6 Steps to Build a High Converting Site on 3dcart
Building an online store is easier than ever – especially with e-commerce platforms like 3dcart or Shopify available to use. However, that doesn’t mean that you don’t need to put any effort into building an online store that converts users into paying customers.
When putting your e-commerce website together, follow these next steps to ensure that it captures as many conversions as possible from the traffic you bring in.
1. Customize a responsive website theme
One sure-fire way to kill your website’s conversion rate is by using an old template that’s not responsive. When a website is responsive, that means that it will adjust its elements to function properly on any sized screen. According to research by Google, your website is likely to lose 61% of its visitors if its mobile version is hard to use.
When building a store on 3dcart, choose any of their Core themes, which are already built to be responsive and designed for conversions. You won’t need to make any adjustments to them to make them work – simply focus on customizing its colors and fonts to make it fit your brand.
As you upload images to your online store and edit page elements, continually check the mobile version to ensure that everything translates properly. Not every image that works on the desktop will work on mobile, so test everything out before launching.
2. Secure your website.
According to GlobalSign, 85% of online shoppers won’t buy from a website that’s not secure. To secure your site, you’ll need an SSL certificate installed. SSL stands for secured socket layer – sites with an SSL will use “HTTPS” instead of “HTTP” in their website URL.
As of late, web browsers like Google Chrome have been alerting customers that the site they’re about to enter is insecure. If users come across this message when navigating to your site, that’s bad news for your sales.
Luckily, 3dcart stores are given access to a free shared SSL certificate if they use the shared URL for their online store. However, if you’d like to secure your entire online store and use a custom domain name without the shared URL, then you’ll need to install a dedicated SSL certificate.
3dcart offers a variety of SSL certificates to their merchants using their software at affordable prices, coming in at as low as $5 per month through Cloudflare. Enabling an SSL on your site not only provides you and your customers with high-level encryption technology that keeps information secure, but it also instills a sense of trust in your customers. With that trust comes conversions, so an SSL certificate is crucial.
3. Create engaging product pages.
Simply adding your products to your online store won’t make customers buy them. To convince them to convert, every product page needs to be unique and engaging. This means that the content and the aesthetic need to match your brand and catch the eye.
For both promotions on your site and products, you need to take high-quality photos. Each product page should show the product at multiple angles and give a real-life example of it being used. For a more interactive experience, you can also add a video to your product page that shows off your product in action or explains how it works.
Unique and optimized content is crucial to have on your product pages as well. This takes the form of your product description, which should not just be copied and pasted from the manufacturer. Take the time to write compelling content that serves two purposes: explains to the customer important details about the product and tells an engaging story that gets them excited enough to buy it.
4. Work on your SEO.
Because search engine ranking is based in part on providing a good user experience, employing SEO best practices goes hand in hand with improving your site’s conversion rate. While 3dcart sites are all automatically optimized for SEO, there’s a variety of ways that you can adjust your 3dcart website for an even better SEO ranking.
Here are a few adjustments that you can make with 3dcart’s built-in SEO tools:
Custom File Names: Edit the URL for your website pages so that the “slug”, or everything after your domain name, is optimized using relevant keywords.
301 Page Redirects: Customize the page that customers land on when they’ve navigated to a page that no longer exists on your site. This is a great opportunity to redirect them to products you do sell that they may be interested in.
Product Dynamic Tags: Enable this setting to allow your store to dynamically create meta tags (or organized bits of information), which is useful for ranking on search engines.
Meta Tags: Customize the title, header, and footer tags on your homepage to make them more relevant and targeted. Use open graph meta tags to improve social media posts linking to your pages.
Product Page Rich Snippets: Add average star rating, price, product availability, and more to the search result that appears on a search engine’s result page.
Page speed is also a huge determining factor in conversions and SEO. The longer your website’s pages take to load, the lower that search engines will rank your site – and the less likely customers will wait around to buy your products. In fact, research from Google shows that 53% of mobile users will abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
First, test your page speed with a free testing tool, like Google PageSpeed Insights. Then, take steps to reduce your load time if it’s too long. Streamline pages and remove unnecessary elements, clean up code in the backend, and use smaller photos.
5. Add advanced navigation.
Boosting conversions is all about reducing friction throughout the customer journey on your site. If navigation is hard to find or difficult to use, that causes substantial friction that may lead to customers bouncing off entirely. So, work to add features to your site that makes navigation as easy as possible for customers.
With 3dcart, navigation is already built into their website themes, with on-site search enabled and category menus implemented. However, you can choose to improve those points of navigation and customize them to your business’s needs.
With the Mega Menu Builder, you can create a custom navigation menu with categories and subcategories nested in a dynamic and visually engaging way. When customers hover over your mega menu, flyouts will appear to show the basic roadmap of your online store. You can add images to draw attention to certain categories as well.
Aside from menu navigation, the search bar on your site is a crucial element that you need to get right. You can integrate with a third-party site search solution like Convermax to add an advanced site search to your online store. This site search should include autocomplete, contextual filters, spell checking, product recommendations, and more to convert customers as they browse your store.
6. Make checkout simple
All of this work may be for nothing if your checkout process is leading people to abandon their carts. To keep your conversion rate high and not turn away valuable customers, your checkout process needs to be convenient and quick. There are multiple ways that you can accomplish this.
Provide secure options for payment. Customers tend to prefer specific payment options, whether it’s credit cards, PayPal or Bitcoin, so it’s important to offer a combination of a secure e-commerce payment processor and alternative payments to them. If a customer doesn’t see their preferred option, they may abandon their cart entirely.
Offer guest checkout. Not every customer wants to make an account to checkout, so forcing them to do so may actually lead them to bounce away from your site. Instead, make checking out with an account an option that’s easy to do, but not necessary for the purchase.
Make shipping costs transparent. The number one cause for cart abandonment is unexpected shipping costs, so work to make those fees clear as early as possible in the checkout process. Enable a shipping estimate calculator from within the cart to help solve this issue.
Conclusion
By following all of the above steps, your website is sure to improve its conversion rates. However, there’s much more that you can do to optimize your site for more sales.
The key to improving your conversions is to constantly test and adjust your site. Use analytics software like Google Analytics to see what pages are working and what pages aren’t and work to make the proper adjustments.
Author’s Bio
Jimmy Rodriguez is the COO and co-founder of 3dcart, an e-commerce software to build SEO-friendly online stores. He's dedicated to helping internet retailers succeed online by developing digital marketing strategies and optimized shopping experiences that drive conversions and improve business performance.
