Low conversion rates can hit any store. And with over 4.7 million ecommerce stores built with Shopify, there are only so many customers to go around. This is why we’re considering the best strategies to increase Shopify conversion rates.
Running a Shopify business thus means that you need to employ strategies to increase your store traffic and average order value. If your store’s conversion rate falls below the average 1.4% benchmark, there’s work to do to improve your conversions.
With the right strategies, you can gradually and steadily increase your conversion rates on Shopify. In this article, we’d review some of these strategies.
They include:
- Use Upselling Strategies
- Create Personalized Recommendations
- Optimize Checkout Processes
- Allow Guest Checkout
- Use High-Res Visuals
- Provide Multiple Payment Options
- Persuade Customers with Discounts
- Reduce Price Shock
- Provide 24/7 Customer Support
How to Increase Conversion Rates on Shopify
The best strategies focus on creating a premium shopping experience for readers through recommendations, marketing, customer support, easy checkout, discounts, etc.
Use Upselling Strategies.
Upselling is a method of suggesting higher-value products to customers while shopping. The aim? To persuade customers to spend more, increasing your revenues per purchase.
A collaborative marketing research shows that upselling increases a customer’s lifetime value by at least 20%. This is because upselling offers a buyer extra value at the same or lower costs.
For instance, you can create a campaign that fast-tracks time-to-sellout by offering a 20% discount that covers all purchases above $500. Adoric Shopify app user, Soho Center, offers buyers free shipping on purchases over NIS 249.
You can create upsell offers with third-party apps like Adoric. Adoric lets you create a variety of campaigns including special offers and discounts, incentives such as buy one get one free (BOGO), free shipping, and coupons for store gamification.
For instance, you can reward buyers with custom wins – 20% off, $20 free items, etc – on participating in a store game and buying items worth X amount. These short-span games – usually less than one minute – appeal to first-time visitors and can convert them to buyers.
Create Personalized Recommendations
A personalized recommendation shows a set of products based on the buyer’s shopping history or experience. It could also display products based on their performance in your store, considering factors like reviews, views, or number of sales. This pushes your best-performing products to customers, increasing conversions.
Shopify seller, Nootri Shop, upsells this way with the Adoric app. The store displays an unintrusive popup at the bottom of your screen, notifying buyers of recent purchases and popular products.
Soho Center personalizes products for customers by dedicating a specific page to new and returning products, saving buyers minutes of searching.
Optimize Checkout Processes
If your checkout is complex and confusing, most customers will not bother to complete their purchases. With checkout, the simpler, the better. Here are some ways for improving your website’s checkout process to increase your conversion rates:
- Reduce the number of fields to fill out.
- Show checkout progress by dividing the entire process into stages. This lets them know how far they’ve gone in the process. Below, Nike sections the checkout into three stages – Delivery Options, Payment, and Order Review.
- Utilize one page checkouts (as in the Nike example). Make it easy to review carts before purchase.
- Use a progress bar that shows the checkout progress, as in this demo store by CheckIt.
Optimizing your store’s checkout process is one step towards increasing your store’s conversion rate in Shopify.
Allow Guest Checkout
Say a buyer urgently needs to purchase a wristwatch. They hop on Google and search for simple watches for women, and your Shopify store pops up on the first page of results, alongside others.
They open your website and find a perfect match. But just as they’re about to pay, your store prompts them to create an account before they can continue. Wouldn’t this throw them off?
Guest checkouts are an overlooked feature in e-commerce circles. Sellers want their customers’ details so they can build a community, market new products, etc. But sometimes buyers just want to be that. Buyers.
To ensure you keep converting your visitors, enable guest checkout in your store. You can allow guest checkout by changing customer account preferences in your Shopify settings. Stores like ASOS do it, so why not you?
Use High-Res Visuals to Market Products
We’ve heard it said that a picture is worth a thousand words. But it’s not just an intuitive saying. In marketing, using visuals has been found to decrease cart abandonment rate by 17% and double the average conversion rate.
Go all in with your visual marketing. Pair up your products with high-resolution images that depict exactly what customers should expect when they order. You don’t need a million bucks to get the best images and demo videos up on Shopify.
Nostalgic Impressions, a wax Shopify shop that uses Adoric for creating custom pop-ups, nails their visual marketing with high-res images like these.
Click this guide to learn how to create visuals for your store.
Provide Multiple Payment Options
Relying solely on PayPal for payments processing can be constraining, and that’s a generous way to put it. Different payment platforms include restrictions for buyers across different regions.
So spread your payment options across multiple platforms including Visa, MasterCard, AmEx, and Shopify Pay. This is a statement of care to your customers, and will increase your conversion rates.
Shopify, as an e-commerce platform, also uses multiple payment methods for flexible payment.
