How to Improve Your Shopify Conversion Rate with Pip Hounslow

Catherine Erdly: [00:00:00] What is a great conversion rate and what is stopping your customers from buying on the podcast? Today I’m joined by Pip Hounslow, a Shopify expert and web designer who’s going to be talking all things conversion rates.

Welcome to the Resilient Retail Game Plan, a podcast for anyone wanting to start, grow or scale a profitable creative product business with me, Catherine Erdly. The Resilient Retail Game Plan is [00:00:30] a podcast dedicated to one thing, breaking down the concepts and tools that I’ve gathered from 20 years in the retail industry and showing you how you can use them in your business.

This is the real nuts and bolts of running a successful product business, broken down in an easy, accessible way. This is not a podcast about learning how to make your business look good. It’s the tools and techniques that will make you and your business feel good. Confidently plan, launch, and manage your products, [00:01:00] and feel in control of your sales numbers and cash flow to help you build a resilient retail business.

 Welcome to the podcast. Today’s episode is with Pip Hounslow, who is a small business, Shopify web designer and has made. How many websites do you think you’ve made now?

Pip Hounslow: I literally have no idea quite a lot now. I was keeping count and it’s got a little bit of, because I dabble [00:01:30] in quite a lot as well, rather than just like building the off from scratch. So I help quite a lot of people as well. Yeah, I don’t know, over a hundred I’d probably.

Catherine Erdly: So you’ve got a lot of expertise in Shopify and what we’re gonna be talking about today is about website conversion in general. Obviously, a lot of people listening will be on Shopify, but I think everything we’re sharing will be relevant probably no matter what platform you’re on.

What’s a good conversion rate?

Catherine Erdly: So let’s start off by defining a conversion rate. How do you calculate it and what is “normal?” [00:02:00] Quote unquote.

Pip Hounslow: So these are Shopify’s benchmarks. So, and they’re really, really good conversion rate is sort of 3.5% up. And then most people are sitting between 1.4 and 2.5. But if you’re on less than 1%, then there’s like a block. There’s usually some kind of block on there that’s stopping people from buying or making ’em hesitate that little bit too long.

But yeah, so you can work it out. You can do it the long way if you want to know the actual technical way of working it out. So it’s your total [00:02:30] orders divided by your total visitors and then times by a hundred. So if you had 50 orders and 2000 visitors. So it would be 50 divided by 2000 times a hundred, and that would equal 2.5%.

That would be your conversion rate. But you can also go, if you’re on Shopify, go into Shopify Analytics. And there’s a section in there where you can like do a comparison over days, weeks, months, from different quarters or however you wanna, you want to measure.

Catherine Erdly: You can see [00:03:00] it, right? It’s right there on your analytics dashboard, isn’t it? Yeah, which is great. Makes it so much easier than some platforms.

Pip Hounslow: Yes.

Catherine Erdly: I mean, that’s it really interesting. So basically I think people often, when they first start talking about conversion rate, people are often really shocked by just how low it, it really is, in general.

Do Higher Prices Mean Lower Conversions?

Catherine Erdly: But obviously we know that if you’re at 3.5% and above, then that’s really good. Do you feel like it’s related at all to the price of the products? So do you find that people who’ve got higher, [00:03:30] you know, for example, if you’re selling a 600 pound dress? Do you think generally speaking, your conversion rate’s gonna be lower than someone selling, I don’t know, stationary at sort of 10-15 

Pip Hounslow: Well, I think the people that are gonna go and look at a 600 pound dress are not the same people that would be looking at sub 10 pound stationary. I do know that if I’m on Instagram, if it’s not the pricing’s not clear, I will go and have a little look. It might be that if they’re running ads, they will get a lot of clickthroughs because their [00:04:00] clothes are very pretty.

And then the oh my God, that’s 600 pounds, click off. So potentially if they’re running ads would probably be a bit lower. And with regards to like, I mean, I love stationery, so that’s a very good example for me. I’m very likely to go and buy it. But yeah, you get more of an impulse buy, it’s more of like an impulse buy thing.

So if that wasn’t an ad and you were running and that came up and you’re like, “oh, I quite like that” you’ll be more likely to impulse buy it than you are a 600 pound dress. So it depends who it’s targeted at. [00:04:30] But yeah, I mean, probably a higher cost item will be looked at a lot, especially if they’re running ads. Not necessarily bought.

