It’s no secret that eCommerce conversion rates sit low. But we are here to change that. The first step is to identify those underlying factors of why your conversion rates are falling flat, and what we can do to improve those rates for the long-term. Here, we explore some examples of how you can improve your conversion rates and long-term solutions.
What to expect
- What are conversion rates
- Why are eCommerce conversion rates low?
- How video commerce overcomes low eCommerce conversion rates
What are conversion rates?
A conversion is when a customer website visitor, successfully completes a transaction, or does the action desired – like signing up to a mailing list, favouriting or purchasing an item. This number is then summed up as the conversion rate, which is the number of people that successfully made that action on the website.
Stereotypically, eCommerce is known for its lower conversion rates. There are normally justifiable reasons as to why e-commerce sites don’t get higher conversion rates, here we list a few of them:
Why are eCommerce conversion rates low?
1) Poor navigation
One reason for eCommerce websites not producing as high conversion rates as physical retail is the layout of the website. Sometimes the layout can be more confusing than helpful, and it doesn’t help if your customer cannot work how to buy your product.
2) Your customers do not trust your brand
One major doubt with online retail is the amount of scepticism that comes with it. Yes, online retail has evolved to a point where now it’s much more trustworthy, however, not every customer trusts every brand. You have to make sure that your site, products and company is trusted. Without your customers trusting your brand, they will never fully buy your products in complete confidence.
3) Customers do not understand the product
Another plus of physical retail is that, as a customer, you are able to talk to an expert and understand what you need to buy. With eCommerce websites, customers are open to a lot more confusion when it comes to understanding a product, what its for, and what’s best to satisfy their needs. Often, customers can’t understand the website, along with not knowing what they want to buy, so regularly leads to abandonment.
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How video commerce overcomes low ecommerce conversion rates
Despite eCommerce being known for lower conversion rates, video commerce has come and offered a solution. It provides similar qualities to physical retail. Since the pandemic has come into play, and physical retail has become near impossible, video commerce provides an online solution to customer satisfaction and service. Here we list some of the ways that video commerce solves the problems that customers normally have with online retail:
1) Face to face communication
Face to face communication is an important element for trust. By being able to talk to an expert, who brings an element of human interaction, the customers trust and overall satisfaction increases. Since this is not possible during the pandemic, this makes online shopping a lot more of an assured process.
2) Personalised shopping experience
Often when walking into a physical store, you are greeted with an assistant who will help accommodate your needs. With video commerce, the expert is able to help the customer in similar ways if they do not understand what product they are looking for.
3) Customer relationships
By having this emotional and human connection with the customers it allows your company to form relationships with your audience. By establishing and maintaining this connection, your customers will be more inclined to return to your brand and re-purchase.
4) Satisfied needs
Similar to the way that the face to face communication works, by establishing this emotional connection and allowing this communication pathway, experts are much more easily able to meet the customers’ needs. It’s able to be done in real-time, efficiently and effectively.
5) Increase average order value
Because of this relationship between the customer and the expert, the company are able to offer other products that the customer isn’t even aware that they may need or like. From a brand perspective, this is important in order for your customers to see the variety of your products and how much ground you can cover when it comes to customer needs. This, in turn, increases the average order value and customer satisfaction.
6) Scheduling future appointments
The service also allows the experts to schedule future appointments. Customers can either call one immediately, or book an appointment for later use. This works in the same way for the retail expert. By being able to schedule these future appointments it creates an inclination for the customers to come back – again and again.
How Confer With can help your brand improve conversion rates
Confer With is a video commerce software where retail experts are able to converse with the customers, directly, efficiently and effectively. This mirrors the service that would be received in physical stores, allowing the customer to have their questions and queries answered.
The Confer With service ensures that your customer’s needs are met, allowing online retail experts to inspire, reassure and engage customers about their decisions in real-time.
Match
Confer With enables brands to match high-value customers with members of their team within real-time or set up virtual appointments. This ensures that your important customer needs are met, and even exceeded, to ensure the purchases.
Video commerce allows both the retail expert and the customer to have control of the virtual basket, where the customer has the freedom to remove and add different items. Giving the customer the ultimate control of the final decision, yet being supported, is important for loyalty and conversion.
By reinforcing the process with the retail expert, it gives the customer reassurance, and improves conversion rates. Any questions the customer has surrounding the product, brand or delivery are answered efficiently and effectively.
From the perspective of a customer, video commerce embodies accessibility and ease.
Engage
Your customers can engage with your customers in a way that feels comfortable for them. Live video shopping, allows for more collaboration around selecting the right product for the customer. The service is able to provide answers to any queries or questions quickly and effectively.
With features such as calls with the video expert, live-stream shopping, one-to-one and one-to-many video commerce, it provides customers with several platforms to interact and invest in the brand, not only financially, but emotionally.
Live stream shopping can either be one-to-one or one-to-many.
Retail experts can either interact with their customers one-to-one or through an engaged audience. Throughout the livestream or the call, customers are being talked to live and directly, where all their questions can be answered effectively. Not only does it increase engagement and conversion rates, but it increases their trust in your brand as demonstrations and products are able to be shown.
Once customers have interacted, engaged and are invested, conversion rates rocket.
Find out more about how live-stream shopping can transform your brand and overall conversion figures here.
Immerse
The platform allows you to show product images, video demos and more. It delivers an immersive experience as it lets you curate your recommendations and make it fun for your customers to shop with you and your brand.
Similarly, to the physical retail experience, video commerce allows the retail expert to show the customer different product images, video demonstrations and more.
Video commerce therefore allows an immersive, entertaining experience for the customer to participate in, whilst also being richly informed and allows the retail expert to curate relevant recommendations.
One part of e-commerce that was falling flat, was the inability to physically see and feel the item. With video commerce this gap is closed as much as possible, with video demonstrations, the possibility of live-streams and the reassurance of the experts.
Convert
Convert more sales with Confer With’s virtual shared basket. With the customers feeling more reassured and engaged with your company and the products, encouraging them to come back for more and invest in the brand further. Learn more about how we define conversion in e-commerce here.
Sabir Bose talks about the effects of the upgrade to a virtual basket, combining the different ideas of auctions and post-priced selling. The evolution of the virtual basket has made buying items and retail a lot more efficient and effective.
The virtual basket is something that is not new to e-commerce platforms.
Whenever you favourite, or buy an item, it automatically is placed in your “basket.” This basket is then able to be taken to the checkout and is processed as a purchase.
Cart abandonment is high on eCommerce sites, which results in a lower conversion rate. However, the introduction of the virtual shared basket allows customers to select items to purchase with full confidence.
The confidence is supplied through the experts advice through the video commerce platform, resulting in both higher average orders and conversion rates.
We are on a mission to transform digital dialogue to be infinitely closer to the connection established in the physical world.
Read more about Confer With and our mission here.
Recap
Conversion rates allow companies to understand where they are going wrong if they are not seeing successful purchases and an increase in customers. Once companies are aware of the mistakes they are making they are then able to fix these problems.
Even though e-commerce is known for lower conversion rates, the research surrounding conversion rates and customer engagement allows for us to increase these rates. As customers are rapidly converting to online commerce due to the pandemic, e-commerce is seeing vast improvements in conversion rates. However, it is now more important than ever than companies get their marketing strategies in line with conversion rates to make sure their customers stay, and then return.
