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According to data from Invesp, the average eCommerce conversion rate is 3.65%. That means that for every 100 visitors to your store, only 3 to 4 of them will end up actually making a purchase. The other 90 plus will either leave unconvinced that they need your products in their life, or they’ll head to your competitors.
That’s not the only stat worth mentioning either. Research by Monetate shows that consumers who land on a product page are 72% more likely to bounce than those who land on any other page on an eCommerce store. And with increasingly more traffic coming via Google Product Listings and Instagram Shopping, there’s more customers directly hitting product pages than ever before.
So how do you get those bounce rates down and conversions up? The ‘Shopify product page guy’ Rishi Rawat shared some valuable insights in episode 20 of the ‘In Reviews We Trust’ podcast. We’ve coupled this with some of our own proven strategies to help you build product pages that really do deliver.
But first up, let’s make sure we’ve got the basics covered.
Before you even think about optimizing your product pages, go through your existing pages with an essentials checklist:
Product information: it goes without saying you need a strong title that accurately describes the product, as well as purchase options like size, color availability and any other variations. You also need a killer product description (we’ll come back to this one).
Clear product images: high quality product images are crucial for giving customers a good idea of what they’re actually buying. Make sure images are well lit, show the product from multiple angles and are large enough for small details to be visible.
Product reviews: these are an absolute must have. They instill trust and help shoppers make better purchase decisions. Our own data tells us that brands that display product reviews have an 18% higher conversion rate.
Pricing, shipping and returns information: make sure the price of the product is clearly displayed, along with any relevant shipping information like estimated delivery times and shipping costs. You should also have a visible returns policy. Don’t make customers search for this information.
Quick loading time: the easiest way to lose custom is to keep people waiting, so optimize your page for loading speed. Don’t forget to check for time delays caused by any installed applications (and ideally only use those that have been tested and deemed low impact). You also need to optimize for mobile, making product pages easy to navigate on a small screen.
Now we’ve got the basics ticked off let’s look at how to supercharge your product pages and drive sales in the process.
The first bit of advice from Rishi is to take note of Zipf’s law. In reference to eCommerce, this principle basically tells us that your top selling products will sell exponentially more than your lower ranking products. So to really drive sales and revenue, start by applying the following tips to your top two or three product pages.
We said we’d come back to this so here it is, with a little bit of Rishi Rawat stardust.
Product descriptions are your chance to get creative, and set what you offer apart from all other competing options. To do this, Rishi suggests looking at your descriptions as a three part act with an opening, a middle and an end.
The opening is the most crucial part of the description because if it doesn't connect with the buyer, they won’t bother reading the rest. Use it to cast doubt about competing products and grab the shopper’s attention.
The middle of the description is all about demonstrating expertise. You need to prove to the buyer that your product is the best in the world for the price point. Finally, the closing is where you need to address any negative thoughts the buyer might have. As Rishi explains, our brains are protection devices that prevent us from making mistakes, so if you can anticipate and address these negative thoughts you’ll be more likely to close the sale.
To help with this we highly recommend making the most of customer feedback with review mining. By analyzing quantitative data from your own and competing product reviews, you can learn precisely what the common objections are for your audience and cleverly approach them in the closing statements of your product descriptions.
“The one element we can easily work on that has an incredible impact on conversion rates on the product page is the product description. 90% of websites have incomprehensible, completely utterly throwaway product descriptions.” - Rishi Rawat
We said that product reviews are a must have. Research all the statistics on consumer behavior and buyer trust and you’ll see it’s true. But what Rishi points out is that in a lot of cases the buyer never actually discovers those reviews because of the way they’re published. By tracking review placement and user actions, he found that less than 10% of people would get far enough down the page to see them.
We have two solutions here. Our Review Nuggets feature and our new Sessions and Analytics tool.
Review Nuggets allows you to take the best pieces of review content - the parts that really sell a product and address those conversion blocking objections - and publish them as snippets right next to the buy now button. It makes review discovery effortless on the customer’s part. Meanwhile, the Session and Analytics tool helps you track performance and optimize the position of REVIEWS.io widgets.
In fact, we used the Session and Analytics tool to measure the impact of Review Nuggets. Over a 60 day period we tracked 104,598 sessions with two variants - with and without the Review Nuggets widget. The version with boosted conversion by a whopping 10.7%.
The actionable takeaway here? Publish review nuggets for sure. And wherever on the page your full reviews are published, track performance and keep tweaking.
“What I would say as far as reviews is that you need to think about clever ways of increasing the discovery rate. And the only way to do that is to have tracking in place to know if reviews are being read.” - Rishi Rawat
User generated content is a pretty big deal in eCommerce right now, and there’s multiple ways to drive sales using UGC - like including UGC galleries on product pages.
High quality images are important, yes. And you should have brand generated photos on your product pages. But here’s another bit of advice from Rishi - whatever ideas you have for optimizing product pages, always consider impact versus effort. Professional product images have a high impact on conversion, but they also have high effort and high cost.
UGC on the other hand is incredibly cost effective and also pulls its weight when it comes to increasing sales - it’s been shown to boost conversions by 10% when included in an online purchase path.
It also captures something a professional photo shoot can’t - an authentic experience. UGC shows real people using your products in the real world and helps persuade a shopper to buy into that experience themselves.
With our UGC feature you can pull item specific UGC into dynamic galleries for each individual product page. Combine this with your own brand images and you have a powerful combination for driving conversion rates. Try REVIEWS.io for free today to see how we help to drive your conversion rate!
When a customer loses interest in a product page, you lose the opportunity to ask why. These people are gone and may never return to your store. Sure, you can (and should) analyze heat maps and session behavior to try and fill in the blanks, but it’s unlikely you’ll ever hear their reasons first hand.
There’s not much you can do about that but you can ask those customers that do convert where you can do better.
By using post purchase customer surveys you can gain first hand insight into the product page experience, including what you do well, where you fall short, and how you can improve.
The tips above are both easy to implement and highly effective - but whatever you do be sure to run split tests and find out exactly what works for your store and your customers.
You should also check out all the advice Rishi had to give by listening to ‘Simple ways to drastically improve your product page conversion’ in full.
And for help with or more information on any of the REVIEWS.io features mentioned, just give our Customer Success team a shout.
