Shopify Dropshipping Conversion Rate Optimization: 13 Ways to Get More Sales!

Are you stuck with wondering how to increase the conversion rate of your dropshipping store?

Awesome! You don't have to wonder anymore after reading this article.

I'll show you below what a good and average conversion rate is, and then I'll show you 13 ways to increase your conversion rate in 2024! Are you ready?

Tip: Have you already created your Shopify account? If not, sign up by clicking this link here to get a free 3-day trial + pay $1/month for the first 3 months!

What is a good and average conversion rate for a Shopify dropshipping store?

Before we start exploring what ways there are to increase your conversion rate, it's good to know what a good conversion rate for a dropshipping store is.

The average conversion rate for Shopify stores is between 0.6% and 3.1%. (Source)

Littledata also says that having a 4.2% conversion rate would put you into the top 10%.

But don't worry if your conversion rate is below 4.2%. Hopefully, with my tips below, you will be able to increase your conversion rate!

Also, keep in mind that not all niches and products have the same conversion rates.

You will need to do some research on what the average conversion rate is for ecommerce stores inside your niche.

For example, the average conversion rate for pet care is around 3%. (Source)

How does Shopify calculate the conversion rate?

If you're wondering how Shopify calculates your conversion rate, then follow below.

Start with taking the total number of visitors and dividing it by the total number of purchases from that same time period.

Then you can multiply it by 100% to get the percentage.

This calculation gives you the conversion rate of your dropshipping store.

Shopify does the same thing, but they also give you conversion rates for different steps in your sales funnel.

They show you the conversion rate of "Added to cart" and "Reached checkout".

Also, the average add-to-cart rate for Shopify is between 2.2% and 7.6%. (Source)

13 ways to increase your conversion rate on your Shopify dropshipping store

Now that you know the conversion rate of your store and the average conversion rate of most Shopify stores, it's time to learn how to increase this number!

You can follow my tips one-by-one or skip to the tip that you think is interesting for your dropshipping store.

Are you ready for some tips?

Let's go!

1. Use high quality and unique product images

As you can see in the image above, images can be used to draw attention to your product or copy.

That great image is from this Eye-Tracking Heatmap study that shows you where people are looking.

Awesome, right?

If you want to get great product images for your own dropshipping store as well, then I suggest reading my other article: How to Get Awesome Product Images When Dropshipping?

If you want to learn more about how images can boost your conversion rate, I suggest reading How Images Can Boost Your Conversion Rate by CXL.

Note: Want to know how to make your product pages even better? Check out ConvertMate 一 a Shopify app that uses AI to optimize product pages, improve SEO, and track customer behavior.

2. Add a video or GIF to your product page

How to make a product video - 5 Tips for making better product videos

Videos can be used to explain your brand and what you stand for, but you can also place a video on your product page.

Just take a look at some of these surprising video marketing facts:

• The top three most effective video types are product demo videos (49%), tutorial videos (50%), and customer testimonial videos (51%).
• 62% of consumers watch product review videos before making a purchase.
• When video and text are both available on the same page, 72% of consumers prefer video to learn about a product or service.
• 95% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service.

If you want to learn more about how videos can boost your conversion rate, I suggest reading 10 Reasons Why You Need Video Marketing While Dropshipping written by me!

You can also use a service like Billo to buy some user-generated content (UGC) videos from one of their thousands of vetted video creators working from their home studios all over the United States!

It's the most accessible and affordable way to get UGC videos for your Shopify store!

Interested? You can learn more about Billo's services and pricing on their website.

3. Offer free shipping

Having free shipping on your dropshipping store is another great way to increase your conversion rate.

Just take a look at these case studies:

• Red Door found that adding a free shipping threshold to NuFACE increased orders by 90%
• 2 Big Feet did a similar experiment on their own and increased orders by 50%
• Comscore found that a free shipping day increased sales by 16%

The only thing that you need to make sure is that you're profitable while offering free shipping.

If you're interested in learning how to be profitable with your store while offering free shipping, then I suggest reading How to Make “Free Shipping” Profitable by Neil Patel.

4. Create converting product descriptions

Next up is creating awesome product descriptions for your products!

Let's start this off by looking at a normal dropshipping product description:

You will see these product descriptions on a lot of beginning dropshipping stores.

They didn't spend any time on it.

Do you really think your visitors will be enticed to buy your product after reading a product description like that?

I don't think so!

Here is an example of a great looking product description:

That one is better than the first example, right?

If you want to learn more about creating awesome product descriptions for your dropshipping store, then I suggest reading my other article here!

