Derailers On Your Own Site (Improving your Shopify Store Conversion Rate, Part 3)

Last time I mentioned how the real-life context of your visitors can interfere with their interaction with your store. Aside from the reality-based derailers that you can’t influence, here are some you could optimize:

• pop-ups, like wheels of fortune or email opt-ins, which break the visitor flow
• surveys
• flashing banners
• multicolumn layouts
• related products
• articles
• chat widgets
• comments with outbound links in them

These, albeit some of them useful, can waste the attention capital of your visitors and contribute to their declining will power. The lesser their willpower goes, the lower the chance they’ll click “Add to Cart”.

You can improve on these, when you understand your visitors’ behavior better. Basically anything on your website that is unrelated to the goal of picking a product and checking out is a potential derailer.

To strengthen the main path that leads to checkout: make sure there is one clear action that you want people to take on each page/step.

To reduce the power of derailers on your store: if something stands on the road towards the end goal, it as a derailer—try to soften its negative effects or completely remove it.

In the end, instead of using gimmicks to re-capture the attention of your visitors, you would be better off to focus on crafting a captivating product title, product description and product images. They are what must hold the attention of your customer, not flashy pop-ups that cover up for any lack of initial preparation.

If you’ve read this far, I believe you’ll benefit from my “No Code Shopify Speed Optimization” guide! It is a quick read that’ll help you get the right mindset towards your Shopify store customizations.