Here at Success Path, our purpose is to empower ecommerce brands with AI technology to build and optimise ecommerce experiences for their customers – creating increased engagement, conversion and ultimately, sales.

If you’re an ecommerce brand, the chances are you’ve seen an increase in your paid digital advertising costs, leading to higher acquisition costs. It’s why it’s now more important than ever to be focussing on improving your conversion rate. Because with the same advertising spend, you can increase sales (and so lower your acquisition costs) all by simply improving your conversion rate.

Clearly then, using technology to help optimise your online store is crucial for future success. And we’ve no doubt, that all ecommerce stores will soon be leveraging AI technology, otherwise, they will simply be left behind.

That’s the sales pitch over.

Now, to what we want to talk about in this article – some useful ways to help people find the product they want on your ecommerce store. And so yep again, helping you to increase your store’s conversion rates – you’ll notice, that tends to be the theme of our useful articles…

So, how can you help customers find the product they want?

Firstly, some of the obvious (yet all too often ignored) ways:

1. Ensuring your site is mobile optimised

How often have you been on a site, trying to make a purchase, but a button is hidden/not working properly when on mobile, and you simply give up never to return to make the purchase? This comes back to one of our key philosophies – start at the purchase stage and work backwards. And so, optimising your own channels close to purchase first, before throwing money at paid advertising – otherwise, you are just pouring a lot of that money down the drain. Fix the basics first, and you’ll reap the rewards later. Talking about the fundamentals, here’s another one…

2. Site speed.

A slow-loading site increases the chances of consumers dropping off and purchasing elsewhere. There really is no excuse for a slow-loading site. It’s another easy win.

They were a couple of fundamental fixes, now for a few less obvious but just as important ways of helping customers find what they want.

3. Product search

A fascinating stat is that 50% of customers go straight to ‘product search’ and the customers who do are significantly more likely to make a purchase.

Therefore, you need to make sure your product search functionality works well. Yes, technology can help you with this. But it’s the behind-the-scenes manual tagging of products that is most important when helping customers easily and quickly find what they are looking for.

4. Recommended products

One way to do this is to show other recommended products based on the users’ product search, and the products they have already viewed. Again, your goal here is to help them find the products they want easily and quickly – personalisation is a powerful way of achieving this.

You can take personalisation to another level by using existing customer data (if you have it), like browsing and purchase history, and so showing products that are tailored to their interests.

5. Present products to customers by their availability

It’s best to prioritise products in your store that have the most availability, this increases the chances of purchase and so drives conversion rates. Clearly, you really want to avoid serving products first, that say, only have a xxs left in stock, as there are very few people whom this will be an option for. If they experience this a number of times, they will decide the store doesn’t cater for them properly and leave.

6. Prioritise high-margin items

Your business is there to make a profit. And so, like the above point, you want to prioritise the products that are going to help you achieve your business objectives. Clearly, you want to sell more of your products that have high margins, as these will deliver you better commercial success.

7. Highlight the best-selling products

There’s a bit of behavioural science at play here, with a bit of social proof – ‘if everyone else is buying these then they must be good’. Plus, these are products that have a higher chance of actually being purchased, so by helping people get to these quicker you’re giving yourself the best chance of converting the browser into a paying customer.

Essentially the above are some ways that help to both reduce customer friction and increase their motivation to buy. And these are always the two main levers you need to be trying to pull in order to increase your conversion rates.

We’ll be back with even more ways to help you optimise your ecommerce site, and improve your conversion rates to ultimately, increase your sales.

Until then, get in touch to see how our AI-powered technology can help you to achieve your ecommerce goals.