The primary goal of every eCommerce business is to have more visitors on their website and turn most of them into paying customers. Well, not every website visitor successfully checks out and turns into a paying customer. Some randomly visit the landing page from Google search or Google Ads and bounce quickly. Others might just window-shop. While some might be looking for a job and visit your careers page. The reasons why someone is on your website are endless.
However, it is important that you lead most of the visitors on your website to click add to cart button to turn them into buying customers. The best metric to calculate this is the add-to-cart conversion rate. In this blog post, we shall discuss what this metric is and how to calculate it. We will also deep dive into the ways for improving the add-to-cart conversion rate.
What Is Add To Cart Rate?
Add to cart rate is the percentage of visitors who add items (at least one) to their cart during their session. To calculate the add-to-cart rate, you take the total number of sessions where the users added an item to their cart and divide it by total sessions. You can track this via Google Analytics as well.
Why Is Add To Cart Rate Important?
Add to cart is one of the most useful metrics to ensure that the eCommerce site is working fine. It tells a lot about your website, user experience, products, pricing, merchandising, strategy, and traffic acquisition tactics. For example, if your ATC rate is very low or a lot of visitors are not visiting the check-out page, it may mean your pricing is not in sync with the market. Or you are charging a high delivery cost which is leading the users to buy from competitors. All these little things can be quickly adjusted if you are keeping a track of your ATC rate.
How To Improve Add To Cart Rate?
Having a high add-to-cart rate is imperative for any business. The first thing you should analyze is your inventory. If the visitors are looking for something that you don’t sell, then they are going to leave your website. You can’t expect them to click add to cart button.
Apart from the products, have a look at the features of your products. Are they priced competitively? Perform some competitor research to bring your product pricing in line with the competitors. Also, if your website doesn’t seem trustworthy, then people would hesitate in sharing their details with you.
Merchandising also plays a critical role in helping increase add-to-cart conversion rates. Do a good selling job and use a mix of both up-selling and cross-selling strategies.
CTA in First Fold
Most of the users only pay attention to the information at the top of the page as compared to the middle or bottom of the page. Thus, by adding add-to-cart buttons in the first fold, the customers are not lost in what they have to do (precisely, what you want them to do).
The customers indeed decide whether to add a product to the cart or not. But if they are not able to find the add to cart button, they will leave your website in frustration. Try to make the button stand out from the other elements on the page. You can do this with the help of colour contrasting or the shape and size of the button. But make sure that it doesn’t look alien.
Easy to Buy
To improve the ATC rate, add the button on every page that is showing the product. Why? To ensure an effective customer journey. Make it easier to buy products. In most online stores, the users first have to click on the product and then only they can add the product to the cart. Instead, add the ATC button next to the product to let users easily add it to the cart. This button will allow the customers to add products directly while browsing the page.
Improved UI and UX will definitely help improve the ATC conversion rate. Have a look at the elements that require improvement on the website, improve them, and you will notice an increase in the ATC rate.
Like you can reduce conversion steps, maybe to just 3-4, to let the customers purchase with ease. A quick checkout button will also be helpful – it will help avoid different conversion steps. Many companies have witnessed that a checkout button has doubled the add-to-cart rate for them.
The main objective of the product pages is to get the audience to buy products. In this case, shoppers would appreciate being able to buy directly and faster from the product page. Also, most users don’t like to go through the lengthy process and just wish to directly go to the checkout page.
Displaying USPs Appropriately
Another way of increasing the add-to-cart rate is by displaying USPs and value propositions prominently. Whether it’s free return or shipping, or a quality guarantee, displaying it is imperative. You can also display the value-adds in the header or near the CTA (call-to-action) button. This will help convince the shoppers to click the ATC button.
Live Chatbot
Install a live chatbot or similar live chat software on your website. This will let your potential buyers get their queries resolved in real-time. They don’t have to search for your contact information or wait till their query is resolved. Thus, they can immediately make a purchase. If they have to wait long to get the query resolved or search for your contact information, there are chances that the buyers may lose interest in buying from you.
Many users have accepted that a real-time chat window has increased customers’ willingness to browse the site further or even make a purchase. Besides, it affects the overall credibility of the website as well.
Seamless Customer Experience
It is crucial that you offer a seamless experience to your customers regardless of the channel or device. Understand consumer journey to offer a seamless experience to your customers. To increase the conversion rate, you need to first fathom what the users actually want to add to their cart. Mapping the customer journey will allow you to know all the opportunities to influence customer behaviour.
Final Words
Visitor intent is going to play a major role in the add-to-cart conversion rate. But it is important that you target the right people who are ready to buy. You need to think about things like contrast, placement, size, and words on the ATC button. In addition, also have a look at the information that you are providing near the button, such as shipping information.
