You can have all optimisation efforts in place and still not sell as much as you think you should. Website traffic might be great and the clicks you are getting might be pretty significant, but only a small portion of those actually translate to profit.

The problem may not be the products themselves nor the digital marketing strategy you are doing. You are losing customers because of friction in the buying experience.

What is friction?

In digital marketing, the operative definition for friction is the point in the buying process where your customers start abandoning both the purchase and the website. There are many ways friction is affecting the buyer’s experience, which includes: The form fields they need to fill out might be too tedious. They were not given enough chance to browse through your inventory before being redirected to a landing page. Or maybe they saw a fee they need to pay for so they go back a page to find out what it is.

The good news is friction is mostly easily solvable, you just need to identify where it is on your website. Here is how you can reduce friction from your buying funnel and increase your conversion significantly.

Consider changing your web hosting

A lot of website owners tend to gloss over website hosting. This ensures your website’s performance is at its optimal even if there is a torrent of customers using your website at the same time. There are three types of website hosting:

• Shared hosting – You have your own disk space allocation, but you will be sharing a hardware server with other website owners. If one of the other websites is overusing the hardware, your website’s performance will suffer.
• Dedicated Crazy Domain’s web hosting – You have your own disk space allocation and hardware system; however, it is a much more expensive choice.
• VPS hosting – This combines the best features of both shared and dedicated servers. The hardware server is divided into virtual machines which has its own system allocation. Not to mention, its cost is more affordable especially for a start-up eCommerce business.

For a more detailed explanation on what you can get per hosting option, check out Crazy Domains’ web hosting plans.

Edit your landing pages

Landing pages are supposed to answer your customer’s questions about the products you are selling. If your landing pages contain all kinds of information that may not be relevant to your customer’s inquiries but are only there for the SEO, then it is not doing its job.

The best way to edit your landing page is to think like a buyer. You have come across a product which promises to help you with your problem, what questions do you want answered before you make a purchase? You can set expectations, show them how the products work, what they need to have to use it, and so on.

Check the analytics frequently

Most customers abandon cart because of fees they do not know about or double checking information about the product. However, you would not exactly know which one it is until you have looked at the analytics to check where the abandonment is specifically happening. Make sure you are on top of this by checking your analytics as often as you can. You can also check which page they go to after cart abandonment.

Create a FAQ page

To address concerns on fees and deliveries, make sure you have a FAQ page in place. Explain why you have extra fees, when these are waived off, and where they can get discount vouchers or codes. Note that one of the reasons customers abandon cart is they might feel they do not trust you enough. You can establish that you are a credible seller by being generous with information that they need to know.

Audit your buying process

Once you have done all the efforts mentioned above, you can consider auditing the buying process to see what else you might have missed. Ask a friend to make a purchase on your website and watch them. Do not explain how the buying process works nor explain what each element is about; just look at how they are making the purchase. Doing this will give you new insights on how your buying process works and see what the customer experiences first hand.

Not all friction is bad

Friction can help you get good quality leads that can turn into lifelong customers. Let us take the submission forms as an example. Some would argue that a long form might turn off customers because there is a lot of information to give out just to buy the products. But think of the customers who took the time to answer each field.

This process is a method called exclusion. You will be left with customers who are more interested in your products than those who will never be interested. The only way to know is to test each change you will make on your website. So ensure that when you execute these efforts, set up an A/B testing to see if each has a significant effect on the buying process.