I also explain in that article why self-made product descriptions convert way better than the product descriptions that you will get from your supplier(s).

Plus, I suggest you read this article here to learn more about copywriting. (Which is important to sell your products.)

5. Add reviews

One study found that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, and 72% of consumers say positive reviews make them trust businesses more.

Millennials, in particular, trust user-generated content 50% more than other media.

The problem is that customers are more likely to share bad experiences than good ones.

If you want to learn more about this, I suggest reading User Generated Reviews: Do They Affect Conversions? by CXL.

And if you're interested in learning more about how to get reviews on your dropshipping store (even when you don't have any customers yet), then you can click here!

6. Make your Add to Cart & Checkout button stand out

Yes, there are more colors for your buttons other than white.

Research shows that some colors may even convert higher.

Take a look at this infographic from Volusion.

They studied the Add to Cart buttons of the top 50 ecommerce sites, from color to size to icons.

Another great research on which color your Add to Cart button should be is this one.

7. Make your dropshipping store look like a real store and not a scammy store

Now it's time to make your dropshipping store look like a real store and not like a one-day scam store!

Below you will find some of my tips that you can take a look at to see if you have done that already.

If you have already done all these things, move on to the next step!

I just knew I had to add this step because a lot of dropshipping stores lack the basic things that I will cover below.

Please put some effort into making your store look like a real business (which it is!).

Below you will find the pages that you could create now.

The first ones are the ones that you can create inside Shopify. Click here if you don’t understand one of them.

You can go to Settings -> Legal to find these pages.

You can create these pages here:

• Privacy Policy & Terms of Service
• Refund Policy (Click here to learn how to write an awesome Refund Policy)
• Shipping Policy (Click here for a Shipping Policy template)

The other pages that you should put some effort into are:

• Contact page
• About page
• FAQ page (Click here to learn more about how to create a FAQ page and why it is important to have one in your store)
• Collections page
• Homepage (Click here to get inspiration from the homepages from other successful dropshipping stores)

Next up is designing your Shopify dropshipping store so it won't look like all the other dropshipping stores out there.

I suggest you click here to learn more about that! I will also explain to you how to add a Favicon to your Shopify store to look even more trustworthy!

Plus, I suggest you read How to Build Trust in a Dropshipping Store? (Increase Sales) written by me.

Because building trust in a dropshipping store is one of the main ways to not look like a scammy store!

Another great tip to boost your conversion rate and the trust your store visitors have in you is to add trust badges to your dropshipping store.

For example, on your product, cart, or checkout page (or all)!

8. Add more payment options

Having more payment options on your dropshipping store could definitely increase your conversion rate!

What do you think happens when a customer who doesn't own a credit card but does have a PayPal account wants to checkout, and you only offer credit card payments?

High chance that they will leave, right?

And there is more. What do you think about debit cards?

Some countries are also used to paying with their bank card.

If you want to read more statics regarding credit cards and debit cards, then I suggest reading this article here.

And if you're wondering what the best payment gateways are for dropshippers, you can check out this awesome article here.

9. Decrease your page loading time

The next thing that you can do is decrease the time it takes before your product page, or any other page of your store, is loaded. For example, Strange Loop says that a one-second delay can cost you 7% of sales.

You probably don’t earn $100,000 a day. So, let’s put it in lower numbers.

If you make $500 per month from your Shopify store, then that means that you’re losing $35 per month in sales. Which is $420 per year!

Here are some more interesting facts about the page loading time of websites (source):

• 4 out of 10 Americans give up accessing a mobile shopping site that won’t load in just three seconds (which is roughly the time taken to read to the period at the end of this sentence).
• Amazon calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost them $1.6 billion in sales each year.
• Google has calculated that by slowing its search results by just four-tenths of a second, they could lose 8 million searches per day.

If you're interested in learning more about how to improve the page loading time of your store, then I suggest reading my other article here!

10. Scarcity and urgency

Scarcity and urgency! Two marketing strategies that you could use to increase your conversion rate.

In case you don't know what these terms mean, this is for you!

Really simply said, scarcity means that you only have a limited amount of that product ("Buy now, only 100 left in stock").

This means that your store visitor needs to buy it now or might regret it later on when the product is out of stock.

And urgency means that there is a time limit on a product sale, for example.

For example, when you have a 50% discount on a product and you say that it will only be there for the next 24 hours.

After that, the price will return to the normal price again.

A site that uses these tactics a lot is Booking.com

Or look at this one:

Do you see all the scarcity and urgency tactics that they use?

