16 Ways To Improve Shopify Conversion Rate in 2024

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to building a successful business on Shopify is getting sales.

Fortunately, there are a number of different things you can do to your store to turn visitors into buyers and hopefully at a rate higher than the average 1.4% conversion rate that more Shopify stores get.

But back to the problem at hand, converting traffic into paying customers. Fortunately, there are quite a few different things, sometimes just small adjustments that can lead to more paying customers and hopefully better than the , which is the average for Shopify stores.

For this guide, we are going to go through each step of the sales funnel, from customers landing on your site to going through your checkout to hopefully give you some ideas of things that you can change.

1: Check Your Shopify Analytics

If you are getting traffic to your store and even a small number of sales, then you first want to take a look at your analytics as Shopify’s standard analytics can provide you with a huge amount of data and insights for your store, including:

• Your conversion rate at different stages of the checkout process
• Average order value
• Top selling products
• Sessions and sales by traffic sources

By analyzing this data, you can look to see where the potential problem areas on your site are as it could be things like:

These are just a couple of examples but having data is hugely important in being able to find the areas that need improving on your site.

2: Attract The Right Visitors

A key component of generating more sales is to get the right traffic to your store as you can optimize every aspect of your site but if the people visiting your site aren’t going to be buying your products, then you won’t be generating sales.

But how do you attract the right visitors?

1. Choose the right marketing strategy for your store – the target audience for every store is different and you need to find the right strategy for your business and can include SEO, Social Media Marketing and Running Paid Ads
2. Do effective keyword research – this helps you find out what people are searching for and can show you what people are more likely to click on (this does vary between SEO and Social Media), so that you can tailor your content to appear for them
3. Monitor your results – marketing is very much trial and error based on educated decisions and by monitoring the results of your marketing efforts, you can then begin refining the process to get better ROI

By improving your market efforts, you massively improve the chances of turning visitors into paying customers but you still need your store to convert, which we cover in a lot more detail below.

3: Make Sure Your Site Loads Quickly

This one is very important as faster loading pages can lead to a 17% increase in conversion rates as the quicker the page loads, the better the experience for the customer (as we all know how frustrating a slow loading site can be!) and the better the experience, the more likely they are to become a paying customer.

Due to being fully hosted, there are limited options in terms of optimization but some of the things you can do to make your Shopify store faster are:

• Optimize Your Images – so that they are the right size and in a web-optimized format
• Minimize The Number of Apps – apps are great on Shopify but the more you have, especially ones that load elements on the front end of your site can slow it down, so keep them to a minimum
• Use a Fast Theme – not all themes are built the same, so where possible, use a theme that has proven performance credentials

Once again, don’t go doing this blindly, get a benchmark for your store using a tool like Uptrends and for conversion rates, you want to focus on your product pages speed for both desktop and mobile, so test the page, make your changes and then test again to see if there have been any improvements.

4: Provide An Excellent User Experience

While page speed is very important when it comes user experience, it isn’t the only thing that contributes to this, with other things to think about including:

By doing these things, you are making your site enjoyable and easy to use, which is something that most customers now come to expect and functionality should be at the forefront when it comes to building your store as you can have the best-looking store in the world but if it is frustrating to use, then people will go elsewhere.

5: Optimize Your Product Page

Your product page is your sales page and the aim of it is to encourage visitors to click on the add to cart or buy button and there are lots of things you can do to achieve this, including:

Your product page is a hugely important step in the sales funnel, so spend time trying different things, sometimes this can be really simple things such as:

• The size of the product images
• The layout of the page
• The size of the font being used

And this is why it can be useful to use heatmap software to track what people are doing on your store as it may show up some consistent user behaviour that is preventing people from buying and it isn’t always just about the price.

The amount of customization options you get on your product page may depend on the theme you are using as some premium themes offer a lot more than the free themes that are available.

6: Use Reviews For Social Proof

Reviews are one of the main tools that Shopify stores can use to build trust with potential customers as when they see that people have not only bought from you but also had a positive experience, it creates social proof, which removes another obstacle in the buyer’s mind.

And recent research found that 98% of online shoppers say reviews are an essential part of making a purchasing decision, 98%!!

