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Your store gets a lot of traffic, and you target the right audience. All your marketing efforts seem right, but still, you notice low sales. That’s when you need to look at your conversion rates (CRs). 

The conversion rate deals with fulfilling the desired action. For example, do visitors subscribe to your newsletters? Do they add items to their carts? And most importantly, do they finish the order? If half of your visitors don’t convert, it signifies that they don’t find what they want somewhere along the customer journey.

Conversion rate is a broad term that goes beyond your offering. You should remove all the obstacles and make purchasing simple. In this article, we will take a closer look at three common conversion killers and what Magento store owners can do to avoid them.

1. Unoptimized & Slow Store

Let’s assume customers open your website. They don’t know the assortment yet, how excellent your products are, and how fast you deliver goods. All they can evaluate at this stage is how long they have to wait for a page to appear.

Note that the chances of conversions decline by 4.42% with each second of load latency. Why so? A poor load time spoils even the most beautiful design in the world. In any way, how can anyone appreciate it if nothing appears for several seconds, if not minutes? That’s why I put the store’s speed as the top conversion rate killer.

How can you make the Magento store run faster?

Learn how to optimize Magento 2 to ensure your customers won’t become frustrated with page loading. Here are some of the main tips to follow:

• examine your images to see whether they’re optimized (it includes image weight, dimensions, compression, etc.);

• use fundamental features such as Lazy Image Loading;

• remove data and logs that are no longer needed;

• limit the number of utilized plugins;

• get some caching software, such as Varnish.

Pro tip: take advantage of cutting-edge solutions, such as progressive web applications or headless commerce.

Suppose your next step is converting your site into a progressive web application. For example, you use the Magento 2 PWA Studio or another toolkit such as Vue Storefront.

How can it improve your Magento store? A PWA will take your site’s optimization to a completely new level, offering users amazing UX\UI and speed on various devices, including smartphones.

For instance, mentioning great PWA examples to check out, here are a few mobile screenshots taken on the Apivita cosmetics store, based on Magento. It is a PWA that looks and works really well on mobile devices. It’s fast, intuitive, reminiscent of a native app, user-friendly, and works in the browser.

Do you see the “Add to Home Screen” instructions? It allows adding the shortcut to the site to the phone screen that’ll look like an app icon but doesn’t clog the device memory.

Screenshot taken on the Apivita website

2. Poor & Unappealing Product Pages

Did you know that the product page is, perhaps, one of the most crucial page types in your entire Magento store? It’s the major reason why you should do everything you can to brush up your product pages, make the sold items look appealing, and be informative too.

So what should a decent product page ideally have apart from the “Add to cart” button?

1. A gorgeous product gallery. Visuals should be a strong side as images speak much better than any of your text or descriptions. Pictures should be compressed yet but of amazing quality. In an ideal case scenario, they should be zoomable or convey every tiny detail. Video content works well here too.

2. A nice SEO-optimized product description and all the needed text.

3. If there are product details that you should highlight, do it. You can add videos, tutorials, FAQs, and\or unique interactive elements that can help you to promote the product.

4. A nice upselling or cross-selling section. Does this specific item go well with another product from your store? Show it, pitch the options; they can be added to the cart alongside.

5. Do you know what your client likes? Add a personalized product section that’ll pull items that this specific customer might find to their liking based on their previous buys or browsing history.

6. Opinions of other customers count a lot. Not having a cool Review & Rating section on a Magento store is a huge miss-out. Potential buyers trust the points of view of real customers greatly, and this affects their purchasing decisions.

7. What else can urge or inspire your prospects to buy something? Right, other user-generated content, for example, a widget that shows posts from social media of how real people are using your product.

8. How about customer retention? Building long-lasting relationships with your buyers is vital, so add some call to action for loyalty program sign-up.

A wonderful example of a product page is on the official Bright Star Kids website, developed on Magento. This visually rich product page allows you to customize goods, check out reviews, and choose tailored products you may also like.

Screenshot taken on the Bright Star Kids website

3. Lengthy and Inconvenient Checkout

Let’s face it; if you’re excited about buying something, you don’t want to waste your time. It’s just as if you’d be in a physical store with a shopping cart full of stuff you want to get, and you see a huge queue to the checkout. A sigh of disappointment, agree? It works the same way with online sales, leading to cart abandonment.

Therefore, as a Magento store owner, you must ensure that your product checkout is simple and time-saving. It’s one of the typical eCommerce mistakes that can cost your business money.

It means that you should rethink the design and minimize everything you can within the checkout section to make the process of paying you for the selected items as fast and easy as you can get it to be.

Here are some pointers regarding the Magento checkout:

• Multi-tab checkouts that are extended into one too many steps are a big “no-no.”

• Heavy and field-crowded checkouts with just too much to fill out is a bad move too.

• Not using suitable time-saving elements (like data auto-fill or using text where checkboxes or drop lists would be more convenient) can negatively influence the whole process and urge cart abandonment.

• Not having preferable payment options or shipping variants is another thing that can backpedal your sales and kill your Magento store’s conversion rate.

Okay, so what does a good checkout look like? For instance, below are screenshots of the product checkout on the official S’well website, another Magento example.

First, we see a fantastic opportunity to finish the order as a guest. By eliminating the obligatory sign-in, you can “win over” clients who don’t want to register on your store.

Those who already have an account and have previously purchased things on the site can speed the whole thing up by signing in. Then their personal data will be auto-filled, and all they’ll have left is to cross-check that everything is relevant.

Screenshot taken on the official S’well website

Another good point here is the clear order summary block on the right that previews the items you’re paying for and breaks down the grand total.

Final Thoughts

What can spoil a Magento store’s conversion rate? A lot may go wrong, and even the most visited website should look into ways to reorganize product descriptions for readability and SEO, optimize page load time, and simplify checkout. Of course, you should also give your search area some thought and invest in proper mobile optimization.

Magento stores, being highly customizable and scalable, can serve thousands of customers. So why not take the full potential of these visitors by implementing the above strategies?

About the Author

Kate Parish

Kate Parish is the chief marketing officer at Onilab, Magento website development services, with over 8 years of experience in Digital Marketing in the sphere of eCommerce web development. Kate always aspires to broaden her competency in line with cutting-edge global trends. Her primary areas of professional interest include SEO, branding, PPC, SMM, Magento PWA development, and online retail in general.