As an eCommerce merchant, we know how much effort you put in to drive traffic to your online stores. It takes time, energy and money. Once shoppers hit your store, what you need to do is to maximize your chance and turn them into customers. The touch points that will make the most impact to your online sale conversion are the Top of the Funnel (TOFU) and Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU).
TOFU: At the very top of your funnel, it’s all about Search
The custom site search box is the very first touch point with your visitor. Merchandising with appealing visuals and offers is great to fulfill your push strategy. But how can you guess each time what your visitor really in mind? “Many people fail to realize this but search and sales are directly proportional; if people don’t find what they are searching for, they will not buy from your site. In a case study by eConsultancy, after investigating 21 eCommerce websites, they found that the average revenue generated was highest from visitors who performed searches” according to business2community.com’s article about online conversion hacks.
And when it comes to search, users’ expectations have been shaped by their experience with Google and Amazon. Speed is king, relevance is queen. They also expect what’s called rich auto-completion. In Google, that means query auto-completion—a user starts typing and it tries to guess their question. “In eCommerce, we can do even better. You can actually guess which product the person was going to look for, and you can offer it directly in the search drop down. That means engaging with the shopper in milliseconds.” says Zohar Gilad, CEO and co-founder of Fast Simon.
BOFU: at the bottom of the funnel, it’s all about checkout optimization
Checkout is the most complicated part of placing an order online, driving over 7/10 online shoppers to abandoning their cart (source: Listrak cart abandonment index 2016). Key drivers for cart abandonment include additional page loading, unexpected shipping rates and complexity of the checkout form.
What you need is one simple user-friendly page with no distraction and all unnecessary fields and questions removed. You can also make it quick and easy for shoppers to complete and double check with auto-complete and address verification as well as total dynamically updated every time shoppers change quantity, a shipping or payment method for example. “By simplifying your checkout not only do you increase your conversion on the spot but you also increase your return visits” says Asbjørn Johnsen, CEO and co-founder of OneStepCheckout.
The perfect sales conversion hack from small and medium Magento merchants
In that spirit of fixing the leaking funnel, OneStepCheckout and Instant Search Plus are teaming up to allow smaller businesses to succeed. The good news is that those fixes are very quick to implement. Both solutions as packaged as Magento search extensions that merchants can purchase out-of-the-box and install in a matter of hours. No additional development needed, it works straight away.
What those two businesses share is the quality of their support and deep expertise in their respective field, as per reviews you can read on Magento Connect.
Flightcases, a Danish company manufacturing high-quality cases and packaging, has fixed it’s top and bottom of the funnel with Instant Search Plus and OneStepCheckout and saw session with search having a conversion rate of 3.2x higher than non-search sessions while their conversion rate has increased from 2.96% to 7.19%.
“It’s a no brainer to provide superior customer experience thanks to fast, visual and relevant search combined with best in class checkout process” says Keld Wedell Seerup, Technical Director at Flightcases International A/S.