Persuade Customers with Discounts and Coupons
What better way to build loyalty with your customers than offering them a discount each time they come back to buy from you? Between 2017 & 2020, at least 88% of US shoppers used a coupon while shopping.
Buyer don’t only look out for discounts and promos, they expect them. It’s why the volume of sales during special discount seasons like Black Friday and Cyber Monday exceeds the standard volume of sales.
You can create custom discounts and product bundles that let customers earn while spending. For instance, you can bundle two products that gets them to save 10% on shopping. SaaS products do this, offering a percentage discount if you opt for an annual subscription over a monthly one.
Reduce Price Shock
This means implementing strategies to make significant price changes less jarring or surprising to customers. The goal is to minimize negative reactions and maintain customer trust and loyalty despite your pricing.
One way to do this is to offer discounts. A second way is to offer free shipping. Both methods increase your conversion rates. You should state that the shipping only covers purchases that reach a certain amount. Soho does this by stating that only shoppers who purchase over NIS 249 get free shipping.
Also, if you charge for extra stuff like taxes, state it upfront so buyers can prepare for it. If you offer a refund policy, place it on a banner on your homepage. These increase the likelihood of conversion.
Provide 24/7 Customer Support with Live Chat.
Live chat promises seamless access, easing a buyer’s potential concerns. The live chat feature allows you to interact with your visitors in real-time and provide instant support whenever they need one. Think of it as a customer care line and you as the agent.
Live chat helps you create a more intimate connection with your customers and assure them that you are available to cater to their needs. It makes it easy for your visitors to easily navigate your store, find products, and ultimately make purchases.
Adoric prioritizes 24/7 customer support. You can directly chat with the support team from your Shopify dashboard and get responses within an hour. On the Shopify app store, a customer notes, “Excellent customer service. They answer very quickly and provide quick solutions.”
We recommend installing a live chat app in your Shopify store to provide real-time support to customers.
Make Your Store Easy to Navigate
If you’ve not paid great attention to your store’s design, we understand. Creating a user-friendly website requires a different skillset from running a profitable business. It may not matter to you, but it sure matters to your customers.
Keep your website simple, easy to navigate. This will increase your conversion rates.
Here are some handy navigation tips:
- Sort your products by categories and subcategories. This simplifies how your products are listed and makes it easier to find items in your store. Bookseller Barnes and Noble files numerous key sub-categories with their dropdown menu.
- Use legible fonts and bold colors.
- Create visual impressions with the right icons. Highlight benefits and special information where necessary. Miracle Made, makers of comfort beddings, use animated icons to highlight benefits of using their products
They also include a small icon at the topmost corner to guide users to the accessibility menu. It’s splendid.
- Sort multiple options with a dropdown menu (example below) or a hamburger menu (consisting of three parallel lines). Furniture company Office Depot couples a dropdown menu with a horizontal sidebar navigation to list their hundreds of supplies. This formatting type is particularly helpful for Shopify sellers with a mega menu.
This will simplify navigation for your customers, ensure they find the right pages on time, and nudge them towards checkout faster.
Using Popups with Discretion.
You can use popups to upsell and cross-sell on Shopify to increase conversion rates. You can get consent for cookies with popups (called cookie-consent popups), and generate leads, market offers, create promotional campaigns, and build email lists.
To increase conversion rate, you can nudge your customers towards a purchase by offering a discount if they subscribe to your newsletter. Nostalgic Impression does this by offering 10% off on a visitor’s first purchase once they provide their email address. This makes prospects more responsive to completing that first purchase. It could also create curiosity about what other offers await them. On Adoric, this is an email welcome popup.
You can also create anticipation with popups. Towards special seasons like Halloween, BFCM, you can create custom seasonal popups with special offers (example below)
To heighten customer awareness and engagement, include time limits that ensure only early shoppers get the best deals.
Win Back Customers with Retargeting Advertising
Retargeting advertising is a powerful strategy that helps increase conversion rates on Shopify by targeting customers who visited your store but didn’t complete a purchase. This approach is highly effective because it focuses on individuals who have already shown intent, making them more likely to convert.
In 2024, 70% of shoppers still abandon their carts. This is a case of “it’s not me, it’s sellers.” So what can you do?
- Create exit intent popups that simply stop them in their tracks and give them a chance to rethink abandoning your website.
- Take advantage of FOMO. One way to do this is to offer your visitors a coupon. Then let them know that they have a limited time to redeem that coupon, after which it would expire.
- Send cart recovery emails to remind customers that they haven’t completed their purchase.
This reconnects with the customers, shows that you’re in touch with their buying experience, and boosts conversion chances.
