10 Reasons For a High Ecommerce Bounce Rate (And How To Fix’em)

Nothing is more frustrating than paying for ads and then having your visitors bolt after a few seconds. If you have a high eCommerce bounce rate, it's imperative you fix it.

Ever since it took the world by storm, information technology has been rapidly changing the ways things get done in every industry – the world of business is no exception. With continuously increasing competition and changing consumer habits, more and more businesses are pushing the boundaries in an attempt to find newer and better ways to improve the customer experience.

While the digital world has greatly evolved over the years and many practices that were once widely followed are now obsolete, websites has always remained constant. It is still one of the most important elements that determine the experience a brand provides to its digital consumers.

Despite the fact that many, comparatively newer, digital platforms have now emerged and most of the brands maintain presence across multiple platforms, your website is likely still the topmost channel consumers visit to learn more about your company and its offers as well as to buy.

However, attracting and bringing customers to your virtual shop is more difficult than it is in the non-digital world. The intense competition requires businesses to invest in multiple digital marketing strategies, such a pay per click, search engine optimization, and social media marketing, to bring traffic to their website.

As if this wasn’t difficult enough, businesses also have to take measures to ensure that visitors move further down the sales funnel and convert into customers.

Higher Bounce Rate – One of the Biggest Issues in Ecommerce

While attracting potential customers to your website is hard, keeping them on it is even harder. This is why many businesses struggle with poor conversion rate in spite of getting a good amount of website traffic consistently.

Higher ecommerce bounce rates are one of the biggest problems a large number of online sellers face. It not only means you are losing potential customers after they have visited your website, but also affects your search engine ranking, which then can have a negative impact on the site traffic as well.

Businesses often fail to figure out the reason(s) why a huge chunk of visitors leave their website without converting into leads or customers.

10 Common Reasons for a Higher Ecommerce Bounce Rate

To help business owners figure out the potential issues that could be causing the visitors to bounce off their websites without performing their desired action(s), here we are listing some of the most common reasons behind this phenomenon:

1. Long Loading Time

As a business owner, you need to understand that everyone is busy in today’s world. If a webpage takes more than a few seconds to load, it is highly likely that majority of the people will leave without viewing it.

Since the website speed can get affected by a number of factors, such as broken links, missing pages, and poor-quality web hosting, you need to analyze your website to find out what’s slowing down your website speed.

There are many online tools available that can help you do that.

Google also provides a number of PageSpeed tools for ecommerce businesses to improve their website performance by measuring the website speed, identifying the problems that may be causing it slow down, and by giving suggestions to resolve them.

2. Poor Usability

One of the basic rules of website development that ensures greater engagement is to keep the site simple and user friendly. In simple words, your visitors should be able to easily navigate through the website as well as to quickly find the information or product they are looking for. Ideally, the visitors should be able to find out what they are looking for within two to three clicks.

Many a times, having a large number of products becomes the reason of poor usability of a brand’s website. If this is the case with you, divide your products into different categories according to styles, price, uses, etc. to make it easy for visitors to sort through them.

3. Distracting Website Design

We understand that you want your website to look interesting and attractive, but remember that an attempt to be too different and unique can sometimes backfire. Using too many flashy colors, fancy fonts, and odd layouts will only put off the visitors and make them bounce off your site, even if your products are amazing and the information you are providing is pertinent.

Remember, that website is your storefront in the digital world that determines the first impression you make on your target audience. While making your website visually appealing is important, going overboard will only put off your visitors and will prevent you from having a page that converts.

4. Not Communicating a Clear Value Proposition

According to the Nielsen Norman Group, a website should communicate a clear value proposition ideally within 10 seconds. Research has shown that visitors only spend 10 to 20 seconds, on average, to determine if a webpage offers what they are looking for.

The action that a visitor is going to take next largely depends on whether you are able to incite their interest within the first few seconds or not. If you are successful in doing that, you can hold their attention for a much longer time and the failure to deliver a clear value proposition will most likely make them leave your website.

Don’t know what delivering the value proposition means?

It means clearly answering the common questions most of the buyers have. Here are the essential questions that the webcopy of your landing page needs to quickly answer are:

• What products or services you are selling?
• Who is your target audience?
• What are the benefits of your products and/or services? Why should someone use it?
• What makes your products and services different and better from that of other similar ones?

