CRO And E-Commerce: How To Increase Purchases

Can CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) increase purchases, also called conversions, on e-commerce?

CRO, that is, Conversion Rate Optimization, is a practice that can increase the conversions of e-commerce. Let’s now discover how it is possible to increase the purchases of e-commerce by optimizing the conversion rate.

What CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization is, and how it works

As already mentioned, the acronym CRO stands for “Conversation Rate Optimization,” and its literal translation in Italian is “conversion rate optimization.”

The conversion rate is the percentage value that identifies the ratio between the number of people who come into contact with the call to action and the number of people who decide to put it into practice. The objective of the CRO, of course, is to raise the percentage of the latter figure.

How? Studying and putting into practice the necessary measures in terms of product, strategy, and content in order to improve their conversion results. In detail:

Observes and analyze user behavior using various tools, such as interviews, questionnaires, Heatmaps, or a graphic tool that allows you to view the contents of a web page highlighted by different colors, where the warmest colors define the areas on which the attention of users focuses most. This can lead CRO experts to modify the page layout by inserting elements, such as calls to action or buttons, through which users are invited to take actions ( buy a product, get a discount coupon or a free gift, subscribe to the newsletter, etc …), in the areas deemed most relevant, i.e., those marked with warm colors in the Heatmap;
Experiments using AB Tests or other testing tools to identify the most effective solution and improve the User Experience, i.e., the user’s browsing experience and, consequently, the conversion rate.

How to CRO on your site: tools and strategies

In the specific field of e-commerce, it is very important to seize all the sales opportunities and meet the needs of an audience that now receives many solicitations daily.

Increasing purchases on e-commerce with the CRO is possible, but it is important to take the right steps and, first of all, decrease the Bounce Rate or bounce rate.

Among the most useful tips in this sense, the one that suggests exploiting the data made available by Google Analytics to understand which pages of your e-commerce site you need to optimize stands out.

The Google platform, in fact, shows the pages able to attract better users but also the bounce rate of those same pages, highlighting when a user opens a single page of the site and leaves it without activating other requests to the server during the session.

This can lead to different reflections and implement that succession of actions listed above – observe, analyze and experiment – to understand how to improve the site’s navigation and lead the user to a conversion.

Here are some practical steps that can help improve the conversion rate:

Refine keywords and better guide users to the links that lead to the purchase of the product or service offered;
Structure the site with a clear, navigable menu divided into categories and sub-categories;
Insert on each page of the e-commerce site all the information necessary to help the user complete the purchase operation, such as the product description, photos (high quality), reviews and feedback from those who have already purchased the product, and shipping details;
Encourage cross-selling , recommending other related products to purchase to the potential customer;
Speed up and make the purchase and checkout procedure intuitive ;
Create a clean graphic, without unnecessary distractions, with the buttons clearly highlighted, and all the steps clearly described;
Create a responsive e-commerce site and therefore readable not only from desktop but also on mobile devices;
Do not require mandatory registration to complete the operation.