Increasing eCommerce conversion rates

How retailers thrive online with WooCommerce  

Given that 88% of online shoppers say they wouldn’t return to a website after having a bad user experience, a clumsy, confused or frustrating store will undermine your website’s longevity and ultimately its success.

Read on for our take on how to use WooCommerce to build an effortless user experience (UX) into your online store — and convert one-time visitors to loyal customers. 

Where to focus your efforts for an effortless WooCommerce user experience

Your WooCommerce site should be beautiful, but it must also be functional. A user-centric design will prioritise usability and simplicity.

Ditch nonsensical layers of menus, cluttered listings or visual overwhelm and, instead, design a site which gets your customer’s attention without using up all of their time. 

Intuitive user journeys from product page to order confirmation 

When you’re exploring how to improve eCommerce conversion rates, user experience is one of the most important factors.

The best user interface designs should make it easy to find products and buy them in as few clicks as possible. Stores like Amazon and Argos funnel users into product pages within 2-3 clicks: then to order completion in no more than 3 further clicks. 

The frustration of clunkier, arduous navigation stays with shoppers — bear in mind that 44% of shoppers would share negative sentiments about a brand with others and yet shrewd UI and UX design will have a fluidity that goes largely unnoticed. 

Help customers buy into the brand 

What you’re selling might seem obvious: the products you list, right? But modern shoppers want to invest in more than the physical purchase. 

Never before have consumers focused so much on a brand’s reputation and attached so much emotion to the brands with which they engage.

64% of women and 68% of men have felt an emotional connection with a brand. Brand identity and brand values are part of the package, adding purpose to a customer’s purchase.

To communicate why customers should buy, first study your market:

• Who are your customers?
• What does your brand offer them in addition to a product? 
• How does your brand identity dovetail with theirs?
• What practical and emotional needs are being met by your customers’ association with your brand?
• How can you communicate that your products fulfil their needs?

Dungaree aficionados Lucy & Yak use the landing page of their Shopify site not only to offer a visual feast of the pieces and people who wear their clothes, but also to highlight their commitment to sustainable, slow fashion. Menu items allow customers to navigate easily to learn more and engage with these values. 

Buying from this brand often becomes a statement about ethical fashion, as much as about the want or need for the piece itself.  

Carefully curate the visual experience to improve eCommerce conversion rates

The tactile experience of shopping in person (or IRL) cannot be replicated online, but as an online seller, you have an incredible asset: as shoppers’ other senses are muted, what they see is heightened.   

Your curation of the visual aesthetics and the click-through experience of your site can make it a powerful tool in communicating your brand identity, showcasing your products and eliciting excitement from your customers, with the end goal of improving eCommerce conversion rates.

Three things to remember

1. Represent your products and your brand

Your imagery should represent your products, but also represent your brand. Plan for a consistent method of product imagery — which can and should evolve over time — and creative but clear ways to frame the images on your site. (Read on for an example of this done well by Petalon flowers.)

2. Form enables function

Your site’s visual design is not a superficial aspect of your commercial platform: crucially, it has to have function! 

Colour choices can generate customer confidence and improve brand recognition by up to 80%. The visual elements should all coalesce, so make your colour choices consistent with your branding. This visual harmony means it’s easier for your identity to be intelligible to customers: they can ‘read’ your brand, understand it, and form that all important emotional connection to it. 

Colour contrast supports you to create an effective and accessible user interface. Adopting striking colour choices or contrasts for calls to action can visually guide customers to the parts of the site you want them to engage with.

Note how Mariner Eyewear’s monochromatic, clean aesthetic is punctuated by an arresting vivid orange for banners and account buttons. There’s some clever harmonising here with the product colouring, making both pop and be visually satisfying.

Their site could be even more accessible with better use of opacity layers behind the text that sits over the image of a mountain. 

3. Do things dynamically

Get things moving by utilising visuals or animations as signposts. You could use these for: 

• Banner headings for new products or sale notifications
  
• Product, people or brand videos
  
• Creative hover or mouseover effects
  
• Product media rotations
  

Using the right plugins for your WooCommerce site can make all the difference when it comes to creating visually rich pages that won’t ruin your SEO or CRO strategies by harming site page loading times.

For example, ShortPixel compresses all images including custom size/thumbnails on upload. This keeps page load times speedy and performance rates high, offering you the freedom to showcase your products with any visual you like. 

Pic of the bunch from Petalon 

Flower farmers, florists and deliverers, Petalon, hits the mark on a variety of fronts with their WooCommerce site:

• Product imagery: The landing page uses the hover effect to offer an immediate, dynamic close-up and rotation of the bouquet for sale. The flowers are almost always captured in this homespun and relaxed style: a hand displaying the bouquet, earth-toned background, hessian wrap. This repetition and unique framing creates a striking visual signature for the brand which filters across to their social platforms. 