Catherine Erdly: So it’s not necessarily true that the higher your price point, the lower your conversion then necessarily.

Pip Hounslow: Not necessarily. It kind of depends. I mean, like again, if it’s ads and you’ve got your targeting properly. Then maybe you do have a good conversion rate. It honestly just depends what you’re selling and who is looking at it. And if you’ve targeting, right? I mean, people targeting me for a 600 pound dress, I’m sorry, but they’re [00:05:00] out of luck. So yeah, it depends who’s looking at it, but yeah, it’s not necessary. Not necessarily.

This Common Website Mistake Stops People From Buying

Catherine Erdly: Yeah, that’s interesting. That’s good to hear. So you mentioned there that if your conversion rate is, say lower than about a 1.4 to 1.5, that there’s gonna be something there that’s stopping people from buying. So what are some of the most common mistakes that you see on product business websites where they are doing something [00:05:30] that is stopping people from buying?

Pip Hounslow: Yeah, one of them, the main ones is photography. And I’m not saying people should invest in a professional photography free session ’cause they can be expensive and small businesses don’t necessarily have a budget, but everybody has a window and most people have an iPhone. So you can get some really good quality in focus, bright images without spending like hundreds or thousands of pounds.

But yeah, having [00:06:00] a clear sort of high res images in use. Like one that’s in use, a lifestyle shot, somebody holding it to scale, and then a on a plane background. ‘Cause if you wanted to submit your products for like gift guides and stuff, then they’ll want the plain image one.

So to have one of those is quite good. And it also looks quite nice as a catalog of images. So lots of people overlook that and will quite often have dingy and dull images. And that’s not, people can’t imagine [00:06:30] that in their house. They want to imagine that thing in their house or in their hand or on them.

And you need to get that across in the photography. So lots of people just do overlook that and just assume any old picture or a mockup. A mockup picture is not going to work either ’cause there’s no sense of scale. The person that’s putting, if you have like a print and you put that onto a mockup, you’ve got no idea. And nothing to relate it to. So yeah, photography is the main [00:07:00] one. 

Catherine Erdly: So you would suggest having something, somebody holding it or somebody, I mean, Amazon have got their kind of little diagram, haven’t they? It’s like a outline of a person and the person is holding. Yeah, the sizing thing. Yeah, that definitely is, that’s always my biggest bug bear is when I go onto jewelry websites and they’ve got earrings and they just show the earring and they don’t show it on any ear. And I’m always like, I don’t know what seven.

Pip Hounslow: No idea. Like, is that like a tiny hoop or is it a hoop hoop? Or like, you’ve got no idea. So giving some [00:07:30] sense of scale , and giving people a chance. I mean, the Amazon size thing does do its job. It’s not very pretty, but it does do its job. So I would tend to put the thing like in your hand or something. Just as like a more personal.

Catherine Erdly: So you think that, um, that’s probably like the biggest blocker then?

Pip Hounslow: I mean, there’s quite a few, but I’d say probably is one that people overlook when it’s just so important on your website. It can like, make or break the design of a website. Somebody’s [00:08:00] got bad photos, then no matter what the layout or what you are including, the photos just aren’t selling your product for you.

Why Benefit-Led Product Descriptions Matter

Pip Hounslow: So yeah, I think that one. There’s also, like product descriptions are quite often overlooked. Like people will just plunk anything in.

Catherine Erdly: Yeah.

Pip Hounslow: And it can be, and then have the same thing over multiple products.

Which is not very good for SEO either because you’re not, you are basically gonna rank for the same thing on multiple products.

And there’s no sort of [00:08:30] benefits added to them. Sort of like, why should people buy that product? What problem is it solving? Sort of a benefit led description is, one again, that’s overlooked.

Catherine Erdly: Right. Okay. So, and I suppose going back to imagery for a second, is that something? Sometimes a difficult conversation you have to have with people if you, they you’re redoing their website and then you’re like, okay, well I can redo it, but the imagery’s.

