How to Decrease Bounce Rate of Your Ecommerce Store

by Rabeea Mansoor 8min read
Do you want to decrease the bounce rate of your ecommerce store and drive authentic traffic to your site? Here are a few ways to do this.

If you struggle with increasing engagement on your ecommerce store and turning visitors into potential customers, this article is for you. We have put together fool-proof ways to help you decrease your bounce rate and increase engagement on your online store that you have created using a free online ecommerce store builder for your business. So keep reading to find out how to avoid driving away potential customers and skyrocketing your sales. 

What is the bounce rate on an ecommerce site? 

Before talking about increasing the bounce rate on your ecommerce store, it is important to know what the bounce rate is. When a visitor comes to your ecommerce store via any ad or some other source, the normal course of action is navigating the store further to see if they can find anything interesting to buy.  

But if a visitor does not follow this route and leaves your store immediately after landing on the first page, it decreases the engagement rate on your online store and increases the bounce rate. This means that the bounce rate shows the percentage of those visitors who backtrack after coming to your store. 

How to decrease the bounce rate?

If you want to increase the revenue of your online store, you will have to ensure that your visitors are not just coming to your store and leaving immediately but are staying long enough to explore your products. If they stay for a long period, they will likely return to your website the next time they think about buying the particular product you offer.   

Product page optimization 

If there is one thing that can make or break the deal for your customer, it is the product page. It is one of the most important assets in your ecommerce store and holds power to turn your prospect into a potential customer. To ensure that your product page does in fact convert your prospects to customers, that too permanent ones, you need to optimize it. 

Product page optimization is the process of making your product page convincing enough to be the last nail in the coffin. It must have all the right information to give your customers the details about your product and guarantee that the product will work out for them. 

To effectively optimize your product page, you have to focus on four key elements; your product, brand, copywriting, and user experience of your product page. However, if we talk about specific things that can give your product page the optimization it needs, there are a  few things that you can include, such as; a clear Call To Action (CTA), great and right product photography, the correct detail of your product, and social proofs. 

Fast site speed

The biggest reason behind the high bounce rates of any ecommerce website is the slow-loading web pages. Mostly when people shop online, their main reason to do so is to avoid wasting time in going to the physical store. So when they end up facing a slow-loading page that takes forever to load, it can cause them to get frustrated and lose interest eventually. Testing the speed of your website via website analysis tools can help you curb the low page-load speed. Google's Page speed insights is one of the best tools to score your website's speed accurately. 

 "The general agreement in the industry is that a three-second load time is a maximum for any landing page on an ecommerce store," says Adam Pearce, head of marketing and partnerships for Blend Commerce.

Usability issues 

Imagine yourself visiting a website on your mobile that cuts off useful information due to its lack of mobile optimization. Would you want to stay on that site? No, of course. The same is the case with an ecommerce store. If the ecommerce store is not mobile optimized or there are other usability-related issues such as broken links or faulty drop-downs, visitors are more likely to be driven away. 

To identify and tackle usability issues, you can conduct usability testing to evaluate the user-friendliness of your online store. 

Analyze paid campaign traffic 

It is recommended that to gain a better understanding of how your paid campaign is performing, you should investigate the traffic sources that your campaign is driving and the bounce rate associated with it. The most common traffic sources are natural search engine results, affiliate programs, link-based traffic sources, advertising, targeted traffic, social media, email list, and many more. 

Analysis of traffic sources can help you identify the well-working ones so that you can understand the target audience better and know which source has the most potential to decrease the ecommerce bounce rate and get more clicks. 

Keep copy relevant

Your copy must be clear, persuasive, and informative if you want your visitors to take action. Ambiguous copy riddled with complex information can keep your visitors from taking any specific action. They might go away because of a lack of understanding of the product. To keep your copy relevant, you must first know what part of the current copy is not working, which you can do by taking a survey related to the information about your product using Hotjar.

Optimized product page 

Let's that you succeed in bringing your ecommerce store visitor from the homepage to the product page. But, they bounce away from the product page due to a lack of product page optimization. So you should ensure that product images are clear and displayed accurately and Call To Action (CTAs) are properly embedded in the right places. The key elements that must be added to your product page are 

  • Unique add-to-cart buttons

  • Properly used white space

  • Incorporation of all the important information, such as specifications or measurement charts

  • Attractive and clear imagery

  • Branding

Identify the gaps 

The bounce rate is mostly high due to those undecided explorers who come very close to buying your product but decide otherwise when it is time to click that buy button. Identifying the reasons that send such potential customers away can make it possible for you to overcome the gap and turn these undecided explorers into your customers. 

Drive them towards other products 

The biggest reason visitors leave any online store is not finding anything of their interest at first glance. In such a case, you must inspire people to browse more by suggesting additional, complementary, or related products to your customer. By incorporating cross-selling in your store, you will increase the odds of showing an item of interest to your customers. 

Make your store trustworthy

Imagine visiting a website that does not guarantee security and looks spammy at first glance. Would you still want to continue shopping there? The answer is obviously no. The same applies to your customers. If they visit your ecommerce store that looks untrustworthy, they will most definitely bounce away. According to research, almost 85% of online shoppers avoid unsecured websites, which shows how important it is for your online store to appear trustworthy. By adding trust seals, certificates, social proofs in the form of reviews and testimonials, detailed and transparent policies, and emotional appeal across all touchpoints, you can make your store look trustworthy. 

Use relevant keywords

Relevant keywords play a huge role in keeping your visitors engaged on your site. The correct use of words and sentences will accurately communicate to Google what your webpage is about. The closer you stay to the topic without straying, the more relevant information will be displayed to your visitors, which will help decrease the bounce rate. 

Display payment methods 

To make shopping easy and convenient for your customers, you must show all the payment methods on your online store. This can make it easier for your customers to spend more effectively. 

Well-timed exit intent popups

If you want to increase engagement on your online store and do not want your customers to leave your store after almost placing the order, the best thing to do is to incorporate well-timed exit intent popups. This serves as the last shot at keeping your customers from bouncing away. 

Conduct A/B Testing

When it comes to the designs and user experience of the website, the only way to be certain about its effectiveness is to see how your audience is responding to it. And you can do this by making two sets of the different designs and UX that you want to test and making them available to different visitors, a process called A/B testing. This test will help you determine which version did well in retaining the traffic. 

Target the right visitors 

Imagine the last time you looked for something and landed on an ecommerce store via a Search Engine Result Page only not to find anything and face disappointment. That happens when any ecommerce site fails to attract the right fit. To ensure that your ecommerce store is targeting the right people, you must include the right content and products. 

To attract the right visitors to your store, you must include multiple landing pages, unique content curated only for your target audience, and relevant keywords. 

What is the average bounce rate for ecommerce? 

A bounce rate is usually triggered when a user returns to the search results page, closes the browser, or does not perform further action and stays on the same webpage. 

According to data from CXL, an average ecommerce bounce rate is between 20 and 45%, which means that a bounce rate below 20% is exceptional, while above 45% is troubling.  

Bottom line 

When it comes to running your ecommerce store effectively, there are multiple things that you need to consider. From managing inventory to assessing your site's performance, you have to oversee everything. The bounce rate, which tells you how many visitors are not going beyond the first page of your website, plays an important role and must be kept in check to ensure better site performance. A low bounce rate means that your website is driving traffic that has the potential to turn into customers. The lower your bounce rate, the better the chances of your online business making revenues. 

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