5. Information Overload and/or Low-Quality Content

While there is no denying the fact that content is central to the success of a website, you need to be very careful about what and how much you publish and what your purpose is.

Ideally, the purpose of content should be to attract and engage audience by addressing their problems and needs, a lot of businesses make the mistake of only writing for search engines. Although optimizing your content for search engines is critical for success, you need to understand that it is just one part of digital marketing.

High SEO score will get you traffic, but if the content on your website doesn’t provide any value to the visitors, they will bounce off.

Remember, people want to read content that is valuable and easy to read. Avoid getting into complex details or the use of jargon on your webpages.

Simply put, if the visitors are unable to understand the content or find it irrelevant, they will move away from your website.

6. Poor Quality Product Images

This is quite obvious –everyone wants to see the product before buying it. Since online shopping has its limitations i.e. buyers cannot see, check, or try the products, they rely on the product images. If the images on your website are poor-quality or blurred, you should not expect a high amount of sales.

In addition to ensuring that your product images are of high-quality, try to provide a zoom-in feature, so the potential buyers can see the smallest of details. Good-quality images make it easier for buyers to make the decision and if your products are of good quality too, they will highly likely move further down the sales funnel.

7. Automated Videos

Imagine a scenario – there is product that you really want to buy. You run a Google search and get a list of online sellers that stock it. You open multiple links, so you can analyze and choose the seller that you find the best. Suddenly, you hear a person’s voice or loud music coming out of your computer. You leave what you are doing and start looking through all the opened tabs to find out where it is coming from.

Irritating, right?

In such a scenario, the user is likely to get annoyed by the noise and close the site without even looking at it.

While videos are more engaging, can help customers in decision making, and may also increase your SEO score, automated ones can be annoying and can put off a potential customer.

8. Not Having Customer Reviews

Generally, online buyers are more cautious than the traditional ones. This has to do both with their inability to physically see, touch, or hold the product they want to buy as well as the prevalence of scams and frauds in the digital world.

To make sure they aren’t going to be scammed, the buyers look for ways to confirm the seller’s authenticity and reliability. When it comes to establishing trust, reviews of other customers play a huge role. Also, reviews also help customers to ensure that the product actually delivers what it claims.

If your website doesn’t have any product reviews, you are likely to use many visitors to your competitors that provide the information they are looking for.

This is due to this huge importance of customer feedback that ecommerce experts recommend businesses to interact with their customers and also encourage them to share their opinions and viewpoints.

9. No or Weak CTA

No matter how amazing your website and content is, if you are not directing your visitors to what they should do next, you are likely to lose them. Including clear call-to-actions (CTAs) at the right places can make a huge difference in your conversion rate.

Whether you want them to buy your products or services, download a document, sign-up for something, or as simple as providing their contact details, ask them for it!

Unfortunately, a large number of businesses fail to make use of the power of CTAs and as a result, lose many conversion opportunities. For example, you have written an amazing piece of content to explain the importance of a service that you offer and how it can benefit people. You optimize it for SEO and post it on your blog and you quickly start getting loads of traffic because of that.

Looks great!

But, when you check the website analytics after a week, you get surprised to see that the majority of the visitors left your website after reading the content or probably after visiting a few more pages and you wonder why they didn’t buy from you.

If you can relate to this, it’s time you should revisit all such pages and see if you told you visitors what to do next. In case, you had included CTAs, but they didn’t provide the desired results, then you should analyze if you added the right and strong CTAs.

Yes, CTAs can be right or wrong. For example, asking your customers to place an order on your homepage is not a very good idea. You should perhaps first try to gain their trust before you ask them to buy.

10. You Are Targeting the Wrong Audience

If your website is well designed, user-friendly, good quality content, high-resolution images, and clearly delivering your value proposition, but still has a high bounce rate then, it is likely that you may not be attracting the right people.

While there can be many underlying causes of this problem, one of the common issues is being present on wrong channels. For example, if your target audience is experienced professionals, maintaining an active presence on Instagram is not going to benefit you. To attract the right audience to your website, you should instead be active on LinkedIn.

Bottom Line

As a modern day entrepreneur, your goal should be to make the customer experience as smooth as possible because the digital world is all about customer experience and your success is directly dependent on it.

Avoid making the mistakes discussed above to reduce your ecommerce bounce rate and hold visitors’ attention for a longer period of time, which then will ultimately improve the chances of building a high conversion landing page.

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