Like a piping hot coffee from their favorite local roastery, consumers now expect all things online to be simple, fast, convenient, and totally satisfying. Be honest, does your eCommerce site meet all those descriptors?

When it comes to elements like performance, payments, and marketplaces, reducing friction is the key to improving conversion rates. It’s about customers seeking flexibility and wanting to do things themselves. So here’s how to let them have their iced maple macchiato and enjoy it, too.

Make Your Site Savvy

Like the dissatisfaction that comes with a lukewarm latte, a site that loads slowly, keeps going round and round, or falters during checkout is sure to leave a bad taste in customers’ mouths. But the better your site’s performance, the more likely you are to win with your customers. 

Did you know that a study released by Google found that every 0.1 seconds that your page speed improves can increase your conversion rates by 8%? Talk about big returns!

It cannot be emphasized enough; the responsiveness of your website is the most basic key to conversion. Page speeds must be optimized to ensure customers get the quick, on-demand experience they expect.

Another aspect to look at is ease-of-use. How’s your navigation? Search? Checkout? Can customers easily find what they’re looking for and do any obstacles stand in their way once you’ve piqued their interest?

By creating a home for your brand on a cutting-edge, cloud-based platform like ZiftrShop, you can ensure you have the capabilities and nimbleness to slay these kinds of concerns. Headless architecture, flexible design, and limitless API integration are all signature advantages that are no longer nice-to-haves but necessities for eCommerce enterprises that want to be built for performance. Every bit of friction you remove brings you one step closer to that sale.  

Help Your Customers Buy Where They Want to Buy

Beyond your own site, you also want to show up in the online spaces where your customers like to hang, shop, and socialize. Marketplaces provide sellers with a huge advantage because by offering your products there, you’re tapping into an expansive existing customer base, as well.

Because many of these marketplaces already have long standing reputations, they come with built-in credibility and consumer trust, a boost for your own brand, especially if your company is on the newer side. We’re talking about the heavy hitter marketplaces, like Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Wayfair. How many of these major consumer hubs is your enterprise engaging with?

Then there are the more nuanced spaces, like social media. Again, since this is a place with an enormous pool of existing users, there’s huge potential for your brand to benefit from social tools tailored to business, such as shoppable posts. Product tags on a platform like Instagram allow people to check out product details, visit your site, or even purchase right within the app. Talk about removing friction!

Social also presents unique opportunities for co-marketing, collaborating with influencers, and building the culture around your brand. Want to drive traffic and make sales? Find out where your people are and meet them there. Or better yet, discover customer pools you haven’t even tapped into by accessing new marketplaces.

Expand Payment Options

Ever been just about to complete a purchase only to find out that your credit card info won’t autofill in the app? Then things come screeching to an excruciating halt. How likely are you to get up, walk across the house, and grab your wallet? Not very!

But if there’s another simple, easily accessible payment option right there, the crisis might be averted. The more options you give your customers to complete their payment, the more likely they (and you!) are to succeed without getting frustrated and putting down the smartphone.

While some eCommerce platforms make it challenging to implement some of today’s in-demand ways to buy, ZiftrShop comes with out-of-the-box options prepared to help you propel your business to a new level of growth.

In addition, when you’re looking at payment options, you should also include financing to reduce the barrier of a product being too expensive to purchase in the moment. For instance, Klarna, the app that lets users follow the latest, greatest deals from thousands of retailers and finance purchases, has blown up in popularity.

It’s the new internet layaway, breaking things up into payments that come with minimal or no interest. You can now do this for products as low as $20.00. It’s amazing and empowering for shoppers and is now on the list of options they expect. If you haven’t already, time to make this payment preference a must for your brand.

Simplify Shipping

Another barrier that can cause a sale to vanish faster than a case of peppermint coffee creamer at the holidays is shipping. If a customer is already on the fence about their expense, tacking on a sizable shipping fee is sure to send them packing.

Free shipping has become the new norm, so when you’re pricing, adjust accordingly and make shipping fees a thing of the past. Otherwise, that last-minute bit of friction may be the barrier that drops your sales dramatically.

These are some of the best ways to get rid of that friction and improve your conversion rates fast. But you can honestly come at this from any angle where you think a barrier might be present. One of the best ways to find out—look at customer feedback. Or better yet, ask your customers in a place where you’re already in conversation, like on your social pages.

What would they like to see become more seamless? Their insights are some of the most powerful tools you have to combat friction and make every experience with your brand a fantastic one.

Are you looking to build or migrate your site so you can accelerate your eCommerce trajectory with no sweat? Bring it on with ZiftrShop! We’re ready for ANYTHING the future holds, so connect with our eCommerce experts today.