26 tips to improve your Shopify Conversion Rate

26 tips to improve your Shopify Conversion Rate in 2023

If you’ve chosen a Shopify ecommerce platform for your online store, you are now joining over 1 million savvy business owners, who chose this user-friendly and powerful platform. By 2024, eCommerce sales are expected to account for 21.8% of global retail sales and Shopify is the market leader. If your online business runs on Shopify, you have chosen well.

1. Start with a fast theme

The speed of your site is very important to ensure a high conversion rate. The theme you choose will provide the foundation on which to build your store and so it is important to start with one that has been built with speed in mind.. Eva, Elomus Shop, Roxxe, and Workie are the most popular Shopify themes so the simplest way to start is to choose one of those.

2. Create content of value

Creating content takes time but it should be seen as an investment in your growth. Providing interesting content of value should be the first step in your relationship with new potential customers. The aim of this content is to capture the email address of individuals who are interested in your area of expertise. Once you have their email (and permission) you then have more opportunity to tell them more about your business and ultimately convert them into one of your customers over time.

3. Install a Speed Boost App

Even with a fast theme, you can still improve the speed of your shopify store with an app. Our favourite is called Page Speed Optimizer and is free. You can use the website GTMetrix to measure your before and after speed to make sure that your product pages are loading in 2-4 seconds.

4. Prioritise the mobile experience

Nearly 79% of traffic to shopify stores comes from mobile devices, the average person taps their phone once every 10 minutes (averaging three hours and 15 minutes of use) every day and makes up 69% of orders.

5. Build your email list

Email is the best converting traffic source for Shopify generating 4.29% of referral conversions compared to 3.04% for search, 2.93% for direct marketing, and 1.81% for social media. Email marketing should be a key part of your strategy and, once implemented correctly, will make up 30%+ of your revenue.

6. Use a popup to collect emails

We recommend using Klaviyo for your email marketing. Part of their software includes a variety of popup forms you can show to new visitors. Start with a 10% discount pop up that shows after 5 seconds and keep an eye on the sign up rate which should be around the 5% mark.

7. Use a teaser to load your sign up form

Within Klaviyo, each sign up form has the option of a “Teaser”. This is a small button that appears in the corner of your website. When clicked, it will open the pop up form so there is always an easy way to access it.

8. Make use of apps

The Shopify App Store contains approximately 6,600 apps and 87% of Shopify merchants consider apps to be an essential part of their conversion rate optimisation strategy. We have covered the best apps to install in this article but, for now, the key thing to know is the app store provides a huge variety of tools that can improve the functionality of your website and ultimately the conversion rate of your store. One thing to keep an eye on though is how these apps affect the speed of your site so use GT Metrix whenever you install a new app to check your site loads in 3 seconds or less.

9. Make Shipping Fast & Free

Invest in stock so you can ship your orders as fast as you can. If possible, build the shipping cost into your calculations so that you can provide free shipping for all orders. If this isn’t possible then have a free shipping threshold to encourage a higher average order value. Also make it very clear on the product page how much shipping is and how long delivery will take.

10. Make returns free and easy

One problem of running an online ecommerce business is the high return rate. There are techniques you can make use of to reduce this rate (see below) but assume that returns are going to be much higher than you expect. Companies like Amazon have made returns so easy that buying and returning products has become a habit of the online shopper.

11. Create Three Customer Avatars

The best product descriptions address your target audience directly as if you were trying to sell them your product face to face. Try to imagine three different people that would benefit from your product, picture their age, gender, where they live, what they like to do. These imaginary people are who you should keep in mind when writing your product descriptions.

12. Ask your repeat customers for reviews

Shopify allows you to filter your customers based on those who have made a repeat purchase. Export this list and send each one a personal email thanking them for their purchase, asking if they have any suggestions for how you can improve your product or your service and ultimately, if they would leave you a review on Trustpilot, Facebook or Amazon.