When it comes to using reviews for your store, you have two options:

1. Product Reviews – these are reviews that are left by customers about your product and these show on your product pages and can also appear in search results
2. Business Reviews – these are reviews that are generally left on third-party websites such as Trustpilot, Reviews.io, Google or Facebook and are reviews about the customers dealing with your business, rather than a product-specific review

You can use both of these for your business and you want to encourage people to leave a review but you should also be prepared to embrace negative reviews as it can actually help with sales as people are more likely to buy a product with a 4.2-4.5 rating than one with a perfect 5-star rating.

Using customer reviews in your marketing can also be helpful, which is why so many companies do it as the social proof can encourage people to click on ads or posts.

To add product reviews to your store you will need an app and we’ve tested them to find the Best Shopify Review Apps.

7: Build Trust With Prospective Customers

I mentioned building trust above to do with reviews but there is much more you can do to build trust with potential customers and this is something you definitely want to do as the more trustworthy you are in someone’s eyes, the more likely they are to buy from you.

But how do you show people that your site is trustworthy? Well, there are quite a few different ways, including:

With your contact options, it can also be helpful to list your customer support times and the time frame for replying to emails.

The aim of all of this is to show prospective customers that you are:

1. A legitimate business and not some scammy website (hopefully you aren’t!)
2. Not hiding anything and are very up-front and honest

As the more trustworthy a website is, the more likely people are to buy from it, which is also why big names like Amazon do so well because they have done a great job of showing that they are a trustworthy business to buy from.

8: Add Urgency

This is a very psychological aspect of increasing your conversion rate as it can give people a feeling of FOMO (fear of missing out) and as humans, we hate missing out on things but it has to be done correctly because if you overdo it, people are going to become aware of it and it can have the opposite effect but some of the things you could consider are:

• Time-limited offers – just make sure they are genuine offers
• Showing stock quantity – people are going to be more inclined to buy a product if there are only 1 or 2 left than if there are 100 stock

Doing this correctly can increase the chances of customers making a spontaneous purchase as they don’t want to miss out on the offer and/or product.

9: Create A Loyalty Program

Creating a loyalty program can do more than just increase conversion rates as it encourages customers to come back and buy from you again and this can work really well for some product types.

But just looking at it from a conversion rate perspective, the reason why loyalty programs can increase them is:

1. They are getting something – when a customer earns rewards points when making a purchase, it feels like they are getting more than just the product, which incentivizes them to complete the checkout
2. Perceived value – as they are getting more than just their order, it feels like they have got more value from placing an order with your store
3. Order values – if they earn more points per dollar spent, they are likely to spend more money as the more they spend, the closer they are to getting a reward

So there are many benefits to offering a loyalty program but you have to be selling a type of product that encourages people to come back and buy more such as clothing, self-care or beauty products (just a couple of examples).

Related Post: Best Shopify Loyalty Apps

10: Use Cross-sells and Upsells

One of the best ways to not only generate sales but also increase average order value is to use cross-sells and upsells, if you aren’t sure what these are or the difference, I’ve covered this below:

This is one of the best ways of increasing average order values but also showing customers all the different types of products that you sell.

As for implementing this on your store, you will need an app for this and it is up to you whether you do this on the product and/or cart page but I recommend running some tests to see which converts best and also don’t over-do it, you only want to show people a small amount of products, not your complete inventory.

11: Discount Codes

Discount codes won’t work for every Shopify store as there are some products, such as luxury items where offering discount codes can devalue the brand, which is why many luxury brands never do discounts or sales!

When it comes to offering discount codes, there are quite a few different ones that you can choose, including:

There are other discount codes that you can offer for returning customers but for this you will need to get them on to your email list, which is why the new customer discount can work so well but I’ll be covering email marketing a bit later on.

12: Optimize Your Checkout

When it comes to your checkout, you want to Keep It Simple so that you can get the customer from clicking the add to cart button to the order confirmation page as quickly as possible by removing distractions.

This is where the testing for the cross and upsells becomes really important as you need to find out what works best for your store as you may find that adding product recommendations might increase average order value but have a negative impact on conversion rates.

