Keep your social accounts active

Having dead Facebook and Instagram accounts — meaning, accounts without much quality content posted — hurts you if you're an ecommerce company. A lot of people look at a company’s social accounts to assess their trustworthiness. If you’re planning to run Facebook and Instagram ads, people are clicking through and looking.

You don’t have to go overboard. but you do want to hit a few minimum thresholds:

1. Have ~20 pieces of content posted (arbitrary, but feels like enough that you’re not a dead account)
2. Have ~200+ followers (same thing)
3. Have engagement on your posts so it’s not obvious you bought followers.

Other Fixes

Include a quiz

This works surprisingly well for most ecommerce companies - the quiz doesn't even have to be particularly well designed. You can put something together with Typeform with surprisingly good results.

In particular, you should try pointing ads directly at a quiz. As opposed to the homepage of your site, or asking for a direct signup, for example.

Here are a few example quizzes that we know perform well:

• Tea Quiz
• Beauty products
• Wedding planning (requires signup)

Aggressively A/B test pricing

This is often the biggest macro test available to you. Find out if a price reduction results in a net higher profit — it often can by getting more people to buy.

Design mobile-first

Most purchases will happen on mobile via Instagram and SEO. This means you literally design in Sketch with the mobile dimensions as your starting point: figure out what allows for the best UX. Consult Baymard for mobile ecom CRO advice.

Speed up the checkout flow

Get rid of the checkout flow and allow instant checkouts on the product page via Apple Pay and Google Checkout. Even more aggressive: Ask for contact and shipping details only after they've paid.

Free shipping

You must offer free shipping. It's not a nicety. Increase your product price to allow for it if needed. This will often be net positive. Put the free shipping copy as a small snippet of text underneath the add to cart button instead of putting it as a site-wide banner. The former results in 10% better checkout performance.

Anchor prices

Anchor prices tend to work. Introduce very expensive products or plans (that you don't expect people to buy) that will make your normal pricing look cheaper.

A/B test your product images heavily

Labels, colors, positioning, models, jar shape, pill sizes, everything. These are a chronically overlooked micro-test with a lot of potential. A/B test your product images a lot.

You should be A/B testing the look of your products on checkout performance every single week. (Once you have over ~5,000 visitors per month.)

Use GIFs

Using GIFs of people using your product outperforms having static images on your product page. It provides a unique experience and makes you feel premium.