Around the beginning of the Dotcom era, entrepreneurs and business analysts around the world had high hopes for the future of e-commerce. The reasons behind their optimism made a lot of sense. E-commerce companies don’t have to deal with the overhead of having a physical office and lots of shift employees.

Based on the logic behind the inception of the commerce industry, it seemed that entrepreneurs would be wildly successful creating their own online stores. Unfortunately, the reality turned out to be much bleaker.

The average e-commerce entrepreneur is not nearly as successful as diehard advocates around the turn of the century expected. In fact, the odds of succeeding in this business are not much better than they are with creating any other type of business. Failory reports that the failure rate in the e-commerce sector is 80%. Data from MarketingSignals paints an even more depressing picture. Their survey showed that 90% of e-commerce companies fail within just 120 days.

Does this mean that it is not worth starting an e-commerce company? Not at all. However, you need to really know what you were doing if you hope to succeed. This includes using tools like Shopify search to make it easier to find products on your site.

One important thing that you need to know is conversion rate optimization. Conversion rate optimization involves doing everything possible to maximize the likelihood that every visitor to your website is going to make a purchase.

What conversion rate optimization steps can ecommerce entrepreneurs take?

There are a number of steps that you can take to increase the likelihood that your website visitors will become paying customers. Some of the most important steps are listed below.

Use high-quality images of your product

You need to make sure that you are presenting your product in the best possible way. Many marketers think that the only thing that really matters is the copy on the landing page describing the product. However, images are at least as important.

You want to have pictures of your actual products, rather than stock images that you found online. You want to take a picture of the product and make sure that it has great resolution. It might also be a good idea to show someone actually using the product, so customers can get a sense of how it works. They will have more confidence in a product if it looks like somebody is enjoying using it.  In addition, for the greatest ranking on Google search, you should include ALT text in all of your photographs. If you have a huge number of photos to optimize, Shopify provides a terrific SEO app that will do it in seconds.

Consider using videos

You have probably heard that the future of marketing is video. This has been something marketers have said for the past decade. Nevertheless, many people still don’t take it to heart.

You will probably be a lot more likely to use video marketing for your e-commerce site if you are aware of the statistics behind it. You can increase your conversion rates by an average of 86% by incorporating videos into your sales pages.

Make sure that your headlines are as captivating as possible

You might have spent hours crafting the body description of your landing page. Unfortunately, all of that hard work is going to be of a little benefit if you don’t get people to actually read it.

There are a variety of things that you can do to improve the likelihood that people will read your landing page copy. One of the most important things is to make sure that you have a captivating headline. Readers have reported that they read the landing page description 90% of the time if they are interested enough to read the headline.

A bad headline is going to kill your conversion rates. You need to use emotional hooks and captivating words to accomplish this task. You will significantly increase the likelihood that you will be able to sell your product.

Use only as many words as necessary

It is easy to get excited when writing about your products. You might feel like you could write an entire novel detailing the benefits of them.

Unfortunately, you need to resist this temptation. People don’t like to read a lot of longform copy on the Internet. You’re going to have much higher conversion rates if you use shorter sales pages that highlight the benefits in as few words as possible. Write copy that gets right to the point instead of rambling.