Check out these tips on how you can increase conversion rates and turn your site visitors into satisfied customers who are sure to keep coming back.Every online store is striving to make its mark in an ocean other sites doing just the same. If you find that visitors are bouncing off your site instead of making it to the finish line with a purchase in hand, check out these tips on how you can increase conversion rates and turn your site visitors into satisfied customers who are sure to keep coming back.

Make Your Search Bar Visible on Every Page

As visitors are combing through your products with excitement, they’ll need to rely on your site’s tip top navigation. It’s an unfortunate reality that many find themselves lost when they want to get back to a previous product they’ve just seen or when they want to look for something they’re not sure that you have. Spare them the hassle of needing to weed through your menu(s) and provide them with a search bar at the top of your site that appears on every one of your pages. Even if you don’t offer many products, the instant satisfaction they crave is sure to be provided. If you want to take it a step further, continue to keep them engaged by offering recommendations based on their keywords if they don’t find what they’re looking for.

Initiate Communication

Many online stores forget that real people are using their sites. Although those same real people enjoy the luxury of browsing the internet in the privacy of their our own homes, it doesn’t mean that they want to feel like another faceless transaction on someone’s site. Adding a phone number or email to your page, or even an intricate contact page requires a bit to a lot of effort on their part, depending on the design of your site and the savviness of each visitor. Luckily, you can easily address that by showing them that you’re ready to answer any question they may have at any moment, with a multi-channel communication app, like Bontact. It’s a widget that hovers on every site page, which offers your visitors live chat, callback, text message, and email options. With Bontact’s dashboard, you can view how many visitors are on your site, what page they’re on, and how long they’ve been surfing. You can then choose to contact through the live chat portion of the widget to offer them a helping hand.

Check for Browser Compatibility

Although this may not be so simple for the non-web savvy site owners, it’s important to check that your site looks great on all major browsers and resolve major discrepancies, should they arise. Dogfooding is your best friend here, once again. Don’t shy away from loading your site on different browsers frequently to check that everything is in working order and in it’s right place. It’s also good to test your site on browsers that may not be popular, so you can alert visitors of existing issues and provide recommendations that they use a different browser. This small heads up shows visitors that even if you’re not perfect, you’re aware of it and you genuinely care about their experience.

Invest Time in Your Shopping Cart

Your shopping cart is the final key to your visitors’ purchase. It’s likely that they won’t take the extra step to alert you of an issue or error they’re experiencing in the checkout process, and will abandon ship. Their interaction with your shopping cart should be smooth, clear, and as effortless as possible. This means that prices and tax should be clearly stated next to the details of each product. It’s also recommended that details (e.g. colors, sizes) appear there to avoid any misunderstanding after their purchase. It’s beneficial to keep the cart visible throughout your site to make it easy to update and to help them keep track of products they’ve already added. Always, and I mean always, check to see that your cart is fully functional and bug-free. Dogfooding is truly important here, so take time out of your already hectic workday or night, and test that cart! It’ll be worth every saved penny.

I Challenge You.

In addition to the tips I mentioned above, I strongly recommend not just playing around with your own store, but also making some purchases on other online stores. I really mean going out of your way to think of something you want to buy, looking through someone’s site, and spending your hard earned money. Go through the trials and tribulations; take notes about the positives and negatives of your experience. Ask yourself why you chose to buy an item on one site but not another. It’ll truly help you put your own site in perspective so that you can make more insightful changes.   Share some of your experiences of how you improved your online store below. We can always use a little more insight. ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