4 things that kill your fashion store's conversion funnel
Team Easysize
23 Nov, 2022
Who hasn’t dreamt of a 100% conversion funnel? Not even, who hasn’t ever dreamt of a 5–15% conversion funnel?
Conversion funnel is by far the most mysterious and complicated area to understand for webshops. No one can pretend to fully understand it, and just being able to find room for improvement is already a big step. Testing out things in the conversion funnel and measuring the impact is extremely fastidious and demanding. On top of it, you can’t change several things at once, as you need to measure the overall impact of every single change.
But don’t worry, online shops have been working for years on conversion funnel, new features are available and things are slowly getting better.
I will try to cover the 4 things which can potentially kill your funnel as a fashion e-commerce actor, as well as some insights on what you could implement to avoid it.
Have you ever been tempted to buy something on a website and after adding the product to the basket, asked yourself: I don’t know this website, is it serious? And what did you do? Probably, like many others, left the website, went on Google, ended up somewhere else and never came back.
The increase of fraud over the past years has turned into a lack of trust, becoming a major problem.
But there are easy and simple ways to improve it. Here are some tips to help you with trust issues:
Company information: it needs to be obvious for your potential customers that your company is real. No legal notice? No contact details? No company description? No face of the people working there? Don’t be surprised if people leave your website! Yes, people buy more and more online but they also get more and more suspicious, so make sure they know you are real, honest and easy to reach.
No genuine reviews: latest studies showed that 80% of online buyers check reviews before finalizing their purchase. If you don’t have reviews, especially genuine ones from a third party, your potential customers will simply leave your website. Don’t think you can fool them with a few reviews written by your developer. That just doesn’t work anymore.
Lack of practical information: your user conditions need to be clear and transparent. Shipping fees? Returns? Refund? Make sure your conditions don’t sound tricky, that’s a killer for your conversion.
2. User experience
This one is a classic. How many times did you end up on a website where everything seemed complicated? Too many products? Unclear information? These are some important points that -if you do it right- will help you get a higher conversion:
Ergonomy: your online shop needs to be easy to navigate. Users need to find the right information fast, and that information needs to be relevant and easy to read. It’s all about finding the right balance between design and ease of use.
Number of steps: another big conversion funnel killer is the amount of steps during the checkout process. Too many steps can seem complicated while too few can scare the users with a feeling of unclear information. A good way to deal with this is to give the users options like registration (user account or not) or payment info (save option). It is also a good idea to display the final price in a clear way.
Unique user experience: even if every customer journey is more or less the same, a good way to improve conversion funnel is to make it look personal for the user. That can be done in many ways, just few examples can be: live chat availability, “targeted” reviews, similar product suggestions etc.
3. Lack of sizing assistance
This is a more critical point. All shops use more or less the same size guide with measurements and sizes correspondence. But do you know that, when users click on a size guide, it’s one of the easiest moments to convert them. And what do you do instead? You probably put doubts in their heads by showing too much information that will be confusing.
It’s time to rethink it:
Measurements: When was the last time you saw a measuring tape? Probably long time ago. I personally don’t have any at home and I guess the same happens to most of you. So why do you ask your customers to measure themselves when you know they can’t or don’t want to?
Mobile conversion: Have you noticed how many people visit your website from mobile platforms? Most of the webshops don’t have a size guide on their mobile version, which of course is killing conversion -except if you have free return policy, in which case customers end up ordering the same piece of clothing in 3 different sizes. Just to be sure.
Returns: Do you really think your size guide doesn’t have a big impact on your returns? By pushing customers to use an efficient size guide, you will increase confidence and conversion, but also -most likely- reduce returns. No one’s going to return clothes that just fit.
If it’s not obvious yet, maybe you should check out Easysize one more tim
4. Hidden fees
Pricing has always been an issue. Being able to have attractive prices and keep an okay margin is a big challenge. Most of the webshops get attractive prices by keeping shipping and/or returning fees. Even if studies showed that customers are ready to pay a bit more if that makes them believe the website if more trustworthy, fees are a big killer for fashion e-commerce.
Shipping fees: these fees are almost non-existent anymore. Most fashion e-commerce websites offer free shipping. And the reason is simple: conversion. So if you can’t deal with free shipping, a classic option is to put a minimum amount to the order value to get free shipping.
Return fees: returning fees are more complicated. Although the returns cost you money, free return policy brings a much higher conversion. This subject could start a whole new article, for now just keep it in mind.
Most of these ideas are not rocket science and are easy to set up, but that doesn’t mean you should start testing them randomly. Take some time to go through your online shop, think out of the box and identify your most important pages, collect user feedback and prioritize which tests you’ll run first.
.jpg)
.jpg)