13. Collect social proof

The beauty of social media and websites like Trustpilot is that you can collect the (hopefully positive) feedback your existing customers have given. These reviews are invaluable in demonstrating to new customers that your other customers are happy with their purchase. Use these reviews on your product pages, emails and ads to build confidence among the individuals who are on the fence when deciding whether to purchase from you or not.

14. Create customer avatars for your ideal customers

15. Craft your product descriptions

Short, friendly and to the point copy is your friend. Your product description should express the product benefits, explain the problem that it solves as well as why it is better than the competition. Think of your avatars when writing and write in a natural way that would appeal to them. Add social proof to increase credibility. 20% of unsuccessful purchases are due to lack of product information so it’s important that your copy provides the answers to the questions your store’s visitors have.

16. Communicate your brand values

Sustainable and responsibly sourced products are becoming increasingly important values that customers are looking for. If your brand has adopted these principles (and it should) then make sure you communicate this clearly. This can be done on the product page, the About Us page and within the automated emails that you send as part of your welcome series.

17. Embed Trustpilot reviews on your product page

Install an app called Trustpilot Reviews by Reputon to automatically display all of your 4 and 5 star Trustpilot reviews on the footer of your store. These will display by date and will show your potential customers how happy your recent customers are.

18. Aim to increase average order value

A key part of your strategy should be to increase your average order value. Shopify’s analytics dashboard shows you the AOV each day so you can clearly see whether it increases or decreases each day.

19. Use a free shipping bar to increase AOV

A free shipping bar can display the order value required to get free shipping. This is a great motivator for customers adding another product to their cart. Persuading a customer who has already decided to make a purchase to increase the value of their purchase should be a key part of your strategy and a free shipping threshold is just one technique to implement to achieve this.

20. Use checkout upsell apps to increase AOV

Another point of the user journey at which you should aim to upsell additional items is the cart page. There are a number of apps that can make this job a 5 minute installation and our app of choice is called HA Upsell. These apps use the purchase history of your store to work out which products are most likely to be bought as a bundle (or you can set it up manually).

21. Provide a FAQs page

Your store should include a frequently asked questions section which answers the most commonly asked questions that your customers have. Examples include shipping costs, the return policy as well as answering questions about your brand values and history.

21. Check comments to discover common questions

If people have a question or a purchasing issue, they often use the comments of your Facebook post as a way of expressing their thoughts. This becomes an invaluable source of information which you can use to populate the FAQs section of your website.

22. Customise your 404 page

Your 404 page is the page your customers will end up at if they have followed a broken link. The best solution is not to have broken links but it happens. When it does, customising the 404 page allows you to provide products that may be of interest to your customer rather than a blank “page not found” page. An app called 404 Custom Page will allow you to do this.

23. Check Shopify analytics daily

Shopify provide a variety of stats within the analytics section of the back end. You should be checking this every day to get familiar with your key stats such as conversion rate, average order value and most popular products. You are also able to compare performance over periods of time so you can see if your trends are heading in the right direction.

24. Send back in stock notifications

If a particular product is out of stock, your website should be collecting emails of individuals who are interested in that product so that you can notify them when it is available to order again. Our app of choice to do this is called Back in Stock: Customer Alerts.

25. Build relationships with your customers

You should treat each customer as an individual and use your email communications to cultivate brand loyalty. Thank each one for their purchase and address them by their first name. This one tactic goes a long way and will make your customer feel appreciated. Use this “Thank You” email to explain more about why you set up your business and what you are hoping to achieve with it.

26. Use Social Media Ads to find new customers

Once your website has a consistent conversion rate of 3-5% and positive feedback from your existing customers, you can then look at growing your business via paid social media ads. How to do this properly is an art in itself and covered in another article which you can find here but social media ads are the best way of finding new customers.

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Author: Simon Ridgwell
Simon is the founder of Big Digital and a Digital Marketing Expert with over 20 years of experience in building websites with Shopify
Publish Date: 23.02.2023