If there is something good about eCommerce, it is that you can have a lot of visits to your online store, many more than you could have in a physical store. If there is something bad about eCommerce, it is that Converting those visitors into buyers is much more difficult than in a physical store.
What is the conversion rate
In this regard, a key fact is the conversion ratewhich is nothing other than the % of visitors who become buyers, although to be more exact we should say that it is the % of visitors who do what we want them to do on our website. If we talk about eCommerce, usually What we want is for them to buy.
Until a few years ago, marketing at the point of sale and visual merchandising (that is, how you display products in a physical store so that the customer sees them and wants to buy them) were the poor little brothers of marketing strategies, both online as offline. The important thing was the visits, they told us, as if customers, by the mere fact of entering a website, were already going to buy.
So everyone launched massively into the techniques of , attraction marketing, online marketing… thinking that “my website is well designed and visually attractive is enough”. The conversion rate was a big business thing with millions of visits, and not even then. Everything is great… until the chestnuts arrived.
Online stores with thousands of daily visits had (and many, in fact most still have) sales results shockingly low. Something was wrong.
But let’s go by parts.
What is the appropriate conversion rate?
I’m going to take out my Galician soul: it depends.
About what? Well, the sector in question and the type of visits we are analyzing. We will not obtain the same conversion rate in visits that come from search results or social networks.
It depends on the country of origin (not everyone has the same online shopping culture) and many other factors (age, income level, gender, etc, etc). In other words, each eCommerce requires a detailed analysis of its conversion rates (you can use Google Analytics for this) in order to draw conclusions.
Having said that, there is a certain consensus in the sector that affirms that the average conversion rate ranges between 1% and 3%. This is quite debatable. A newly opened online store takes months, if not years, to develop its potential, and that’s by doing everything flawlessly. The truth is that there are thousands of Spanish eCommerce with conversion rates below 0.5%. In other words: they need 200 visits to get a sale.
https:///keys-to-conversion-in-digital-businesses-in-spain-flat101-2019/
Starting from that more or less agreed figure of between 1 and 3%, each company must evaluate its own data. Knowing the competition would be great information, but companies do not usually publish this data. And those that publish them do not give us any guarantee that they are true (there are some startups that make incredible claims about their number of visits and their conversion rate, all to get investments). But we are going to stay with the range of 1%-3% as a desirable conversion rate.
100 visits to get a sale
Notice what we are saying: It takes between 30 and 100 visits to get a sale. If a physical store owner thought about these percentages and wouldn’t even bother to open, and if these were his results after opening it would burn to the bonzo at the door of your store.
In this sense, eCommerce does not seem, a priori, to be a panacea. A priori. If we talk about fixed costs , the ability to reach a global audience and the effort to get these visits, then things change. Be that as it may, this average conversion rate shows that selling in eCommerce requires a significant effort, which is not less than having a physical store.
The magic formula to increase the conversion rate
Does not exist. Thus, without palliatives. Whoever claims (and there are many people who do) have a formula to double or triple the conversion rate of any eCommerce is lying and knows it. There is no magic formula because no two online stores are the same. However, there is the paradox that this fact, which a priori may be a difficulty, is in itself the essence of the purchase impulse and the conversion rate: what makes you different is what makes you sell.
Impulsivity and rationality
The selling impulse is almost never rational. And that irrationality makes it escape any algorithm. Of course to improve the conversion rate, and I’m not going to repeat them here. I am not going to talk about the sales funnel or other things that, being important, come later.
Get this into your head: you must do things well, that helps a lot, but it is not a guarantee of anything. If your products are unsaleable, as is the case with many eCommerce in this country, they will remain unsaleable. If there is nothing that sets you apart from the rest, you will have to spend a huge amount of money on marketing, probably more than you can afford AND even then, your conversion rate may have meager increases.
Be different
Many online stores can afford this luxury because they have enough financial kidney to invest in marketing and attract visitors, which allows them to compensate for a low conversion rate. But we talk about hundreds of thousands or millions of visits per month. But a small eCommerce cannot put the cart before the horse.
First the essentials, which is what defines you, and then comes SEO, strategy, or usability. The problem comes from the fact that many eCommerce managers think that the fundamentals are figures and data, and they forget the most basic questions that would not escape anyone who wanted to open a physical store.
Therefore, the key to success, or rather, the non-key to success, is the same in the online environment as it is in the offline environment: If you want to improve your conversion rate, you necessarily have to be different. In products, in prices, in complementary services, in the shipping system, in whatever (better in all of it), But don’t do what everyone else does.
And that difference should be your flag.
From second 1 of the 20 seconds that a user is going to grant you to decide if your store is worth it or not, you have to show him, very large and well highlighted, what makes you different. And if there is nothing, you have to create it. Imagine that the user enters your online store with a question in mind: why should I buy from you?
Well, the answer to that question is the first thing you should find. Sometimes we get lost defining brainy strategic plans and we don’t realize that we are creating a giant with feet of clay. Numbers are monitoring tools and indicators, but they can never be goals in themselves. Do not forget this, because your strategy would be stillborn otherwise: I first define who and what I am, and then everything else.
Image:
Stay informed of the most relevant news on our news channel
Facebook Comments
Disqus