How to Increase Holiday Sales with an eStore Conversion Checkup (2019)

illustration how to increase holiday sales

Running an eCommerce business is almost always more complicated than people anticipate. You choose the right products, build your store and provide excellent customer service. Not to mention do marketing to build awareness, and start generating sales.

Things are good — but you know they could be better.

With the holidays approaching even a simple increase of 0.5% conversion can mean thousands more in sales if you have enough traffic.

So it’s time to give your store a conversion-rate checkup.

How to Increase Holidays Sales: 8 Things to Check in Your eStore

Before you can determine what healthy conversion rate is for your store, you need to know how to calculate it.

An average conversion rate for an eStore is between 1% and 2%.

You can calculate the conversion rate by dividing the number of visitors you have by the number of sales that you generated.

For example, if your store receives 10,000 visitors, and 100 of those visitors purchase a product from you during that time frame, your store’s overall conversion rate is 1%.

After you have identified what your average conversion rate is, then you can start working on doing the following things to improve it.

1. Set up Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a tool provided by Google that allows you to see background data on what your users are doing on your site and how they found you.

You will be able to see information such as:

How long someone stays on your website.
Where your website traffic is coming from.
What percentage of the visitors to your site are new or returning.
How visitors are finding your website.

Google Analytics is going to give you half of the puzzle that you need to determine your conversion rate. You will be able to refine your timeline and determine how much traffic you are receiving.

If you’re using Shopify, you can follow their guide to integrate Google Analytics with your store and get even more information.

taking picture to make up

2. Check Your Images & Video

Shopping online is a very visual experience. The images and video that you include on your products is the best way to demonstrate to customers what they are going to be receiving.

Images should include a size reference so customers know how big the product is.
You should have photos of the products from multiple angles.
Include images that show the detail work zoomed in.
Where possible, include a video that shows the product in use.

3. Free Shipping is a Necessary Evil

Thanks to Amazon, offering free shipping is no longer optional. If you don’t offer free shipping on your store, customers are going to go elsewhere.

They are not going to take the time to figure out how much your product plus shipping is when a competitor offers free shipping. Customers don’t want to do the math to figure out their final cost.

Bonus tip: Make sure you make it very clear on your site what your delivery times are. This is especially important for holiday gift purchases since they need to arrive by a certain date.

4. Customize Your Checkout Experience

It’s common for customers to add products to their cart and then abandon it and not complete their purchase. They do this for a variety of reasons:

They want to save the product and come back to purchase it later.
They want to see the shipping price (if you aren’t offering free shipping, or if you didn’t make it clear that you offered it).
They want to see the shipping timelines.
They want to see the price + tax.

Or – they see something in the checkout process that makes them feel uneasy about completing their purchase.

If you upgrade to Shopify Plus, you will be able to customize your checkout process to help alleviate customer concerns and improve the number of successful purchases. Shopify has a host of great apps that can be utilized to add more customization to your checkout.

5. Increase Trust & Credibility

Customers are giving you their credit card information online — this is a bigger step for them than you may realize. In a world fraught with identity theft and online scams, they want to feel comfortable and secure purchasing from you.

Install an SSL certificate across your entire site. Shopify does this automatically which makes it easy for people migrating their store from other platforms to Shopify.
Show small images of trusted payment options.
Include customer reviews on your products.
Include an About Page on your store that shows the human side of your business. (Here’s a great example)
Publish content to your store regularly that answers questions and shows people how to use your products. (Here’s a great example)
Be clear about your return policy.
Make it easy for customers to contact you with questions (live chat can be a great option).
Describe the product dimensions and benefits clearly.

6. Use Shop Testimonials Throughout Your Store

Product reviews are a great way to increase trust in individual products, but if someone is buying from you for the first time, they also need to trust you as a store.

If you have product reviews that highlight aspects of your shopping experience, return experience, or customer service, then bring those snippets out and display them around your store.

7. Make Actions… Actionable

Your “Add to Cart” and “Checkout” buttons should be easily visible and clearly actionable. Sometimes it can be easy to get carried away with the design and be artistic, but that can actually hurt your conversions.

Make sure the colors are consistent, the fonts are legible, and the size is easily tappable on a small screen. Understanding how users move through your site is paramount to getting them to convert to a sale. Prioritize optimizing your store to make the user experience clear and streamlined.

8. Bring in Your Experts

At Future Holidays we have helped hundreds of these store owners just like you increase their conversion rates. We know what it takes to build a high-quality, high-converting, and engaging online store.

With the holidays approaching, can you really afford to miss out on sales just because your user experience isn’t top-notch?

Schedule a meeting with me today and let’s talk about how we can help you get prepared for the busiest shopping season of the year.

Have a Project? Let’s Talk!