Pip Hounslow: Yeah. I actually had that conversation very recently with a [00:09:00] brand and their whole website was black, dark. And I was like, that’s not, that’s not the vibe. And all their photos were dark, and they basically did a full reshoot of all of their images. And then we even got ’em to do like a video for the homepage at the top. And it just completely changed the whole look.

And they didn’t, they were like, they went with it. They were like oh, we like dark. And I was like, you don’t want dark, you’re not having dark. So they just went with, they look so nice now. [00:09:30] But yeah, they did a whole, a full brand, like a new photography thing. Which was really good, really worthwhile.

Catherine Erdly: Yeah. So obviously we talked about imagery, we talked about product descriptions, and we touched on that. So having really good benefit led product descriptions where people actually understand why they should be buying something.

Pip Hounslow: Yeah. Yes, exactly.

Catherine Erdly: And not the same ones.

Pip Hounslow: No, no, not the same ones for every product. So it is basically having like what you sell, [00:10:00] who it’s for, and why it matters. That’s quite a good sort of basis for your product description. So it can speak to particular people, you know. Even it’s vegan or any sort of anything that you maybe take for granted about your products.

Other people might be like, “oh okay, so it’s sustainable.” I might put that in there. They’re really pushing the benefits of that product onto a person like you. You speak to people, buy from people. And so you are actually speaking to a person and they might just see themselves in that [00:10:30] issue and be like, “oh, that will solve my frizzy hair problem.”

So I’ve also done that.

Catherine Erdly: So I know that product descriptions is one of those tasks that a lot of people just find really, really tough and tedious.

Pip Hounslow: Yeah, especially when you’ve got a big catalog.

Catherine Erdly: Yeah.

Pip Hounslow: But yeah, I mean, I’m all for not trying to do it all at once. Just work through and you start with your best sellers and reassess those and just make sure the individual to the product, [00:11:00] basically. Don’t just make them the same for if you’ve got like a conditioner and a shampoo that are doing the same job.

Just try and tweak them a little bit to be more about that, like what that particular thing is doing.

Make Your Homepage Crystal Clear

Catherine Erdly: Rather than just copy paste. So when you are designing and you are designing, presumably, you know, the purpose of the website is to convert, right? So what are some of the key elements that you [00:11:30] want to see on every homepage, every product page.

Pip Hounslow: I’d say on the homepage is what you sell. You know, who it’s for and why it matters. Like right up there on the, on the banner that top that first bit. Rather than like, welcome to my shop.

It needs to be sort of speaking to a person like, I don’t know, natural. So I’ve got one here. It’s Natural Skincare for sensitive skin. Made in the UK and backed by dermatologists.

That sort of like covers all of them things. It’s very clear what they sell. And then having a clear call [00:12:00] to action. But underneath that, so for that one would be like shop skincare. And all above the fold, very clear what you do and you sell and hopefully you’ll get people in quicker ’cause it’s super clear.

And along with that is having, making sure your navigation is again, very, very clear. Rather than shop and then a list of collection names. It’s like having it you know, like if you are doing skincare, it will [00:12:30] be like Shop Skincare in the top rather than just shop and then underneath a big list.

And then obviously we’ve talked about the product photography, making sure that top one is like really a really nice showing of like either your bestseller or a collection of your products or something, or a video. And having some of your best sellers is also good to have in your homepage.

I tend to put them fairly near the top. With Shopify, you can get them to order automatically by [00:13:00] bestseller. But quite often you’ll have a load of bestsellers, which are very similar products, so you can actually go in and manually adjust your bestseller list. So you can move some of the things up so you’re not stuck with like, shampoo, shampoo, shampoo, shampoo.

Build Trust with Reviews and Policies

Pip Hounslow: Be like, “okay, I’ll just move the best selling conditioner up.” You can sort of like play with it a little bit. And just make it, give a bit more of a spread of your products. So it’s quite an easy way of showing some of your products really early on. Reviews always important bit of [00:13:30] social proof.

Yeah, just having review, like a review carousel on the homepage is always very important. And then I’ve noticed quite a few people in their footer leave out their policies.

Catherine Erdly: Right.

Pip Hounslow: Have all the sort of standard ones you. And they’re very easy to get, like with Shopify, which will apply to all, anybody could use them.

