Recently we explored the biggest challenge in overall ecommerce; Checkout conversion.
Finding buyers can be a challenge for merchants, but the most difficult part is guiding buyers that land on a home page, to the checkout and converting. Optimizing the checkout, as well as other areas of the buyer journey is needed to improve conversion rates.
One of the quickest and most effective methods to improving conversion rates is with lean localization.
Lean localization is an agile and iterative approach that helps identify the quickest and most effective ways to start converting international buyers. It’s about prioritizing the things that will have the biggest impact, in the shortest implementation time.
By providing the buyer the localized experience as close to their normal native experience as possible, you can significantly improve the chances of your checkout converting. This localized experience needs to be evident throughout the buyer funnel, to ensure consistent conversion at each stage.
What is the buyer funnel?
The buyer funnel is the mapped user journey for your store, from when someone lands at your homepage, to converting at your checkout. This helps you to determine which stages your buyers go through, and identify where optimizations can be made.
This is an example of a standard merchant international buying funnel.
This is split into the different stages a typical international buyer will go through:
- Home Page
- Product Page
- Cart
- Checkout
In most cases, your user will land at the home page through simple search engine marketing and optimization. However, certain shopping platforms, such as Google Shopping, can land your buyers one step further down the funnel into the product pages.
The challenge is optimising the funnel and guiding the visitor through all stages to finally land on checkout, and convert.
How can you use localization to optimize conversion?
Let’s look at an example.
At the top of the funnel, you have 100 international visitors. As these visitors progress through the funnel they will slowly drop off at each stage, until finally at the end, we have just one order. A conversion rate of 1% can be pretty standard for an unoptimized funnel.
One of the biggest reasons why international visitors fall off is due to a lack of localization across the entire funnel.
However, there are many aspects to international ecommerce, and so localizing the entire funnel at once could be complicated and/or time consuming for many merchants.
Do you start with SEO & SEM to bring in more traffic? Returns, conversions etc to improve the middle of the funnel? Or Payment methods and currencies for a better checkout conversion?
This is why lean localization is an effective approach and can be used to optimize the buyer funnel for better conversion.
For example, common reasons why merchants lose international sales in the checkout is because they don’t support multiple currencies. If, by supporting an additional currency, you can generate 2 orders, rather than 1, you’ve doubled the conversion rate, which has the same impact as had you doubled your entire marketing budget. Changes made to the bottom of the funnel, i.e. the final stages of the buying process (cart & checkout) can have a huge impact on the overall performance of the funnel.
Mapping localization components to the buying funnel will help you identify which components are likely to have the greatest impact on your conversion rate. Working up from the bottom, is the most impacting way to improve the performance of your funnel.Changes made at the bottom of the funnel have a compound impact on the layers of the funnel above, what that means, for example, is if you improve your checkout conversion by supporting additional payment methods and currencies you will also consequently improve your ROAS on your marketing campaigns.
Using Google Shopping to supercharge your buyer funnel
Optimizing your funnel and improving the checkout with localization allows you to improve checkout conversion.
By combining the lean localization impact with the Google Shopping platform, you can supercharge your buyer funnel and not only increase your conversions, but your visitors as well. Use our free Google Shopping grader tool to understand your growth potential.
Earlier we focused on making changes to the bottom of the funnel through lean localization, resulting in the overall conversion rate improving 100%, from 1 buyer to 2 without doubling the visitors.
But we can take this a step further. If we take that improved international conversion rate and then add in marketing investment on top of that through Google’s Shopping Ads, we can start seeing an increasing impact on sales with a checkout converting 4x more than the original rate.
Glopal’s international Google Shopping solution not only improves checkout functionality and localizes entire sites, but also entire shopping ads listings, allowing you to discover international buyers with greater conversion rates.
A cross-border trade partner can help you not only localize your funnel, but help scale international sales through efficient and effective localization.
For more information on how Glopal can help you grow your international sales 4X in 30 days, contact us today.
International growth stategies for your ecommerce brand
The most effective way to increase checkout conversion is by providing a localized experience throughout the buyer funnel.
By combining both lean localization and google shopping to give your global buyers an online shopping experience that is indistinguishable from their normal native experience, you can increase your international sales.
To learn more about a variety of different international growth strategies you can implement for your ecommerce brand, download our free ebook.
Download the global growth strategy guidebook to choose the optimal approach for your ecommerce brand.
