13 Reasons Why Your OpenCart Store is Failing to Sell
Every E-Commerce website out there is struggling to get more sales, more customers, more traffic. It’s essential for the growth of your online store.
Being an entrepreneur, you know that getting profits requires some investment first. The question often is where to start from?
In this blog post, we’ll discuss what may be holding back your OpenCart store’s conversion rates and what’s necessary for them to start rising. You will see some of the main areas where you need to focus with highest priority, as well as steps to take when you have started making progress and advance even further.
Poor Website Performance
64% of mobile shoppers expect pages to load in less than 4 seconds - Radware
A slow website is something you cannot afford if you want customers to find your store, browse around it and enjoy their online shopping experience. 46% of online shoppers say that the speed of your checkout process is the #1 factor that determines whether or not they will return to your store.
How to Solve in OpenCart - NitroPack
What NitroPack does to your OpenCart shop is it increases your overall page loading speed.
It’s more than just a caching tool, it’s an entire optimization framework that maximizes your PageSpeed score and skyrockets the performance of your entire store by optimizing images and resources, caching pages, compression, browser cache and much more.
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Accessibility Difficulties
77% of users believe that social login is a good registration solution - WebHostingBuzz
The standard one account per website is getting outdated, since it requires a lot of actions to finish and piles up on people's list of credentials to remember. 86% of users are bothered by the need to create new accounts on every new website. This is where the social login shines as an accessibility solution - it’s instant and bypasses the standard registration.
How to Solve in OpenCart - Social Media Bundle
The Social Media Bundle combines all of our social logins for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and LinkedIn, as well as extensions for integrating social comments into your store.
All the modules come at a heavily discounted price so your store can be open on all social fronts at a lesser cost. This makes it much simpler for your customers to access your site without having to go through registration and be able to start shopping.
Social logins also remove the worry about storing customer passwords on your site, as this is handled by the social network.
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Poor SEO
Search is the #1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300% - Search Engine Land
Search engine optimization is the most comprehensive of all digital disciplines since everything you do is connected to it. Whether it will be link structure, content, keywords, social outreach, URL and caching optimization, image compression, all of those factors and many other affect SEO directly or as a subsequence.
70-80% of users tend to completely ignore the paid ads showing on top and focus on the organic results below. This means that if you manage to get on top for one or more keywords, your traffic metrics will escalate rapidly.
How to Solve in OpenCart - SEO Backpack
SEO Backpack is a complete SEO solution for any OpenCart store that is falling behind on their search ranking. Without having any technical knowledge, you can quickly start optimizing your URLs, meta data, canonicals, generate custom titles, descriptions, and links. All of that in a multi-language environment.
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Lack of Product Recommendations
Upsells and cross-sells are responsible for an average of 10-30% of E-Commerce revenues - Forrester Research Analyst
Once you have acquired a customer, it’s 60-70% more probable to sell a product to them again. Bundling products together at a discounted price increases your chance to boost the order total and sell more items at once. Remember that relevance is key here, so don’t try to bundle products that don’t have much in common.
How to Solve in OpenCart - ProductBundles
The ProductBundles extension lets you create unlimited bundles of multiple hand-picked items at a lower than their individual price. You can customize the widget and show how much the customer will save when they checkout with your bundle.
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Lack of Marketing Flexibility
50% of consumers make a purchase only when an offer or promotion is involved - RapidCampaign
Promotions are one of the 5 top reasons for customers to follow your brand on social media. If your promotions are well executed, you can expand your market quite a bit and surprise not only your customers, but your competitors as well.
How to Solve in OpenCart - Promotions
Customers are naturally attracted to special offers and promo products. Getting a deal on something you want is always a positive experience and you want to make sure your store can offer that. This feature-rich extension can create personalized and stackable promotions that will drive your sales up, attracting the eye of every customer that lands on your E-Commerce site.
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Not Sharing Your Expertise
Blogging is the #1 most important piece of their content strategy for 45% of marketers - SocialMediaExaminer
Online businesses that have started blogging about their products and industry generate 67% more leads than the competitors that have not. And naturally, sites with frequently updated blogs and unique content get an average of 434% more indexed pages. Moreover, you have the perfect marketing material to share with your social media circles.
