BwP_Baymard_Report_US_Editorial_Banner.png

Baymard Institute report: 8 ways to optimize your site for shopper conversion

Download the latest UX research for tips to keep shoppers engaged on your site.

Looking for the latest tactics to convert shoppers on your website? From telling the right brand story to personalized experiences, there’s a never-ending list of strategies touted by experts to reduce cart abandonment and boost site conversion.

We recognize that minor optimizations can lead to major sales growth. That’s why we’ve taken a research-based approach, collaborating with the Baymard Institute on a report of the latest research-based optimizations tips to help you improve your shopper’s likelihood of purchasing from your brand. In this report you’ll find:

  • Benchmarks around 110,000+ hours of ecommerce user-experience (UX) research
  • Eight optimizations to improve site conversion
  • Tactics to address shoppers wants and needs in 2023

You can download the report here.

For a preview of the insights, we’ve highlighted a few ways you can start optimizing your site today to convert more shoppers.

3 ways to improve your site’s shopping experience

Here are three ways to ensure that your site meets shoppers’ changing preferences, yielding big results for your business.

1. Promote “Free shipping” on your site

48% of online shoppers Baymard Institute surveyed in the US have abandoned orders solely because extra order costs were too high[1]. But if shoppers must search the product page to locate shipping information, the impact of offering “free shipping” on shopper behavior can be mostly lost.

Free shipping is fast becoming an expectation and key motivator for shopping online. This can be an effective way to drive purchasing on your site, but can be ineffective if you’re not adequately promoting it on your site. In fact, during the Baymard Institute’s desktop testing, 27% of the users missed notices of “free shipping” in sitewide elements — such as in the header, in the footer, or as a banner. Consequently, shoppers would often miss “free shipping” information — and thus have to spend extra time searching for it — if “free shipping” information was only offered in sitewide elements. Mobile shoppers are especially in need of “free shipping” information being placed in or near the “Buy” section, since banners and headers which aren’t sticky will disappear once the shopper scrolls down the page.

Bottom line, make sure “free shipping” is easy to find on your site.

2. Create content about your brand and product details

Did you know that 62% of shoppers at some point engaged with non-product and non-order related content (information found on pages titled “About us”, “Our story”, “Our process”, etc.)? That means more than half of your shoppers want to know more about your brand’s story before making a purchase. How are you putting your brand front and center for shoppers that want to “get to know you”?

“About us” and similar pages generally performed well when it came to offering shoppers the background information they were looking for. Yet testing also revealed that going the extra mile and providing a handful of such supplementary pages will help shoppers fill in the story about a particular site, to the point where they get more comfortable with purchasing from the brand.

3. Have one or more third-party payment options

This is an insight we’ve seen from Baymard before as we know some shoppers want to check out using their preferred payment method, like Amazon Pay. What’s worth calling out is that we’re seeing an increase in the number of shoppers who want an alternative payment option. During Baymard’s quantitative study of cart abandonment reasons among 4,384 US online shoppers, 9% had abandoned a checkout in the past three months because the site didn’t offer their desired payment option, and this number has been slowly growing, compared to 7% in 2021 and 6% in previous years.

Download the 8 ways to optimize your ecommerce website in 2023 report to learn more ways to improve shopper conversions.

[1] https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate