Using ShopWired’s reports system to increase conversion rates

Increasing your conversions is the best way to increase your profit margins. While there are many different ways that you can tackle the issue of boosting your conversions, fully utilising the reports available in your ShopWired account is a great, helpful way to get you started. The reports feature gathers information about ecommerce activity on your website and displays this information to you in easy to examine ways. If you’re feeling a bit stuck on what style of marketing campaign might look and work best, or if you already think your website is perfect and can’t figure out why people aren’t buying things, using the data in your reports can help you find answers. Here are just a few ways that those reports can help you increase your conversion rates: 

The visitors report 

Your visitors report gives you basic information about how many visitors your website is receiving and how many of those visitors convert into customers. Seeing your current conversion rates shows you how much room you have to improve.
Helpfully, this report shows your conversion rates in four different percentages to show you where in the process you’re losing the most sales. 

These percentages of how many visitors added products to their basket, viewed their shopping basket, began the checkout process and completed a purchase can help you understand which pages on your website might need a bit of work. 

If a high percentage of people are beginning the checkout process, but a lower percentage are completing it, then you might want to take a look at your checkout process to see if there’s a reason people are stumbling. For example, maybe you don’t provide enough payment options, so some customers are leaving when they don’t see the payment option they usually pay with. Or maybe you haven’t made guest checkout an option for your customers, and they don’t want to have to create yet another account with yet another website just to buy what they want. Go through your checkout, or ask some friends to go through it for you, and look at it from the customer’s point of view and fix anything that would annoy you if you were the customer.

If the percentage of how many of your customers have added products to their baskets is low, then you probably need to assess the way you’re displaying your products. Poor quality images turn your customers away as it decreases their trust in your brand.  If your product descriptions are badly written, you might not be getting the full idea of the product across to your customers. You'll want your descriptions to fully explain the features of the product to the customer, and also try to tell them ways that the product can be useful to them. 

Sales by product
The sales by product report helps you see which products of yours are really connecting with your customers and which are just big flops. Having products on your website that don’t sell very well could be what’s lowering your conversions, and it also might not be the best use of your inventory. 

Writing the products off and finding other products to sell might be the best course of action, but it isn’t your only one. If you are particularly attached to some of the products that aren’t selling well, you could start to think about an involved marketing campaign that really pushes those items. Also think about the way you are presenting them on your website. Poor pictures, the pricing and the description of the product could all be having a negative impact on the sales. 

Seeing which products are selling well can help you put more of an emphasis on what your customers want. Use those products in ad campaigns to drive more visitors to your website. If your best selling products fit a certain niche, think about what else you could be selling within that field to help boost your sales.

Advertising your lower selling products by placing them on your best selling products’ pages (by utilising the product extras app and the related products feature) places those products in your customers’ view. If they see something that’s related to what they know they already like, they’ll be much more willing to take a look at those products to see if they want them too.

Failed searches 
Your failed searches report should be checked frequently as the information held in it could be time sensitive to helping your conversion rates.

 On the surface it just looks like this report tells you whenever a search on your website failed, but if you dig into its ideas a little deeper it can be a window to why your conversion rates are lower than expected. If people are conducting searches which should display specific products, but those products aren’t currently showing under those search terms, you can start to see why your sales for a product might not be what they could be. If customers can’t find what you’re selling, they’ll give up and find a website that shows it to them immediately. You can fix any of these issues that arise on your website by using the product search keywords app to ensure a product appears when a particular keyword is typed in. 

Additionally, failed searches on your website can be a useful way to see what your customers are currently interested in buying. If a lot of people are searching for a particular item, that seems related to your brand, but you don’t even sell it, then maybe you should be.

Sales by customer 
When you started your business you probably had some idea of who your target audience would be, but you can use the sales by customer report to garner a real feel for what your customer base actually looks like. Gaining an understanding of your current customer demographics is integral to tailoring your marketing campaigns and website content (like blog posts) to the potential customers who will actually be interested in what you’re selling. The sales by customer report shows you which of your customers place the most orders and spend the most on your website. Use this information along with some of the personal details that you collect about your customers to learn your customers’ demographics. 

Since you’ll automatically be collecting the location of your customers when they place an order with you, if some locations stand out as being popular for your website you can target your advertising to those locations to put your brand in front of other people who live there. 

When a customer creates an account on your website you can customise the form, by adjusting your theme’s settings, to input their birthdate. Enabling this field allows you to capture yet another useful demographic about the people who shop with you. By knowing which age groups you’re most popular with you can perform research to help you learn how best to market to those age groups.