4 tips to easily optimise your online store

Is the cart becoming the new Wishlist? My partner, Aimee, definitely thinks so. Her new strategy for online shopping, especially late at night, is to allow herself the freedom to spontaneously add any item her heart desires to her cart. And why not? Your cart is a safe space, and no one is judging you. The best part is you can wait until the next day, or week, to decide whether or not to actually buy everything you’ve accumulated. This technique is a great way to use the clarity of the morning to protect your fragile bank balance from yesterday’s impulse purchases.

Read more: 8 things you should consider when creating an online store

1. Interrogate your sales funnel

As digital marketers, it’s insights like these that help us build better sales funnels. It makes a lot of sense to start looking at the cyclical nature of your traffic, in order to improve the timing of different steps within your funnel. Those single session conversions are great, but a quick look at your website analytics will show you that not all purchases are made in one session, and it’s those multi-session conversions that are often the trickiest to optimise for.

2. Find the right time

What time of day do you have the most success in processing payments? That could be the best time to send an email reminding your customers about the items they have in their cart. At SnapScan, we can see a decent spike in online payments in the morning between 7am and 10am, as well as over lunch between 12pm and 1pm. This could be a good time to send those reminder emails, but it all depends on your unique customers, and the kind of products they are purchasing. Look at your data and create a strategy that works for your business.

Read more: 6 tips for the perfect email marketing strategy

3. Think about someone on their phone

It’s a no-brainer that an online store’s website needs to be optimised for mobile, but have you considered whether your checkout is optimised for people browsing from their bed too? In conversations with some of SnapScan’s best performing ecommerce merchants we often hear that they see better conversion rates with returning SnapScan users as opposed to people entering in their card details to pay. My hypothesis was always that a familiar payment experience like SnapScan requires less steps, expediting the payment process, and reducing the time for second-guessing the decision.  But Aimee disagrees, when she is relaxing on the couch or in bed, she’s simply not in the mood to get up and go find her bank card. This got me thinking: how many people do you know that sleep with their wallet next to their bed? How many people keep their cellphone on their bedside table?

4. Empathise with your customer

Maybe it’s a matter of comfort and context? When you’re out on the street, you won’t want to walk for 5 minutes to find an ATM, it’s easier to download an app, load your card, and pay in a snap. When you’re relaxing at home, a 5-meter trip to your wallet could become a dealbreaker. 

Optimizing your sales funnel includes providing your customers with an easy way to pay. You can have the best products and the best online store, and miss a sale because people don’t want to get up and find their wallets. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes (or slippers) and create an experience that they don’t need to walk away from.

To see how SnapScan can work for your ecommerce store, have a look at our online offering here.