When it comes to running an ecommerce business, no-one said it would be easy!
But they did say the more website traffic you get, the more likely you are to make sales. However, with many Shopify owners getting tons of traffic to their site, yet tumbleweed when it comes to actual sales, it’s safe to say it’s not as easy as 1 + 2 = 3! Luckily for you, we’re here to highlight exactly why your Shopify website isn’t generating the sales you thought it would and provide tips and tricks for how to improve your site’s conversion rate. If you want to grow your Shopify store, increase high-quality traffic and boost conversions, you’ve come to the right place. Without further ado, let’s dive straight in!
1. You’re attracting low-quality traffic
Firstly, it’s important to understand where your website traffic is coming from if you want to identify why it’s not converting first-time site visitors into sales. Low-quality traffic and users with low buying intent are not likely to make a purchase from your Shopify website and as a result, aren’t the most desirable, but your site may be inadvertently attracting them. All too often, low-quality traffic comes as a result of focusing on increasing volume of traffic rather than quality of traffic. This includes pursuing tactics such as targeting SEO keywords with the highest volumes rather than those related to your niche and the conversational natural language queries your audience are likely to use amongst others.
How to fix it: So how can we fix this? To attract high-quality traffic and users that are intent on purchasing a product, you must invest in Shopify SEO. Ensuring your site is optimised is absolutely paramount for improving both the quality of your website traffic and conversion rate. A specialist SEO agency will undertake thorough keyword research, competitor analysis, GAP analysis and audit your site for technical and content improvements that can move the needle for your business.
Using this research, you’ll then be able to optimise your existing website content and create fresh new content that targets your identified niche, long-tail keywords that your audience will resonate with. This can look something like switching from targeting a vague keyword such as ‘best sports shoes’ to targeting a narrowed down and much more specific keyword like ‘best women’s trainers for playing tennis’. Whilst it may not seem like a huge change, these incremental changes can transform the success of your ecommerce website by driving users who are ready to buy, to your online shop.
2. Your site navigation is poor
A whopping 38% of first-time site visitors actively look for navigational links on a page, highlighting the importance of nailing your navigation to make a good first impression. If you’ve been running your Shopify store for a while now, it’s likely you’ve have an abundance of various category pages, product pages, collections, blog posts, articles and more. The older your Shopify store gets, the more complex it is to navigate as a result of the multiplying pages and growing site. Therefore, it’s absolutely paramount that your main nav is clear, concise and key pages stand out within yoru menu to ensure users can quickly find exactly what they’re looking for. If a user has to click 7 times before getting to the category they were intending on purchasing from, they’re likely to abandon the site altogether out of sheer frustration.
How to fix it: To avoid customer frustration, reduce bounce rates and boost conversions, it’s vital to categorise your menu succinctly. The key here is to use a data-driven approach that takes customer data and previous buying journeys into account. This enables you to structure your menu in such a way that appeals to your target audience and places the most popular pages in predominantly places within the menu itself. If you want to take it to the next level, AI-powered integrations can help you to dynamically personalise menu structure and products based on a users’ previous search history. This is an advanced implementation so be sure to enlist the help of an ecommerce agency. It’s also important that you don’t neglect the important of your footer menu! Including key areas such as contact, FAQs, about, sizing information and returns policies within your footer is also good practice to improve navigation and create seamless user journeys.
3. Your landing pages don’t have clear CTAs
Call-to-actions (CTAs) are excellent tools that can be the driving force behind increasing conversions for your Shopify ecommerce site. Well-designed CTAs are your secret weapon for converting first-time site visitors into customers. You must decide on what action you want site visitors to take on each page and design your CTA layout and buttons accordingly. If you don’t place your CTAs strategically, you’ll miss out on sales. Likewise, if your CTAs have weak contrast and don’t stand out on the page, your sales with suffer too.
How to fix it: Ensure that every page has a clear CTA that stands out from the rest of the content on the page and entices users to take action. The copy on your CTA must be persuasive and succinct if it has any chance of converting a site visitors into a paying customer, so be sure to spend time crafting the perfect copy and repeat it wherever relevant to ensure consistency. Consistency is key when it comes to CTA’s. Imagine the ‘Add to Basket’ CTA being a different colour and different copy on every product page… Now that’s a sure-fire way to confuse site users and will not compel them to make a purchase.
