As a veteran Shopify entrepreneur, you know how to calculate return on investment. The million-dollar question is how to increase ROI. To help, we dug deep into our Scrooge McDuck golden safe of Shopify wisdom to share game-changing strategies for boosting eCommerce ROI.
Why Is Boosting eCommerce ROI a Priority for Shopify?
Business growth only comes in a few ways: more customers, more sales, or greater profits per sale. Relying on advertising alone to deliver eCommerce customers gets expensive pretty quickly. For healthy long-term revenue, it’s better to find ways to get more bang for your buck with every dollar.
What Is the Average ROI for eCommerce Stores?
ROI varies more by industry than by platform. A good ROI for Shopify is usually between 10.5% and 20%, but the specifics can change depending on your business model, time in business, and products. The main thing is to keep ROI positive and trending upward.
Goals for advertising ROI are easier to measure. Paid search should ideally net you between 5x and 10x your investment.
How Can You Boost eCommerce ROI Effectively?
These aren’t your granddaddy’s “ye olde” business tips. They’re 100% born and bred online, created by eCommerce pros and delivered piping hot to your door.
1. Do More Customer Research
Customers are the end-all-be-all of ROI. Whatever the industry, learning about your target customers helps you make better decisions for advertising, product selection, discounts, and user experience.
How do you identify your most important audience segments? Step one is setting up a customer relationship management platform, like HubSpot, Zoho CRM, or Agile CRM (it’s free, baby).
Step two is enabling Google Search Console tracking for your Shopify website. That way, you see who’s browsing your products, when, and from which marketing channels.
Metrics are a double-win for ROI. You spend more on the avenues that work and avoid wasting money on ads that don’t.
2. Treat Your VIPs Right
Over 70% of your revenue comes from repeat customers, not new clients. That means treating loyal customers to the VIP treatment delivers big returns.
One option? Offer exclusive discounts for your best clients.
Don’t just show extra products as upsells on checkout. Include a “members-only” special price to sweeten the deal.
3. Discover the Causes of Cart Abandonment on Your Site
According to the Baynard Institute, the average abandonment rate for eCommerce shopping carts is over 70%. Imagine: Seven out of 10 customers walk away at the last moment! It’s like throwing a touchdown pass and watching the receiver stop at the 10-yard line.
Wish you could “nudget” another 20% into the endzone? The key is understanding why your visitors are abandoning cart items:
- Trust problems: Do your checkout pages seem too pushy? Do you show customers accurate pricing right away or swap prices after they enter payment details?
- Forced accounts: Do you require visitors to create an account before buying?
- Complicated checkouts: Do users have to navigate multiple pages before they can complete their purchase? Upsells are good, but show them on the checkout page, not instead of it.
- Long loading times: Are your product images too large to load quickly?
- Not enough payment options: Do you require customers to pay with a few specific credit cards?
If you don’t love PayPal’s return terms or fees, we hear you. But what if not offering the payment platforms your target audience prefers is leading to abandoned carts?
Before dismissing PayPal, Stripe, Discover, etc., analyze how much they realistically cost you versus what you stand to gain. Remember — you can always make changes down the road if your worst fears come true. They usually don’t.
4. Boost (eCommerce) Returns by Lowering (Product) Returns
Returning customers? Absolutely, can’t get enough of them. Customer returns? Not so much.
Returned products are bad for ROI in so many ways:
- Eating into your profits
- Costing you money on shipping
- Frustrating new clients
- Messing up your inventory calculations
In 2022, nearly one in four customers returned items to retailers. The return rate for eCommerce businesses is about 16.5%, leading to losses of more than $200 billion.
The biggest reason? Sizing issues. They’re behind nearly half (45%) of all returns. Some clients get so irritated by wrong clothing sizes that they order multiple items intending to return the extras.
Fortunately, app integrations such as Kiwi can dramatically reduce size complaints. With product videos, detailed (and accurate) size charts, and dynamic size recommendations, you can help your customers select the right fit effortlessly.
5. Streamline Your Shipping
Big things like discount percentages, site design, and ad spending aren’t the only ways to affect ROI. Never underestimate how big an impact “last mile” services have.
Think about it — even if you have the most attractive website, it’s all for nothing if customers receive damaged products, don’t get their orders, or have to contact customer service multiple times.
Bad shipping experiences can turn a phenomenal impression into a negative one lightning fast. How do you improve Shopify shipping? Use the right tools:
- Work with drop-shipping suppliers you trust: ZenDrop is amazing for partnering with trustworthy suppliers and speeding up deliveries.
- Be clear: Use app integrations that display shipping prices up-front for each option, or show order progress toward free shipping.
- Go flat rate: If most of your products have a similar size and weight, speed up the checkout process, streamline shipping, and improve order accuracy with flat-rate labels from UPS, USPS, or other carriers.
Great shipping is a major factor in getting return customers.
6. Automate Your Discounts
Whether you sell wholesale for B2B, skyrocket your average order volume with bundles, or maximize seasonal revenue with killer Cyber Week deals, discounts are a great way to boost eCommerce ROI.
Automated discount apps deliver tiered pricing and attention-grabbing sales at the drop of a hat. They’re “set it and forget it,” so you can manage a growing business with minimal time investment.
Find the Ideal Shopify Solutions for Boosting eCommerce ROI
One of the best things about Shopify is the way it supports modular solutions. In other words, once you set a goal for boosting eCommerce ROI, it’s easy to find app integrations that provide everything you need to make it happen. Discover powerful tools to deliver the perfect user experience and increase your AOV simultaneously.