Building an online store is fast becoming one of the most popular ways of earning an income for many people out there. This is especially true for those who have lost their jobs to recession or economic and other factors that are beyond man's control, and have turned to the internet to save them from drowning in financial need and despair.
Nonetheless, very few of these E-commerce websites or online stores make it to the top of the success ladder – to be more specific, only 10% actually make through their first year, with the remaining either closing down or left stagnant, totally forgotten about as time passes by.
There are various reasons as to why this happens, and the most common would be the lack of paying customers or clients. Like in a normal, physical business, customers are the life-giving blood of a successful enterprise, supplying it with the necessary cash and funds needed to keep it alive and running.
Although there are several ways to gathering enough customers to visit a site, a big problem for emerchants is converting these visits into actual sales. After all, there is no use if a visitor visits a site and then leaves to make a purchase offline. That is why conversion is important. Simply put, the emerchant should be able to get the person to visit their site, and then persuade him or her to respond to a call to action which in this case is the "buy now" button.
If the person doesn't respond to the call to action, then there is no conversion and no sale.
Conversion can take many forms. For an online retailer, this means being able to sell his or her product to the visitor. For a writer or blogger, it means being able to get the visitor to subscribe to his or her newsletter or daily blog posts.
In order to further reiterate the importance of conversion to ecommerce websites, here are some more reasons why conversion is important.
First, a few paying customers is a lot better that a high number of visitors who doesn't make any purchase or respond to call to action.
Another reason is that there is this thing called a slight edge phenomenon. It's like this. Imagine a race where the winner wins by a split second. That split second is an edge that won him a gold medal. Apply the same thing to an ecommerce website, where it make use of certain tools that can give the emerchant a slight edge over competitors, tools that gives you higher conversion rates. How much edge is actually needed? Well, for small scale ecommerce business, the average conversion rate according to surveys is a meager 3%, meaning only 3 out of a hundred visitors will actually make a purchase. So if an emerchant is able to convert four people into paying customers then he is basically doing better than other emerchants. Some big time ecommerce websites like Amazon reported a conversion rate of 15%.
Another reason is that conversion rates affect an emerchant's profits more than he or she may already know. Some reports show that when a certain ecommerce site doubled its conversion rate, its profits shot up to 500%.
A fourth reason is that with a higher conversion rate, emerchants will find themselves with more money to spend on further developing their sites. They can use this money to start a promotional campaign, or an advertising campaign to get more people to notice and make purchase from their site.
After running those campaigns, they find that now that they have even more conversions, and that they can actually pay for more campaigns and thus increase their profits ... and it just goes on and on and on…
Conversion rates can be quite difficult to deal with especially if one is not trained in this field. As such, hiring the services of a professional web developer is a certain necessity. These people are trained individuals who are knowledgeable about what tools to use and how to use them in order to turn visitors into paying customers. Furthermore, it is best to start now, because as more and more online businesspeople are becoming aware of the importance of conversions, an emerchant may one day find his or herself left behind in the race.