4. Your brand identity isn’t building trust
Your online brand identity is integral to building trust in site visitors. If your Shopify store isn’t converting, it’s possible that it’s down to your branding and lack of trust signals across your website design. A well-established and well-executed brand identity that oozes professionalism and dependability is essential for building trust in users and converting them into customers. Having a distinctive visual brand identity helps your site to stand out from competitors, creates a sense of familiarity and recognition and can help users to resonate with your core values, further developing the relationship. Inconsistent branding, a confusing identity, blurry images, spelling errors and a slow-loading website all contribute to a lack of trust in users so if any of these are ringing alarm bells, it’s time to transform your brand identity.
How to fix it: It’s probably time for a branding overhaul! If you’ve never invested in your brand identity, we’d highly recommend starting there. A good branding design agency will always ensure that your core brand values and beliefs are captured and reflected in your new visual brand identity, ensuring consistency, high-quality visuals and beautiful branding that will convert. From logos and typefaces to colour palettes, brand guidelines and marketing assets, ensuring your brand is presented in the best possible way at every customer touchpoint is vital for building trust and authority in your industry which ultimately, increases sales and conversions.
5. You aren’t speaking to your target audience
Ensuring that your tone of voice, language and any copy on your website is tailored to your niche target audience can be key to boosting conversions on your Shopify store. If your choice of language isn’t directly addressing your target demographic, this can lead to a lack of trust and familiarity which in turn, reduces conversions.
How to fix it: If you think you’re having this issue, we’d recommend undertaking some thorough keyword research to identify key search queries that your audience is using. Be sure to focus on long-tail keywords as this will provide an insight into how your audience speaks and writes and provides clues into the types of words and phrases they are used to, whether that may be slang or . Additionally, depending on your industry you may need to portray a level of authority and professionalism. For example, an ecommerce site selling medical equipment needs to command respect and authority whereas a brand selling cute phone charms aimed at teenagers must tailor their language to fit the demographic. There is no one size fits all so the fundamental understanding of your audience must be there to ensure you’re resonating with them.
6. Your site isn’t optimised for mobile users
Mobile users now account for the majority of ecommerce customers, with over 70% of all online sales attributed to mobile devices. If your Shopify mobile experience is sluggish, slow-loading and not optimised for mobile users, you’ll be missing out on sales. While Shopify themes are designed to be responsive and mobile-friendly, performance can be hindered by large images preventing pages from loading accurately, low-contrast text-to-background ratios making text illegible and excessive plugins and integrations that cause sites to perform slowly.
How to fix it: Luckily on Shopify, this is a relatively simple fix. Firstly, we’d recommend resizing and compressing all of your existing images to ensure they are not huge file sizes causing your site to run slowly. As Shopify allows you to upload a mobile-friendly version of an image, you should absolutely do this to ensure your web design displays beautifully across mobile and static devices. Or better yet, get a great digital agency to revamp your site with UX and mobile-optimisation at the forefront.
7. You don’t offer a variety of payment options
With the rise of payment plans and buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) schemes, consumers are now accustomed to a wide range of payment methods that they expect to be at the checkout. If you don’t offer these types of payment options to your customers, they may abandon their cart and not checkout.
How to fix it: This one is a relatively quick fix! Simply choose a range of payment methods such as PayPal, Klarna, Clearpay and Google Pay and add them to your existing payment methods at the checkout. Not only will this hugely improve trust, it is likely to improve conversions, particularly for high price-point items where customers need to pay over a few months to afford your product.
Overall, if your Shopify ecommerce website isn’t converting, it’s likely to be as a result of one of the issues above. if you need a helping hand identifying the problem areas of your website or would like an entire Shopify website overhaul, we’re here to help! Don’t hesitate to get in touch and we can offer a complimentary UX audit to identify areas that may be impacting your conversion rates.
