9 tips on how to convince customers to buy products at your Magento eStore

It's true that shipping costs and handling is a popular reason for abandoning a cart, but fear is just as important. With so many options nowadays, the number of scams has increased dramatically, and so has customer awareness. Providing high-quality products and a finely tuned checkout process is no longer enough to earn the trust of the online shoppers.

So, how do you get your customers to trust you? A well-performing site is key. Every single business metric needs to be tweaked. Here are our top 9 tips on how to increase your conversion rate by earning the trust of your visitors in no time.

1. SEO. Make your site visible for search engines – they are your best agents!

When it comes to e-commerce platforms, Magento is definitely a lot more search engine-friendly than most of the other platforms. However, there are several tips and tricks to make websites even more visible to potential customers.By following these tips, the ranking of the website on the search engines can be greatly improved.

They are super easy and fast:

• Always have the latest version of Magento installed; make updates if required.
• Make sure that store codes have not been added to the URLs by following this path System -> Configuration -> Web -> Search Engines Optimization -> URL optimization and setting the “Add Store Code to URLS” option to “No”.
• Removing “index.php” from your URLs will help you generate more SEO friendly URLs. Go to System -> Configuration -> Web -> Search Engines Optimization and set the “Server URL Rewrites” option to “Yes”.
• Search engines should be able to index your website. Go to System -> Configuration -> Design -> HTML Heads and change the “Default Robots” setting to “INDEX, FOLLOW”
• Once you have a new category or product, write a good description for it.

These SEO techniques will take your Magento e-store to the next level, but for a true improvement it is recommended that you add a special extension to your store. Mirasvit offers Advanced SEO Suite which allows you to optimize the specific categories and product groups for specific search terms on a template. The extensions, along with the above mentioned tips will greatly improve your performance on various search engines.

2. Support and expanded Q&A service – answer customers questions before they even ask them!

In order to increase the trust of your visitors, it is crucial to establish a reliable relationship with them by providing them with the possibility of asking questions about any product in your store. Shoppers trust people that have been in the same position as them more than flat advertisements. In order to convince them into making a purchase, allow visitors to rate questions and answers. Encouraging potential customers to interact with you is a brilliant way of starting a relationship.

In addition, you will notice that by reducing the workload on your helpdesk team, the quality of the customer service will increase automatically. If your eStore provides enough info, your visitors will be able to find solutions to their needs independently, before contacting the helpdesk team. Mirasvit has two great extensions to help you – Product Questions that fits any Magento website and offers some amazing features and Knowledge base that your helpdesk team will simply love!

3. Web site speed download – speed up your website to speed up your success!

Website speed and page load time are 2 critical parts of your Magento store. They are in direct relation with the conversion rate, and so with the customer's trust. Your visitors are expecting a much faster website than you think they are. Even search engines favor fast sites over slow ones. You have to simply overhaul your site speed. Here are few things that you can do for that:

• Find a dedicated server.
• Host your website in a country where your clients are located.
• Only install necessary Apache modules.
• Do not host files on your web server that you do not use.
• Minimize redirectss.

There are lots of other minor things that you can do to improve you website speed, but it is better to have one extension that will do it for you. Full Page Cache significantly speeds up page load time, reduces the load on the server and improves website ranking.

4. Search service on site – make sure customers find what they came looking for and even more!

Your visitors do not always know what they are looking for or how to spell the name of certain products. Therefore, a quality search with various features is very important for increasing conversions and earning the trust of your customers. What you can do to help them is provide them with search tips, and a drop-down list of suggested items as they start typing. Also, for the typo words, do not display nil results.

Mirasvit’s extension Sphinx Search Ultimate unites several products, Search Spell-Correction, Search AutoComplete & Suggestions and Advanced Sphinx Search Pro into a single operating mechanism of high-performance and makes sure that your visitors always find what they came for.

5. Product return policy – if you do not want your products back, why should the customers want them?

We have already mentioned that quality customer service is necessary for success in eCommerce and accepting returns or exchanges is a vital component of that. A visitor is more likely to make a purchase at your shop if you offer a flexible return policy. It is a physiological moment: “you are willing to have a return policy, because you believe in the quality of your products.”

You can easily manage the return or exchange of items purchased by customers in your eStore with an RMA extension from Mirasvit. It allows your customers to request and manage returns and exchanges directly from your webstore.

Accepting returns or exchanges is a necessary component of great customer service. Customers tend to buy from those vendors that offer a flexible return policy. Your loyal and potential customers expect this kind of service and highly appreciate it. Therefore, this process should definitely be easily managed. RMA extension is an efficient way of managing the return or exchange of items purchased by customers in your eStore

6. High quality service – customers trust people; make your customer service engaging and friendly!

You already know the importance of the Support and expanded Q&A service for increasing conversion rates of your eCommcerce, but what about the service? Its quality is just as important. The majority of the clients prefer high quality service to the option of self-service. That is why it is essential for your clients to be able to submit support requests in various options. Mirasvit provides a must-have extension for guaranteeing high quality service.

All you need is the necessary options in order to organize the most effective communication process with your customers to be executed on the highest level. Customers service is a great way to keep in touch with your current loyal customers as well as completely new ones. Help Desk MX allows you to provide a complete customer care service and excellent support attendance.

7. Quality content: video, pictures, blog posts – let customers feel like they have the product in their hands.

Do not forget that the visitors have to blindly trust whatever content you provide them with. They have no chance to touch, feel or see (in person) the product they are interested in unless they purchase it. In order for your clients to trust you, you should have content of the highest quality, no matter whether it is a video, a picture or a blog post. The more information a shopper has about the product, the more confident they will be about shopping at your eStore. With Video For Products Pro extension you can integrate video from YouTube into your online store.

8. Marketing: social media, email marketing, comparison shopping engines – these are your resources for success – use them!

This part is all about staying in touch with your customers. Keeping your customers updated on a regular basis will not allow your customers to slip away. This can be done through Social Media, email marketing or comparison shopping engines. Featuring your products in the comparison shopping engines will allow you to attract more visitors and potential buyers to your store.

If you want to automatically generate the feed with products for all common comparison shopping engines (Google Product Search, Shopping.com, Twenga.co.uk, etc.), then Advanced Product Feeds is for you and for those who want to make the most out of the email marketing Mirasvit offers Trigger Email Suite.

9. Promotion and holiday sales – who doesn't love it?

Everyone falls for a special discount or a promotion. An interesting promotional offer can increase the sales of your online store significantly. Therefore, keeping the customers engaged with various promotional offers and great deals will increase their trust a lot. Also, do not forget to send them follow-up emails with info on discounts they might be interested in, and free samples. Promotional Offers extensions from Mirasvit can help you solve these tasks with ease.

It is important to realize that selling online is all about trust! When the customer encounters your online store for the first time, they want to learn as much as possible about you. They trust people, not the website itself. The environment and atmosphere of your eCommerce business should be very relatable and trustworthy. Keep these 9 tips in mind when tweaking your eStore next time and you will see how new visitors will shortly turn into long-time customers.