If you want to learn more about how to use scarcity and urgency in your dropshipping store, then I suggest reading one of the following articles:

• Use Scarcity and Urgency to Increase Sales by Shopify
• Drive Sales with Flash Sales, Scarcity and Urgency by Oberlo
• Use Urgency and Scarcity to Increase Your Online Sales by Beeketing

Just make sure you don’t overuse them, like putting every product on the same sale with the same discount and countdown timer.

Exceptions, of course, are like when you have a Black Friday storewide sale!

11. Retargeting

Let's continue this list with retargeting.

If you don't know what retargeting means, I suggest reading Ecommerce Retargeting 101: How to Drive Sales with Paid Ads by Veeqo.

This is what retargeting can do for your conversion rate:

Depending on the vertical, retargeting has the ability to increase conversion rates by almost 150%, according to a study from DataXu. Brands and businesses dedicated to customer service saw an average 128% increase in conversions, while others associated with financial services enjoyed 147% growth.

From Advanced Web Ranking

If you're not convinced yet, then I suggest reading 12 Statistics to Make You Consider Retargeting by Spiralytics or looking at this infographic by Wishpond:

If you want to learn more about retargeting for your dropshipping store, I suggest reading these articles:

• Facebook Remarketing: Using Targeted Advertising Campaigns To Increase Sales by BigCommerce
• 7 Ways to Boost ecommerce Sales with Retargeting by ecommerce Training Academy.

12. Recovering abandoned carts

Next up is recovering your abandoned carts.

Abandoned carts are people that are in the checkout process but decide to leave your website for whatever reason before completing their purchase.

Recovering these purchases can boost your conversion rate as well:

The abandoned carts when recovered can increase sales and lead to better conversion rate. Abandoned Cart emails saw an open rate of 41.18% and top 10 percent of companies are doing at least three times their average performance due to a higher recovery rate of the abandoned carts.

From Chargebee

There could be a lot of reasons why people might abandon your checkout process. Just take a look at this infographic:

Did you know all these reasons?

If you want to learn more about recovering your abandoned carts, then I suggest reading this article with seven amazing tips!

13. Use price anchoring

Price anchoring is a psychological tactic where a higher initial price is presented alongside a lower selling price.

For example, let’s say you’re selling a hoodie for $30. You add a price of $50, which the customer sees first. Then, this price is visually crossed out and replaced with the actual selling price of $30.

This not only draws attention but also makes the $30 price point appear more appealing due to the contrast with the higher 'anchored' price.

One example of how to add this to your store is by using the app Kaching Bundle!

With it, you can create eye-catching bundle deals like "2 for $50 30" on your product pages and improve your sales even more!

In short, the Kaching Bundle app makes your product pages pop! So, if you're in dropshipping or POD, you can try it here! Use the code 'dodropshipping' during checkout to enjoy a 20% discount on all plans!

Conclusion

So there you have it! 13 ways to increase the conversion rate of your Shopify dropshipping store.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article!

Don't forget to check what your conversion rate is right now so you know if it's actually improving or not.

Also, don't forget to check out this article here which contains 14 things that you can check if nobody is buying from your store.

If you've got any other tips to increase conversion rates or if you have any questions regarding dropshipping, let me know by commenting below or contacting me directly by pressing the “Contact Us” button at the top!

Also, let me know if you've got any other topics that you want me to cover in the upcoming blog posts.

Good luck with increasing the conversion rate of your dropshipping store and getting more sales!

Getting started with dropshipping in 2024

So, are you ready to get started with dropshipping? Or maybe you have already started, but you’re looking to get some inspiration?

If so, I suggest reading my complete Shopify dropshipping guide!

It’s a huge article, but it contains everything that you need to know to create your own Shopify dropshipping store in 2024. It’s like a dropshipping course, but for free!

Reading this article will help you to get started and stay motivated while beginning and continuing your dropshipping journey!

Just don’t forget that success takes time. Keep improving each and every day!

Shopify Dropshipping: A 20-Step Guide to Starting Your Store

And here are some of our best articles:

• AliExpress Dropshipping: A 20-Step Getting Started Guide (2024)
• The Complete Guide: Can You Start Dropshipping Without Money in 2024?
• 12 Reasons Why Most People Fail With Dropshipping in 2024 | Beat Them!
• 23 Awesome Shopify Dropshipping Store Examples

Also, if you don’t have a Shopify store yet, then you can click here to get a free 3-day trial + pay $1/month for the first 3 months!