Easter and Mother’s Day are key revenue generation times for hybrid and pure play online retailers. Jim Haritonas of Online Growth Consulting looks at how to maximise these dates.

Australians spent a total of $4.2 billion online in 2021. This represented an increase of 114 percent since 2019. IBIS World predicts that the market will rise to 49.7 billion in 2022.   

The revenue potential is massive with Australia Post’s latest e-commerce Industry Report showing that the Easter period in 2019 saw an increase of 135 percent. This will skyrocket even further in 2022.

Is your site conversion ready?

Is your site set up to maximise online revenue spend? Are you converting as anticipated? Truth is it may not be and you risk losing online sales to other sites. 

Site traffic is rarely the issue for poor revenue return. Marketing, SEO and branding campaigns will generally have done their job effectively to drive visitor volumes to a site.   

Many big brands who have invested heavily in driving traffic scratch their heads when analysing poor conversion rate optimisation (CRO) analytics and low revenue yields. 

Average e-commerce site conversions in Australia sit at two – three percent, but many sit at only one percent or lower. A high performing conversion site should convert at six – seven percent.

Tips to address conversion problems

There are six key elements that are the root cause of poor conversion rates. Addressing them now will provide sufficient time to reap online revenue from Easter and Mother’s Day shopping.

Slow site speed 

A slow website is a conversion rate killer. In a range of case studies conducted by Hubspot website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42 percent with each additional second of load time.

Nearly 70 percent of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer. As page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123 percent. 

If an e-commerce site is making $10,000 a day, a one second page delay could cost $2.5 million per year.

Trust signals

Demonstrating why and how your business is trustworthy is essential. Every page must have a trust signal of the unique selling propositions and jumping out.   

A trusted brand has higher conversions driven from direct traffic, branded traffic and email campaigns.

Hard to locate CTAs  

If call to action (CTA) buttons are hard to locate (almost hidden), visitors will become frustrated and leave.’ Buy now’ and other CTA buttons must be easy to find to simplify the user experience and buyer journey.

Overloaded homepages

You don’t need to share on the homepage everything on offer. It becomes overloaded with information which overwhelms and confuses. 

Consumers just want to get quickly to their product category. Cognitive overload loses visitors as they don’t want to spend time figuring out ‘where to go’ Scrolling banners are a big issue here too,  

A clean focussed Home page with clear user/consumer intent will direct visitors quickly to the category or product they are looking for.

The focus should be to replicate online a similar in-store experience. For example, a department store which has a homewares category at the store entrance should relay similarly online. 

This ensures gaps of user experiences are tightened between bricks and mortar and online shopping.

Clear offering messaging 

Make sure messaging is crystal clear. Cart abandonment drops significantly when messaging is clear and consistent across the journey to the checkout page. 

For example, clear and consistent delivery messages will significantly minimise the cart abandonment when communicated from the home, product and checkout pages. 

Frustrating checkout process 

A survey conducted by BigCommerce asked participants if “they had ever backed out of completing an online purchase because the check-out process was too frustrating”. A staggering 79 percent answered “Yes”.

Analysing cart abandonment data is essential to minimise this issue. Google analytics when set up correctly will show the strength and weaknesses of the checkout process? 

Make sure the following is not included in the checkout process:

• Ask for information twice, such as email confirmation
• Request credit card details to be re-entered 
• Add a double login functionality 

Address these elements and your e-commerce store will see higher conversion rates along with improved user experiences. Outstanding user experiences are fundamental to online revenue generation.

Jim Haritonas is the director of Online Growth Consulting.