Optimize Your Store for Mobile
If mobile shopping wasn’t a global thing before 2020, the pandemic made it a global thing. Since 2020, active mobile shoppers have grown from 167 million to 187 million. That’s a 5% increase in the percentage of the total population who shop with their mobile devices. Per that report, mobile sales are projected to exceed $510 billion by 2025.
The downside of this is that many e-commerce stores are still not optimized to create a cool mobile shopping experience. In fact, 2 in 3 users complain that pages being too small to navigate is a barrier to mobile shopping.
To counter this, use large buttons for your store. Optimize your technical SEO to increase loading speed and loading times.
Another way to make things easy for your mobile visitors is by integrating autofill. This function automatically inputs details that have been provided earlier, thus saving users time as well as the inconvenience of typing into small fields.
Use strong call-to-actions (CTAs). A good CTA should be clear and straightforward – it shouldn’t leave your visitors wondering what exactly you want them to do. The shorter your CTA, the better you can optimize it for mobile visitors. See an example of Adoric’s landing page CTA.
Value Proposition Clarity
Use images, banners, videos, and guides to provide direction. Let customers know from the onset what to expect when they shop from your website. Here, Miracle Made notifies all visitors about a discount for orders above $200.
We spoke about creating high-res images earlier. Go a step further to record clips demonstrating how your products can be used. Create clips and guides that help users navigate your store, make payments, and complete their checkout.
Leverage FOMO to Alert Customers about Sales
We reviewed how you can leverage customers’ fear of missing out with retargets. You can also maximize this by creating push notifications containing social proofs (customers completing an order, customers leaving a review on your store or social media platforms).
Running low on stocks? Alert your buyers – not visitors – urging them to buy now before products sell out. You can include countdown timers that predict when a product will be out of stock or when you’re running flash sales.
Create Social Proof with User Reviews
Word-of-mouth marketing is important for any ecommerce business, and is a good strategy to increase Shopify conversion rates. With technology, word-of-mouth takes the shape of user reviews and feedback. The more reviews you get, the better your social proof. The lesser the reviews, the larger the doubt.
Below is a screenshot of users’ feedback about Adoric. Having social proof – via user reviews – is like having someone leave a good word for you in your absence.
To enable customers to leave user reviews in your store, you need to add a third-party review app from Shopify. From your Shopify admin, enable customers to leave reviews on all products by navigating to the “Customers Account” tab in your settings.
If you’re not sure how to get reviews without coming across as intrusive, check this guide on getting positive reviews for Shopify.
Adopt A/B Testing Practices
Before setting up a campaign or popup on your store, test it for effectiveness. Test page layouts across multiple device types and screens to understand the user experience. For example, you can test a “Buy Now” button on both an iPhone, an iPad, and a laptop. Do you need to reposition it? Should you make the buttons bigger, the colors dimmer?
Using Adoric, you can A/B test several popups before settling on one. Consider the performances of those popups, the number of views and clicks, the feel on your website, before setting them live. Because you have covered the groundwork of seeing what works, users enjoy a more convenient experience and are more likely to convert.
Factors That Affect Conversion Rates on Shopify
Several factors cause a low conversion rate on Shopify. Two of these are:
Poor Landing Page
Your website’s first impression matters. If it’s tacky, if it’s not easy to navigate, users will mentally check out before they can complete an order.
Chase, a US-based bank, had this landing page before redesigning.
There are too many things going on all at once. The “learn more” button has the same color as the “sign in” button, even though they address two different sets of users. Without scrolling, there are multiple buttons and CTAs that would definitely throw off a first-time visitor.
Here’s how the page looks now.
It’s not perfect yet, but it’s better than the previous version. At least, the two key buttons now look distinct from each other.
Invest in a good landing page design. If you don’t have the technical expertise for it, hire an expert to create one.
Mediocre Call to Actions.
Sometimes, buyers need a ‘push’ to get them to make a purchase. Your CTA might be missing that needed push. Consider, for example, this CTA from The Content Folk’s previous website design.
While the CTA feels appealing, it doesn’t indicate that they’re a marketing agency. Unclear CTA worsens conversion rates. Compare this with the CTA on their present website.
So, if your CTAs aren’t clear and convincing enough, making sales will be a problem.
Conclusion
We’ve covered the best strategies to increase your conversion rates on Shopify. These strategies give a consensus statement: you can’t do it all on your own.
If you’d optimize your website’s conversion rates, you need third-party tools. For gathering user reviews, managing your social media presence to build social proof, for providing 24/7 customer support, and for upselling with popups and personalized recommendations.
Start your optimization process with Adoric. Our no-code tool lets you create campaigns that serve multiple marketing purposes.
With only $5, you can join 3000+ Shopify merchants who use Adoric for all their Shopify newsletter popup needs. Click the link below to get started.
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