Today with so many modern tendencies it’s not very hard to impress a customer with fantastic design. You can have fancy widgets here and there; use different hover effects, etc. But does it really add to conversion rate? Let’s see.
Of course, design is important. You would hardly buy a product from the shop lost in the 20th century and having flying snowflakes and some music on its pages. I wouldn’t trust this site. But at the same time, you should remember that a customer is here to buy a product but not to admire your designer professionalism (unless you are selling design related products), so let’s try to figure out what is more important for high conversion rate.
- Clear navigation
This means a customer should easily find any page on your site. If you want to sell you product, you wouldn’t put it in the remote dark corner, would you? So make sure all the goods can be easily accessed with maximum 3 clicks.
Clear navigation includes easily understandable hierarchy of products and categories; breadcrumbs on product pages (they are also good for internal linking); cross- and up-sells, related products.
- Fast and relevant search
You know how boring it may be to look for something. You check a page by page but there is no result. Doh! Then you find a search box, type the query here and… nothing! You just get poor results and leave the shop. I know you’ve faced such things.
So from this you can understand that having relevant site search is important for your business. It helps customers find products they need, and you – to get sales you need. Everyone’s happy.
- Mobile-friendliness
There has been a lot of buzz around mobile-friendliness and new Google mobile update lately. And there is no wonder: the number of mobile users is constantly increasing; we all use our phones and tablets to browse the Internet.
Some may say: “Hey, I have a mobile site but the conversion rate here is much lower than on my desktop site!” Yes, that’s true. But think about it: many people use a mobile phone for the first interaction with your store. They study your products, read your blog while travelling to work; and once they are ready to buy, they come to you via their computer. That is a standard scenario, so make sure your site looks good and readable on mobile devices.
Summing it up
As you can see, high conversion rate depends on many things and aspects: navigation, product presentation, site search, easy checkout, design, etc. I’ve just talked about only the tip of the iceberg here. Magento has many potential possibilities to complete conversion optimization tasks, but for some of them, you will still need to use some special extensions. Fortunately, there are many of them.