How to Solve in OpenCart - iBlog
Lead generation, better SEO, and wider social outreach. These are just 3 of the many positive sides of E-Commerce blogging. What iBlog does is giving your OpenCart store a new blog section where you can begin publishing SEO-ready articles that help your readers, get more users to visit your site and promote your products at the same time.
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Not Selling on Social Media
Social media drives about equal proportions of online and in-store purchases - Vision Critical
Getting your products in front of 1.44 billion monthly active users is quite possible without much SEO efforts, publishing tons of content or spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for ads. The answer is much easier - Facebook. Users spend so much time on social media that many of them have began using it for their online shopping as well. If it’s possible - why not?
How to Solve in OpenCart - FacebookStore
What does it mean to have a Facebook shop? It means to connect your existing E-Commerce store with your business page in Facebook and show all your products to your fans. This happens in a matter of seconds with FacebookStore for OpenCart and lets you start selling securely on the most popular social media platform in the world.
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High Cart Abandonment Rates
Abandoners spend 55% more when remarketed via email reminders about their carts - CPC Strategy
Nearly 70% of shopping carts are abandoned online. You can either accept that or do something to counter it. There are many methods to reverse those numbers, and email remarketing is one of the most popular, since 66% of cart conversion comes from there. Simple email reminders that the customer has forgotten items in their cart.
How to Solve in OpenCart - AbandonedCarts
This is an advanced tool that lets your OpenCart store send email reminders to customers who left without checking out. You can use it to customize the email templates and personalize them for different customer groups. One of the most powerful features is you can combine it with a discount that will hook the customer to come back and finish their checkout.
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Tedious Checkout Process
27% of online customers abandon their cart due to a long checkout process - Baymard Institute
Since cart abandonment rates are high anyway, there’s no need to make it even more difficult for customers to shop from your store. The standard OpenCart checkout is technically a single page checkout with multiple steps that works smoothly. However it can be too much for some customers who want to finish the job quicker.
How to Solve in OpenCart - AJAX Quick Checkout
Single page checkouts are a popular solution for most E-Commerce platforms and AJAX Quick Checkout is the OpenCart extension that seems to be the most popular among the community. It’s packed with powerful customization features and combines essential modules for social login, analytics, etc. It’s also responsive, multi-store and multi-lingual.
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Shipping Difficulties
60% of cart abandonment rates are linked to shipping and handling costs - ReadyCloud
Free shipping is the number 1 incentive for users to spend more for online shopping. This goes to show that simplifying your shipping strategy is more than crucial if you want customers to start checking out more.
How to Solve in OpenCart - Advanced Shipping Pro
For OpenCart, one of the most intuitive solutions is called Advanced Shipping Pro. This extension lets you tailor your delivery methods and their costs so they are as convenient for customers as possible. With the step-by-step tutorials inside the admin panel, you can’t go wrong in setting up a flawless shipping strategy.
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Slow Customer Service
Resolve a complaint in the customer's favor and they will come back 70% of the time - HelpScout
According to The Cost of Poor Customer Service Global Survey, what customers want as an improvement the most is "Better Human Service.” That’s why, 7 in 10 Americans admit a willingness to spend more with businesses providing excellent customer service. If you’re good at customer service, you need the right tools to apply that.
How to Solve in OpenCart - FacebookMessage
Besides being genuinely helpful, fast response is what separates good from bad customer service. Experienced customer service agents know they have seconds of patience after a user has asked a question. FacebookMessage gives your customers a fast way to contact you, and also gives you the chance to answer instantly via the Facebook Messenger app.
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No Customer Feedback System
88% of people trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts - Bright Local
All product reviews are useful for your business - good reviews increase customer trust and the credibility of your products, and bad reviews give you the exact instructions where you need to improve. Compared to 88% in 2014, there are more than 92% of online shoppers that read product reviews online.
How to Solve in OpenCart - DisqusComments
Disqus is one of the biggest comment systems on the digital landscape and it helps sites build an audience and get more engagement on your store. DisqusComments is the OpenCart integration that allows you to install that system on your E-Commerce site and start receiving and moderating comments, tracking analytics, and customize your widget to match your design.
What’s YOUR store’s problem?
Of course, there are many more possible reasons that may hurt your store’s conversion rates. Bad design, poor user experience, confusing navigation, negligent product photos, we can keep going. The point is that it’s up to you to take action and start improving bits and pieces as your store grows. Share the problems you face with your OpenCart the most in the comments below!
