Six eCommerce tips to boost your site through COVID-19

When selling online there are plenty of positives even during this COVID lockdown, check out these 6 eCommerce tips to boost sales during COVID.

The COVID-19 crisis has had a dramatic effect on businesses across the world. However, not everything about the pandemic and lockdown needs to be negative. In fact, with more shoppers going online to buy the things they need and want, there are plenty of opportunities for businesses to strengthen their eCommerce sites and make more sales.

Here we take a look at six great tips for eCommerce sites to help them make the most of their site through the COVID-19 outbreak, 

1. Get to know the metrics of your site

Let’s start at the beginning: metrics. If you are not currently measuring the important metrics on your site, the lockdown gives you the chance to really learn something and new and discover some fantastic insights into how your site actually performs. For example, you should take a look at your Google Analytics account and look at the key issues such as the bounce rate.

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your site who leave immediately after arriving without going to any other pages. Many factors can affect bounce rates, such as the quality of the content or the images, but even more crucial is whether the page that they landed on fulfilled the need.

It is worth looking at the pages on your site that currently have the lowest bounce rate, and establish what it is that you are doing right on those pages, compared to those with a disappointingly high bounce rate.

2. Offer live chat

Customers often like to be able to discuss their potential purchase with someone with experience. With many physical stores currently closed due to lockdown, buyers are turning to eCommerce sites in big numbers, so it is important that you are able to provide them with the same shopping experience that they are used to.

For those customers who need advice or reassurance that they are buying the right product, live chat can increase your conversion rates significantly. 

3. Upload multiple images of your products

One of the major mistakes made by too many eCommerce sites is the failure to utilise high-quality images. Your images are a hugely important factor in the buying decision, so take the time that the lockdown has provided and spend it photographing your products and uploading those products to the pages.

Women’s fashion retailer Tina Bucknall is one of many sites that makes a point of never uploading a product without ensuring that there are multiple images. Having multiple shots gives the customer a similar experience to shopping in a store – they can get a look at the whole of the product to see if it is right for them. 

4. Add reviews

Reviews are absolutely essential to eCommerce sites, especially if your brand is looking to attract new customers. If those potential customers do not know your brand they won’t necessarily feel that they can trust you – this is where customer reviews can help enormously. It has been shown that 84% of people trust online reviews as much as they trust recommendations from friends.

5. Improve your checkout process

Another huge issue for eCommerce sites is the issue of cart abandonment. This refers to when a visitor on the site has added at least one item to the cart but has subsequently left the site without completing the transaction – on the average sites, around 70% of shopping carts are abandoned. Once again there are many reasons for cart abandonment – unexpected shipping costs, feeling a lack of trust in your site etc. – but one of the most common and frustrating is a poor checkout process.

It is the case that many eCommerce sites have unnecessarily lengthy and complex checkout systems which frustrate the potential customer to the point where they simply give up on completing the purchase and go seek it out on a different site. Take a look at your current checkout process and look for ways to minimise the number of clicks, and ensure you are taking on the details you need to make the sale. 

6. Allow guest checkout

Getting shoppers to register can be extremely valuable as it provides you with the details in order to target them later with further marketing campaigns. However, you may not know that being forced to register an account is one of the things that most often puts off new customers from making sales. 

Give them the option to checkout as a guest and you may see a significant rise in the number of sales.