5 Site Changes That Can Actually Impact Your Sales
By Jill Rose, PayPal
User experience, or UX, impacts how customers navigate your web site, find the products they’re looking for and ultimately complete a purchase. If the experience is fast, easy, direct and even enjoyable, they’ll likely complete the purchase, but if your UX is not seamless, consumers will go elsewhere. Here are five simple changes to improve conversion:
1. Create a more prominent and attention-grabbing call to action (CTA): Content at the top of the page is seen 84% more than content placed “below the fold,” or content that requires users to scroll down to see it.1 Place your call to action at the top and test out different enhancements like a different font size or color. Test the feature that gets the most clicks. By making the CTA immediately visible and unique, you should be able to grab your users’ attention.
2. Make your products easy to find: Improving discoverability is critical to conversions. If a customer can’t find what they are looking for quickly, they get distracted and abandon the shopping cart. The use of efficient filters makes the search process fast and efficient — helping lower the bounce rate and keep shoppers on your site.
3. Streamline your checkout experience: Simplifying the checkout experience helps the user experience. A one-touch or no-touch checkout experience can help increase conversion as shoppers will no longer need to input their credit card or payment info. Additionally, consumer financing options help buyers pay over time and increase their average order size.
4. Increase your font size: If users are having a hard time reading your web site, they’re not making purchases. Larger fonts improve the user experience by increasing readability and reader comprehension. Experts recommend a font size of at least 16 pixels for responsive web sites2 which is why search engines usually hover around this font size.
5. Tailor your site experience using analytics insights: Tools like Google Analytics provide an overview of user demographics that can help you identify if shoppers are visiting from mobile or desktop and which area of your page gets the most eyeballs. These insights can help you identify where to focus your efforts and optimize your site. One way to do so is consistent A/B testing so you can compare two different types of your site and leverage the consumer response.
As successful e-Commerce businesses can tell you, optimizing the user experience on your site doesn’t need to take a huge chunk of your time or budget. The little things you do to improve your customers’ journey, from experimenting with simple style tweaks to collecting customer data with a single line of code, have the potential to boost sales, sign-ups and downloads in a big way.
The content of this article is provided for informational purposes only. You should always obtain independent business, tax, financial, and legal advice before making any business decision.
1 Source: Nielsen Norman Group. The Fold Manifesto: Why the Page Fold Still Matters. February 1, 2015.
2 Source: Learn UI Design Blog. The Responsive Website Font Size Guidelines. April 23, 2018.
With more than a decade of experience in payments and e-Commerce, Jill Rose brings extensive knowledge of the industry and the issues that merchants face. At PayPal, Rose has led many aspects of our merchants business — including the global launch of PayPal Here and Large Enterprise Sales Operations. She is now is responsible for our Mid-Market Business Segment. Her business unit is one of the largest contributors to the overall company performance.