• Effective funnelling: Note the ease of the user interface and user experience: the funnel is clear. Simple, central, text-box commands readily direct the customer to what is typically the primary purpose for visiting the site. Their needs are met immediately on the site’s landing page. 

• Brand values and engagement: It’s evident, too, what buying from Petalon means beyond bouquets. Their sustainable credentials (100% carbon-neutral and committed to donating all of their company profits to conservation projects) make it easy to identify the company’s ethical values, likely encouraging customers with aligned values to make a purchase. 

Amplifying your eCommerce conversion efforts through marketing

To support your WooCommerce site to achieve its commercial goals, consider how a holistic digital marketing strategy which harmonises paid or targeted advertising could support the other facets of your online presence and communications. 

Social media

Create and sustain a conversation with your customers across all platforms. Strategise and mix it up between product posts, offers and insights or expertise while retaining that all-important brand synergy. 86% of consumers prefer an authentic and honest brand personality on social networks, so find your tone of voice and sustain it.

Content creation

Content marketing is central to effective branding with 82% of consumers feeling more positive about a brand after reading customised content.

With a WooCommerce integration to MailChimp, using email marketing and newsletters to create meaningful content and publish it regularly to reaffirm your values and keep you visible in the marketplace, pulling users back in to increase eCommerce conversion rates over time.

It’s here you can personalise marketing material and really get creative:

• Feature real-life customers enjoying your products
• Use infographics or video material to offer a variety of brand experiences that get people talking
• Write from a place of expertise about what you sell, how it’s made or developed
• Position yourself as industry leaders, experts or innovators both in terms of what you sell and what you stand for

Content, commerce and conscience 

Industry-innovators and environmental defenders, apparel brand Patagonia score high for content creation and hit the mark when choosing the best mediums for their messages. 

A HubSpot study that included 3,000 respondents revealed that video content is the most engaging, and more than half of the people surveyed indicated they wanted to see more video content from the brands they support, followed by interactive articles and social content.

The use of video content on Patagonia’s site reinforces their connection between product and planet. Call to action buttons allow customers to readily engage.

Much of Patagonia’s content not only amplifies their message of corporate social responsibility but also encourages consumers to get involved with environmental activism themselves, with the brand positioned as a facilitator to this goal. 

Like over 8.5 million other websites, Patagonia uses the Yoast SEO plugin, increasing the reach of this company’s unique content, as well as its apparel. 

If you’re building with WordPress, Yoast SEO makes sure your site meets the highest technical SEO standards. It also gives you the tools to optimise your content for SEO with keyphrase analysis and overall readability ensuring superlative SEO standards are met. 

Can too much traffic affect eCommerce conversion rates?

You want more visitors to your site, so increases in traffic is a good thing, but what about too much traffic? (Surely there’s no such thing? Think again.)

If you’ve perfected your imagery, aesthetic, experience and marketing, you must also be ready to receive higher traffic. Don’t wait until that all-important product launch to check if your current hosting package is up to the challenge of handling more visitors.

Free load testing tools such as k6 can help you estimate what will happen to the user experience if you have a boost of visitors due to an ad campaign, sale, launch or simply more consistent engagement as you grow. 

Finally, explore your payment gateway’s capacity: will it be able to process a higher volume of traffic efficiently? Once new customers are shopping with your brand, you want them to be able to check out swiftly.

Consider installing a plugin such as Mollie to integrate all major payments in your WooCommerce shop, reducing potential barriers to sales. 

Achieving better eCommerce conversion rates

How do you build a successful WooCommerce site which pays out in both sales and brand kudos? Understand your customers, refine the user experience and build in your brand values. Here’s the run-down of how we suggest you do that best:

1. Study your market to learn how you will stand out to your customers and from your competitors. This helps you meet your consumers’ physical and emotional needs, which gives them reasons to visit and return to your site to buy your products
2. Decide how your products are best visualised both in terms of how you use product photography and how multiple images appear on your product pages
3. Consider how colours can showcase products more vividly while being mindful of visual harmony within your branding and using accessible colour contrasts
4. Introduce dynamic visual elements on landing pages to capture your customer’s attention and create an engaging experience from the very beginning
5. Make sure clicks are concise by curating a seamless user experience from landing page to order confirmation
6. Load test your site and your payment gateway to ensure your user experience won’t suffer with traffic or order spikes
7. Use strategic digital marketing to support your site’s reach, engagement and longevity