerce business and what doesn’t. Well, in theory. The trouble is that when your online store and beyond is a veritable treasure trove of things to be tweaked and experimented with, it can be difficult to know where to begin.

So, to help, here are eight hacks (or tweaks) that you can make to your website relatively easily.

Increase conversions by creating a sense of urgency

Fear of missing out is a big deal for modern consumers. In fact, extensive research into cognitive bias has revealed that in humans, the pain of losing is far more acute than the pleasure of winning. As a result, we’ll make seemingly illogical decisions to avoid loss. Many top online brands are subtly incorporating features that play on inherent loss-aversion impulses to encourage consumers to purchase now, rather than giving them time to think “I’ll do this later” and potentially drop off the radar:

Stock levels: Some online retailers, such as Topman, visually alert visitors when a certain size or variation of an item is low in stock, usually through a pop-up saying something along the lines of: “Hurry! Only 3 left in stock.”

Time-limited or number-limited offers: Giving people a hard deadline can act as a powerful incentive to buy. “This weekend only” free postage and packaging or 24-hour flash sales are great examples of these. Similarly, emailing customers around public holidays reminding them of the last day they qualify for shipping to get a gift sent on time will make them feel as if they’re up against the clock and spur them on to take action.

Maximise sales from the category page

Many underestimate the importance of category pages in purchase decisions and it’s important to remember to optimise them. A simple hack for this is using what’s known as the “product page conversion ratio” to decide which products should get greatest visibility on your category pages, whether that’s sticking them right at the top of the page or using other visual tactics.

Here is a simple calculation that uses individual product conversion rates to maximise revenue from the category page by boosting the products that are most likely to convert:

Product page conversion rate (as a %) = [number of purchases / number of pageviews] x 100.

When I use the formula above, it reveals, for example, that the product page conversion of a pair of gold high-top trainers in my online store that’s had 103 purchases and 894 pageviews is 12%. When I calculate this for the rest of my trainers category page, I’ll look out for those that have the highest percentage and push them to the top of the page.

Understand how your visitors are using site search

Site search is frequently overlooked as a source of important information about the way visitors interact with your website. A good hack for flagging up issues with this involves delving into your website analytics, which should be able to track search activity. Are there any search terms that rarely lead to any pageviews? This could suggest that your site search is poorly optimised, especially if you actually stock relevant items.

Likewise, analysis of your site search data can turf up non-product-related terms that are frequently searched for, but for which you may not have thought to optimise your pages. For example, are you getting a lot of searches for “sizing chart”? Being able to find out sizing information can be an important part of a buying decision, so make sure the relevant page appears top of your results.

Reduce pogo-sticking

Pogo-sticking (of the e-commerce variety) refers to the phenomenon of a user moving up and down the hierarchy of your site, for example going from category to product to category to product page and so on and so forth. According to research, it only takes two or three bounces for conversion rates to plummet. The main antidote to this is to give users lots of product information on the category page. Here are some clever anti-pogo-sticking devices you might want to think about including:

Larger-than-average thumbnail images
Multi-view images that scroll as the mouse hovers over them
Quick view buttons that launch a lightbox-style pop-up with more pictures and views
Key technical specs
Average customer review star rating

Quarantine the checkout area

The concept behind this hack is very simple: remove all distractions that might prevent someone getting from start to finish in your checkout process. That means removing pretty much everything bar a hyperlinked logo back to your homepage and the ability to navigate back to a previous stage of the checkout. The Currys checkout process is a good example of this.

When quarantining your checkout, you should aim to hide certain distracting components of your regular layout, so simply employing CSS code display:none (hiding online elements and objects) can be an effective way of achieving this without requiring an entire checkout redesign.

Flag problems in the check-out process

Do this by comparing add-to-basket rate and conversion rate. Is there a big customer turn-off lurking somewhere in your checkout process? Issues at the checkout stage – from high shipping rates to prolonged delivery estimates to an inconvenient returns policy – can significantly dent your conversion rates.

The best way to hack this is to compare add-to-basket rate with conversion rate at both product and category level. Put simply, if your product has a high add-to-basket rate but fails to make it out the other end of the checkout process packaged and paid for, this suggests that there’s something inherent within this process that’s causing people to abandon ship, which means it’s time to get investigating.

Improve form design

Eye-tracking research has revealed that label alignment plays a huge role in form submission rates. Why? If your eyes are forced to jump back and forth from field to label several times, you’re increasing the cognitive load, which means an increased likelihood that visitors will get fed up and leave.

So which form label alignments work best? The winner by a long stretch is top-aligned, where the words sit above the input field. Next is right-alignment (so that the form label is right-aligned next to the field) and last up is left-aligned, in spite of it creating a neat left-hand margin. For a useful diagram of the various alignments, click here.

Terms like “growth hacking” and “agile marketing” seem pretty scary at first, but ultimately they simply mean marketing efficiently, something that makes a lot of sense for businesses wanting to generate more profit and keep one step ahead of the competition.

Ivan Mazour is CEO and founder of Ometria

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