The ultimate goal of your online store is to move your customer through your purchase funnel. This can be achieved in a number of areas. It’s very important to understand the things on your site that need to be addressed in order for your customer to feel compelled to continue through the conversion process. It’s also important to have the tools you need to monitor and track your conversion rate. The average conversion is around 3% and for a successful online business it’s important to achieve around a 5% conversion rate. Following are some points to review on your site to ensure that you are converting the most customers as possible.

Sales and Promotions
Setting up appropriate sales and promotions is an important part of the sales process. The words SALE and LIMITED TIME PROMOTION are call to action phrases that are excellent to use to help push your customer on to the product info page. These promotions should be posted on the product listing pages, home page and via your advertising banners off site. Having your product on sale or even other promotions such as buy one get one free or buy $20 or more in product and get free shipping are very effective ways to entice your customer in to continuing with the purchase.

Confidence Boxes through the Checkout Process
Another important thing to have on your website is a confidence box through your checkout process. This confidence box should contain all the security icons and payment icons that you can cram in to it including virus security logos, hacker safe logos, a BBB logo, SSL Certificate logo, and Paypal and credit card icons. Having these security assurances through your checkout process can help to secure the trust in your customer to continue through the checkout process which is where many store owners have the largest drop off in the conversion funnel.

Clean lines and no bugs
Having a website that renders properly on all your customers systems and browser is very important. If the customer is on your website and encounters a bug, errors or something just looks out of place it immediately bring about a sense of unease and hesitation. This is especially true for the checkout process where you do not want to have anything out of place or the customer will just consider trying a different site they can better trust they will receive what they are purchasing.

Proper Layout and Site Flow
An appropriate site flow is very important to prevent customer confusion while navigating your web site. Through user experience research you can layout your site flow to attract the customers eyes to the sections of your site you want them to focus on such as your products, details about your products, bright checkout buttons and bright advertisements that catch the eye with compelling sales and promotions. You never want your customer to be thinking where do I go from here to make my purchase or answer my next question. You always want to make it easy to continue to navigate further through the conversion process.

Detailed product descriptions
With online purchases it’s very important to have a long and extensive product description that tells the customer all about the product. If you are selling a service it’s important to also create enough content on the page that answers all the questions your customer will have. This means that you should list the dimensions of the product, color feel and details of each aspect of the product. It’s also very important to have large product images that show the details on your product as well as also having additional product images in various angles so the customer really knows what they are purchasing. You should also put verbiage on the product info page that lets the customer know that if they purchase this product it is in stock and will ship either same or next day. This can have a huge effect on if the customer decided to try and order from your company or not.