How to Increase Conversion Rates for Your Online Store

Your ecommerce store’s sales are influenced by everything from the content on your Products Pages to industry trends that are outside of your control. While there are many variables at play, this also means there are many ways to grow your revenue and scale your business. 

Depending on your business, lowering shipping rates, abandoned cart emails, and customized product detail pages are all ways to turn browsers into buyers. Read on for additional ways to improve your online store’s performance.

1. Lower your shipping fees

Extra fees at checkout are the primary cause of checkout abandonment, while free delivery is the reason more than 50% users check out. Incentivize customers to complete their purchase by offering free shipping on their order. 

You can offer free shipping across all your products by creating a free shipping rate, or share a free shipping discount for a set number of customers or a specific period of time. With a Commerce Advanced plan, you can set a free shipping discount to apply automatically at checkout. You can also set up fulfillment profiles to assign shipping rates by individual product.

If you can’t offer free shipping yet, try building the cost into the price of the product. It’s the surprise of the extra shipping cost that often stops customers from checking out. If the cost is built into the price, they’re less likely to experience sticker shock at checkout.

Get tips to calculate shipping for your products

2. Customize your product detail pages

Making small changes to your product detail pages can have a big impact. For example, adding variant button options makes it easier for users to quickly see what their product options are. The simpler it is for a customer to understand their buying options and click the purchase button, the easier it is for you to make a sale.

Learn more about styling your product detail page and setting up variant buttons, available on Squarespace version 7.1.

3. Offer discounts

Coupons and discounts convert 41% of online shoppers into buyers. Create automatic discounts that apply to entire orders, orders over a set amount, or specific products. Set the discounts around limited-time events to increase excitement, like a holiday, the anniversary of your business launch, or a new product release.

If you’re worried about overuse, you can limit discounts to one use per customer, or set a total number of uses in your store. Promote the discount through targeted Email Campaigns or by adding an Announcement Bar to your website.

Get tips for creating a discount strategy

4. Showcase product reviews

Product reviews are a great way to build trust with shoppers and increase your sales. The majority of shoppers read product reviews, so including them whenever possible is key. Our data shows that reviews increase product adds to customer carts by 4.5% during peak selling times.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes: Are you more likely to buy something when you’re able to read reviews when you’re shopping? You can turn on product reviews on physical, digital, and service products.

5. Highlight your return policy

One study found that 12% of shoppers abandon their cart at checkout because they weren’t satisfied with the store’s return policy. 

The placement of your return policy is the key to making sure your customers are aware of it. Make it easy for customers to find on your store website, like on the checkout page.

Your return policy should include details like:

• What’s eligible for return

• How to make a return

• Return deadlines

• Refund policy

• Return shipping or restocking fees

• Exchange policy

See a return policy example

6. Set up abandoned cart recovery emails

Customers don’t always abandon their carts because they’re unhappy with pricing or not interested in your product. But not following up on those abandoned carts and incomplete checkouts can directly impact your store’s conversion rate. 

With a Commerce Advanced plan, set up Abandoned Cart Recovery emails to automatically send reminders to customers who add products to their cart and leave your site without completing an order. You can customize the subject line, message, header, and footer of your emails to match your brand and set them to send 24 hours after a customer abandons their cart or checkout. 

See best practices for writing and setting up abandoned cart emails

7. Offer additional ways to pay

On Squarespace, you can set up different payment methods for your customers like Apple Pay, PayPal, and Afterpay. 

With Apple Pay and PayPal, customers can check out without manually entering shipping and billing information, making checkout simpler. 

Afterpay is a buy now, pay later option that lets customers pay in four installments over six weeks, while you receive the full payment upfront. In addition to increasing conversion rates, Afterpay retailers report an increase in repeat shoppers and number of units per transaction. Currently, Afterpay or Clearpay is available to sellers based in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.

See more alternative payment methods

8. Offer LiveChat

Live chat customer support is consistently rated as having the highest satisfaction levels across all support channels. When customers can get their questions answered quickly, it’s easier for them to make a buying decision. Plus, having regular, accessible customer service shows customers that your business is trustworthy.

You can offer high-quality customer support by adding the LiveChat extension to your Squarespace site. With LiveChat, you can communicate directly with your customers in real time. 

9. Show related products to your customers

Customers who can’t find what they’re looking for are more likely to leave your shop without buying. Add categories and tags to your products for easy discovery. 

Adding these also means your store can show related products your product pages. Not only does a related products feature improve the customer experience, showing more products to your site visitors can help you increase the number of things a customer buys. 

What is a good conversion rate?

A good conversion rate varies widely based on factors like the industry you’re in, brand awareness, and your ability to drive qualified traffic to your store. To start, look at your store’s current conversion rate, then research industry benchmarks. Get a sense of both average sales performance for your business and a goal you can strive toward. 

To calculate your conversion rate:

1. Divide the number of visitors who completed an order on your site by the total number of site visitors.

2. Multiply that number by 100. 

For example, if 50 people visited your online store today, and five of them completed purchases, your conversion rate is 10% (5/50 x 100 = 10). Squarespace does this math for you in the Sales Analytics panel.

Going forward, monitor your conversion rate as an indicator of the overall health of your business. A consistent or increasing conversion rate means you’re successfully converting site visitors into customers, while a stagnant or declining rate means there might be areas for improvement.

Learn more about using data to increase conversion

This post was updated on June 13, 2023.