When it comes to optimizing your checkout page, you want to keep the number of pages to a minimum and really you want no more than three pages, which are:

1. Cart Page
2. Checkout Page
3. Payment Page

This is a checkout flow that most people are accustomed to and it just works, it can also be worthwhile removing things like discount code boxes if you don’t offer them on your store to help streamline the process.

13: Offer Free Delivery

One of the main reasons for abandoned carts is unexpected costs, with shipping being one that is most commonly mentioned and many online shoppers now expect free shipping as part of their shopping experience.

You can avoid this by offering free shipping for your products as it removes another obstacle from your checkout process and is something that you can promote across your site to encourage visitors to become paying customers.

But don’t worry about losing money, most online retailers factor shipping costs into the sale price of the item and can potentially lead to a better bottom line when people purchase multiple products.

If you do need to charge for your shipping, then make sure this information is easily accessible on your site in the form of a shipping policy or even include this information on your product page, basically, you are trying to stop people having a nasty surprise when they get to the checkout page.

14: Offer Multiple Payment Options

Every customer has their preferred way to pay and you want to try and accommodate for this by offering multiple payment options, such as:

You may also want to consider a Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) option which allows customers to pay at a later date or split payments over a chosen period.

You don’t want to go overboard though and offer 10+ different payment options as this will be off-putting for customers but by offering the main options, you are providing enough choice to accommodate a large percentage of your potential customer base.

15: Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing methods out there and is the reason why so many stores want your email address but why?

1. You can contact your customers directly – you can send an email directly to their inbox, meaning you aren’t relying on third-party platforms like search engines or social media to communicate with your customers
2. You are targeting a warm audience – if they are on your list, then they have already interacted with your business and are interested in what you are selling, meaning they are more likely to be receptive to your marketing efforts
3. You can massively increase lifetime customer value – when email marketing is done correctly, you can massively increase the amount of sales that you will get from that customer and is the reason why email marketing has some of the best ROI

So email marketing is something you should definitely be using but how do you get the most out of your marketing efforts?

Another thing that can be really helpful in email marketing is not just sending emails full of products every time as people can feel like they are just being sold to all the time, instead you want to produce emails that are full of value, so include:

• Informational content, possibly with links to helpful guides/tutorials on your site
• News about the industry, especially if there have been trending topics that they might find helpful

As with all types of marketing, you want to try and test different things to see what works and what doesn’t as you want your emails to provide you with good ROI, just like all your other marketing.

16: Use A/B Testing

I’ve mentioned testing numerous times throughout this post and there is good reason for that as you need to refine your marketing and sales funnel so that they are providing the best ROI but one big mistake that many people do is they try lots of different things at once, which is problematic!

This is because you don’t know what worked and what didn’t, which is why A/B testing and then analyzing the data is so important and it should follow a process similar to:

• Control Period – Run week 1 with your existing set-up
• Test Period – Run 1 week with your chosen change
• Analyze – Compare the analytics for the two weeks of the campaign to see if things improved, stayed the same or got worse

And this is very much an ongoing process as customer attitudes and buying preferences continue to change, you also need to factor in conditions such as holidays etc.

You will also see what things don’t work and this is just as important as finding out what does and whatever you do, don’t see the things that didn’t work as failures but instead you learnt what doesn’t work with your customers, which is a positive thing.

Conclusion

As we mentioned at the start, learning how to get more sales for your Shopify store is an ongoing process and will involve trying different things to see what works and what doesn’t.

But at it’s core, you are building a sales funnel for your customer and there are four main steps to this:

1. Getting them on to your site
2. Optimizing your product page so that they want to buy the product
3. Showing them that your site is trustworthy
4. Making it easy for them to go from clicking the buy button to the order confirmation page

You may find that there is something at one of these steps that is stopping customers from progressing through your funnel and as a on-going thing, you want to ask customers for feedback on buying from your site as there may be a something that you have overlooked.

Paul Haywood

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Hi, I'm Paul, the Owner and Founder of EcommerceGold.
I ran my own Ecommerce Business for over 7 years and now help others start their own online retail empires!

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