They have free templates. But you’d need your shipping policy returns and terms and [00:14:00] conditions and privacy policy, and you should just have those in your footer. It’s a very simple thing to add. So lots of people overlook adding that to their footer. I’ve had quite a few people where I’ve been like well, how do people know how much it is?

Catherine Erdly: I suppose that all just helps with the conversion, right? It helps with people have that trust.

Pip Hounslow: Absolutely. It’s all about gaining people’s trust. And if they trust you and they kind of like you, then they’re more likely to buy. So I also like to [00:14:30] add like a little story snippet on that homepage as well so that links through to the homepage. So it’s a little bit more of like you as a person who’s founded this business and sort of why you founded it to start with.

‘Cause the founder story is always like quite inspiring. And often just sort of hidden. So I think it’s really nice to have a picture, a face to put to the business with a little bit of like a why. ‘Cause it’s often the why that you’ve done that. Is the why that people are buying [00:15:00] it. So you can say something, you can get some yeah, I can’t think of the word, but yeah connection.

Catherine Erdly: Yeah, for sure. That’s such a good point. I love that. The why that you’re doing it, you’re doing your business for is the why that people are buying or the reason that they buy, and so don’t hide it.

Pip Hounslow: Yeah, don’t hide it. Never hide it.

Catherine Erdly: Yeah. Whenever I look at people’s websites and they don’t have a picture of themselves, I’m like, come on.

Pip Hounslow: Yeah. 

Catherine Erdly: And I love what you said of there about making it really clear. Just [00:15:30] kind of going back to the whole piece about the carousel on the first image on the homepage, because I suppose that’s probably your first biggest leak of people, right? That they come onto the homepage and they bounce off immediately.

Pip Hounslow: Yeah. If they can’t see necessarily what they want or like, you are not aligning with what they thought you were, and they’ll be off. only get a few seconds to convince them. We’re very fickle.

Catherine Erdly: I always remember seeing a shop, and it was, on the homepage, they had a [00:16:00] lovely photo of a rose. But they didn’t sell roses. It was just like, they thought, “oh, this is a nice image,” but it’s like, “no, show me what you sell.”

Pip Hounslow: Yeah. What do you want me to buy?

Catherine Erdly: Yeah.

Pip Hounslow: Absolutely. Exactly.

Optimise Your Mobile Experience

Catherine Erdly: So when it comes to driving conversion, then how important is mobile? And what should small businesses be checking for when it comes to their mobile? The website on mobile?

Pip Hounslow: Mobile is so important. But it’s because I think, ’cause most people [00:16:30] will edit and build their websites on their desktop, it can be a little bit overlooked. You do have, like in Shopify, I don’t think, I think you probably have it in other, I think you can get it in like on the browser tools as well. Where you can look at your website on different screen sizes, which is not 100% proof and it’s not a replacement for an actual phone, but as a first part it’s quite good to check.

And just to make sure that your site is loading fast enough because, I dunno. The doom scroll is [00:17:00] a, is a real thing. So if you’re not quick enough.

Catherine Erdly: Yeah.

Pip Hounslow: It doesn’t load, they’ll just go do something else. And again, having like that navigation that works, on a mobile ’cause sometimes again, on Shopify. Sorry, this is Shopify specific.

You can have a different navigation for your mobile as you do on your desktop,

Catherine Erdly: All right, okay.

Pip Hounslow: On a desktop, you maybe you’ve got like a couple of dropdowns which won’t work on a mobile ’cause you’ll have to click through a few [00:17:30] times. So just to make sure that your navigation works on both platforms like just no, it’s, no use it looking really lovely on your desktop if it’s not gonna get people through to the product pages on a mobile.

Yeah. And then text sizes is really important. Quite often people forget to that text sizes, if it’s teeny tiny, people can’t read it necessarily like so quite, so easily. Yeah so I would check all those things.

Product pages. And also I had quite a good test where [00:18:00] you, if you have to pinch your screen to buy it. To like, to find the button. That’s not, you don’t wanna have to pinch or scroll sideways. Sometimes it’s not quite fitting.

Catherine Erdly: Yes.

Pip Hounslow: That applies more I’d say to platforms and not Shopify,

The Shopify like official themes. But that’s definitely something to check that you don’t have to pinch or like, or scroll sideways to like get your add to cart button.

