Beyond friction—anticipate the derailers in the life of your potential customers (Improving your Shopify Store Conversion Rate, Part 2)

Friction can make it harder for visitors of your Shopify store to complete a purchase. But this is not the only threat to your conversion rate.

Enter derailers—all the shiny things around you that divert your attention away from your goal.

You wouldn’t be filling shipping info forms while:

• there is a crying baby in the room.
• your house is on fire.
• your bus/train/taxi has just arrived and you have to jump in

In such extreme cases of urgency the real world around you pulls you out from your screen. You stop what you are doing and take care of the “fire”. But mild derailers are hard to recover from, too.

You can get bored, uncomfortable on the sofa and want to move to the bed, you receive a message, get a phone call or your boss enters the room.

After the real-life interruption has passed it takes some time and willpower to get back to what you were doing. And if reality persists, you may not even remember what you were doing before.

Well, your visitors are not unlike you. They are human, too. They have their emergencies and what they’ve done before the derailing emergency rarely comes back to mind.

These derailers are something you can’t control in e-commerce, but you can anticipate them. That’s why you have cart recovery emails, exit intent pop-ups and Messenger notifications—to remind people to continue the process of purchase from where they’ve left.

Aside from cart recovery emails, one thing you can to minimize the chance of your visitors getting interrupted, is to make the steps from your funnel as clear and as quick as possible.

When your Shopify store is lightning fast people are less likely to notice they are “traveling” through pages. As they are hopping around hey’ll be able to look through more products and pages, engaging more and more with your website.

This engagement is like a trance. The more engaged they are, the harder is to divert their attention. The more they pay attention to your store, the more they trust you. The more they trust you, the easier they’ll buy from you.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll like my guide to discovering missed revenue opportunities on your Shopify store!