How I 4x An E-Commerce Website Conversion Rate

All GetClicks Team members (previous team members) started our path in a similar way. All of us started to sell online and had the dream to make some income from home.

At first, we were selling on our Facebook page alone, and taking orders through PM (Malaysia’s favourite word: PM). So we were making people drop us a message on what they wanted, and then we would guide them from there.

Over time, we started having a hard time coping with the orders. So we decided to build an online store.

One of our team members even started a platform to serve as a marketplace, just like what 11street & Lazada are doing.

You know, it is easier when you don’t have to deal with the logistics and customer service. We do what we love, marketing & making money.

When we started using a proper online store back in the days when we were still selling t-shirts & women’s products, we noticed one thing – the sales dropped.

The Nightmare Started

Sales dropped by more than 50% when we stopped taking orders manually and started asking customers to order directly through our online store.

We had to reopen the manual way of taking orders in order to keep our sales coming. Basically, we just had to go back to square one, manually taking orders via PM.

So the first thing was, we stopped blaming the customers for being too dumb to place orders on their own. And, we didn’t stop there.

We are now taking this successful turnaround case study to share with you today.

Taking The First Step To Fix The E-commerce Site Conversion Rate Problem

We created a video & guides to help customers learn how to order using our shopping cart website.

And then, we had this chat feature that will pop up when customers got stuck at one page for too long.

We were using Zopim to help us make this possible. We can set a trigger according to some conditions. For example, when a visitor gets stuck on a product category page for 1 minute, the live chat will pop up asking if there is anything we can help.

And we even tried to set a trigger to fire up a chat box when they got stuck at the checkout page for more than 30 seconds.

Our goal was to get feedback from those who got stuck at the website, and to find out why they got stuck, and why our sales dropped because of using the website.

Then, We Discovered One Thing On Why Our Conversion Rate Dropped So Much

The shopping cart software that we were using had some serious flaws for converting visitors to customers.

The button was showing “Add To Cart”, instead of “Buy Now” which was easier to understand for Malaysians.

You see, at first we thought even Amazon is using the word, “Add To Cart”, and we thought this won’t go wrong because the largest online store is showing the exact words we were using.

But the customers’ feedback was, they didn’t know that “Add To Cart” means they wanted to buy that item. They prefer “Buy Now”, which is easier to understand for them, and they know exactly what is going to happen next after they click the button.

You Hear Ka-Ching? Hell No!

Sorry, this is not a movie where when the hero solves 1 problem, it is a happy ending. Life is harsh.

New customers are still facing a serious problem. After they click “Buy Now”, nothing happens.

We have a screenshot of what happened when we clicked the button here.

That is right, nothing happened, at least for most of the people. As a web store owner, we know that there is a green bar that appears above the site to confirm that the item is in the cart now.

But for most of the people, it is too hard to spot this confirmation message.

Then, we reverse engineered some other online stores. We found out one thing: after clicking a button, it will show something more obvious. For example, it will redirect you to your cart page, or have a pop up to confirm it.

We changed a few lines of the code to make that happen. And this time, ta-daa, customers now understand how it works.

Not Only Conversion Rate is 4x, Sales Became 4x As Well

It was crazy for a 3-months old startup. The sales jumped from RM10k to RM40k after we applied the small tweak.

Take Away From The Lesson We Learned

1. Use “Buy Now” button instead of “Add To Cart” if you’re targeting Malaysia.
2. Let customers talk to you in real time (Live chat), help them along the way when they face problems. This will give you great insight on how you can make your site better + better conversion rate + more money
3. It is our job to make it easier for customers, not blame the customers for not being willing to learn our system. At the end of the day, the money is in their hands; they get to decide whether to buy it from you or not.