Catherine Erdly: Yes. I always remember a [00:18:30] story of someone saying that they’d done some work on their website, and what had happened was that it meant that there’s something over the add to cart button in their mobile version. But they didn’t realize it for ages because they were just waiting on and just like notice their sales were dropped off and they just hadn’t checked.

And then eventually they took a look and they realized what had happened. But it was like, yeah.

Pip Hounslow: Dropping off at my product page. Oh, it’s so frustrating. They can be [00:19:00] fiddly and sometimes they, you know, websites just do stuff and you are like, why? I don’t know what, why it’s doing that. But yeah, so it’s always, it’s definitely worth checking every single page and obviously, especially your product pages and your checkout. Cart and checkouts.

Quick Wins for Better Conversions

Catherine Erdly: Just to kind of wrap us up. If someone’s listening to this and they’re thinking right, I’m not ready for a full web design, but I really want to improve my conversion, what [00:19:30] can I do differently? What would maybe be two or three small tweaks that they could make right now to improve conversion?

Pip Hounslow: I would say like changing your add to cart button color.

Catherine Erdly: Okay.

Pip Hounslow: The built in on Shopify and probably on all of them. You don’t necessarily think about it and it doesn’t really stand out. It will get hidden. Especially ’cause you’ve got like either Apple Pay or Shop or something else you’re fighting. Your button is fighting with, to stand out. It’s to give [00:20:00] it a pop of color basically, is to make it really obvious and bring it up the page, like go above the description.

That when they land on the page, they can go like, okay, I want that done. Yeah, and then having, I’d say improve and reorder your description, your product description slowly. If you have a big catalog, obviously.

But start with like your bestsellers is to like, try and sort of make it into bite size section. So people can like skim read it and get the gist of like [00:20:30] what your product does, that’s where the benefit led thing comes in.

So make sure that’s right at the top. So you’ll lose people’s attention if you have, like I’ve seen people have like really chunky descriptions where everything’s in there. Like shipping, ingredients, size. It’s all in this one massive block of text, which is just unreadable to people. So going in and like separating out and making sure it’s people can get what they need out of it quickly is really good. I’d say those two things, yeah.

Catherine Erdly: Is that where they use? It’s useful [00:21:00] to have the buttons where you can to expand it.

Pip Hounslow: Yeah, the expanding ones. So I tend to put like material size ingredients or they all have their own little tabs so that it’s quite intuitive to find them. People know where to look for them, so they just scroll down and have a little browse through there.

Catherine Erdly: Yeah, okay. I love that about and about the pop of color. That’s really interesting. So making it stand out, moving it higher up, making your web, just making your descriptions easier to read, easy to understand. And of [00:21:30] course, as we’ve touched on, make sure that you are happy with your photography.

Pip Hounslow: Yes, of course. And your photography very important.

Catherine Erdly: How quickly do you see changes to conversion, I suppose? Is it pretty much instantaneous? 

Pip Hounslow: If it’s the same, it really depends. I mean, I’ve done them where they have been just changed almost immediately and just gone up by like one or 2%. Which is amazing like that. But that, I mean, that was with like a theme redesign. So quite often people come to me having done the first stage of their business with their website [00:22:00] and they’re like, okay, we’re ready to step it up now.

And they have built their audience and grown and stuff. The redesign just, I dunno, it just cements in the sort of. I dunno, it gives them a bit more, maybe a bit more like trust.

Catherine Erdly: Mm-hmm. 

Pip Hounslow: Sort of thing, because it’s sort of laid out a little bit differently and all the trust elements are there, which weren’t necessarily there before.

Catherine Erdly: Excellent. Well, thank you so much, really fabulous to talk to you. Do you wanna finish off by telling people where they can find out more about working with you?

Pip Hounslow: Yeah, you can [00:22:30] find me on webdesignandstuff.com. That’s my website. Same handle for Instagram. Always happy to have a chat. Yeah, and you can book a call if you want to have a chat about your website via my calendar link, which is also on my website. 

Catherine Erdly: Thank you so much for listening. If you have a moment to rate and review the podcast Inside Apple Podcast, that would be amazing.

And if you like, follow or subscribe, depending on the platform that you’re listening to, you’ll be the first to know about every [00:23:00] new episode, which comes out every Thursday morning. See you next week.