According to the study, for e-commerce sites, a bounce rate of 20-45% is generally acceptable.

Take a deep breath because lowering your bounce rate doesn’t require major overhauls, just a dedicated focus on delivering an excellent user experience.

So many e-commerce websites are fighting for high visibility online, but better engagement is the best way to succeed!

Let me explain what I try to hint at in the sentence above. Consider you are getting a ton of traffic on your e-commerce store, but when you do a revenue audit, you realize the figures are epically out of proportion. Now, this is what we articulate as high visibility and lower engagement. Why did this happen? There can be many reasons, but one that I can vouch for 100% is the poor UX for your shoppers.

If you had been to Walmart in the ’90s, you would remember the excruciatingly long checkout queues. You would have left your cart right there in the last aisle before the checkout counter and stormed out of the store at the speed of an F1 car. The question is, why did you do that? The answer is that poor checkout design created the bottleneck, and you were in no mood to spend 30 long minutes on the purchase that you finalized in 5 minutes flat. So what did Walmart do? They hired an expert experience design agency to make changes to this part of their store, and the result is what you see today.

Don’t worry. You do not need to hire an agency to do that for your Online store. Here are the 5 most important tips to follow to reduce the bounce rates of your e-commerce website.

What Does Bounce Rate Mean For E-commerce Sites?

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to an e-commerce site who leave after viewing only one page. It's a key metric for understanding how well a site converts visitors.

By analyzing bounce rates on specific pages, you can identify where customers are dropping off before making a purchase. Using analytics tools, you can then know the underlying reasons for these high bounce rates and implement strategies to enhance the user experience and drive more conversions.

5 Tips To Reduce Bounce Rate

A high bounce rate often indicates that something on your homepage or product page is broken, unclear, or unappealing, while a lower bounce rate generally suggests the opposite.

To reduce e-commerce bounce rates, it’s essential to understand where and why visitors aren’t exploring further the first page or landing page they reach. The following five strategies will help you see things from your customers’ perspective and identify what might be causing them to bounce.

1. Forget About The Basic Bounce Rate Metrics

If you want to level up faster than others, you must think above the basics because basic tools will just tell you there is a problem, but advanced tools will tell you, “What is actually going on?”

Generally, you need to start by knowing your website’s bounce rate. If you stick to the regular e-commerce website analysis, You might already use Google Analytics to calculate the bounce rate or the percentage of page sessions that result in a bounce. This statistic can be examined and broken down in various ways, depending on what exactly you are trying to learn from a page’s bounce rate.

Now think beyond the traditional GA, as there are many stories behind the shoppers leaving your website; so let’s consider the following two scenarios;

• Shopper 1: Visit the product page and leave after 50 seconds
• Shopper 2: Visit the product page, spend 10 minutes there, and then leave
  

What will be your first thought? You must assume that Shopper 2 is interested in buying your products because she spent more time on your product page and argues that this bounce is more problematic than Shopper 1’s, who leaves the site within 50 seconds.

Again, Shopper 1 might have expected something very specific and left frustrated without immediately finding it, while Shopper 2 could have had zero desire to purchase anything and just kept reading and scrolling to learn about your product.  

According to Google Analytics, there is no difference between the two scenarios. They are both considered a bounce. However, as an e-commerce business owner, SaaS product website owner, marketing manager, or UI/UX optimizer, you must know what happened in both scenarios, whether an element was broken or a product was impossible to find.

As Google Analytics won’t tell you why people bounce from your page, you need to gather additional user behavior insights to ditch assumptions and get actual explanations that lead to actionable solutions.

2. Know What Shoppers See and Interact With

Have you ever gotten lost in a physical store due to poor arrangements while searching for the product you want to buy? Just like that, online shoppers need proper arrangements in terms of smooth navigation or product categories to shop for what they want.

Product arrangement and content flow directly influence how navigable or familiar a site feels for visitors, whether visiting your site for the first time or returning for a repeat purchase.

Heatmaps visualize how visitors behave and interact with your website, providing answers to questions like:

1️⃣ Do people engage with the most important content when they first visit the page?

2️⃣ Did they leave the website halfway through because they won’t find what they want?

3️⃣ Do they click on the important CTAs or become frustrated after clicking something inactive?

Understanding these behaviors will give you insight into why certain pages bounce higher.

3. Watch What Shoppers did Before Bouncing

If you really want to check how shoppers are navigating your website and want to check their complete journey, you must consider session recordings. riyo.ai’s recordings anonymize personally identifiable information and focus only on how visitors navigate a website or page, including keyboard strokes, scrolling, and click and movement data.

Real-time breathes pour more life into user behavior insights than other tools, which is why watching people how they engage with your website is essential.  

To know why users are bouncing, session recordings provide insight into their actions before leaving a page; simply segment sessions in riyo.ai recordings to focus on users who bounced. As you review these sessions, consider the following:

1️⃣ Which areas of the page do users spend the most time on, and which sections do they overlook entirely?

2️⃣ Do they appear confused or frustrated? Are they repeatedly scrolling up and down, seemingly searching for something?

3️⃣ What actions do they take just before leaving? Do they abandon the page after discovering an out-of-stock item or after trying unsuccessfully to click a non-clickable element?

Observing these behaviors can help you pinpoint which parts of a page are compelling to potential buyers and which might be driving them away.

4. Be available by offering live chat support

Your shoppers are new to your store and may have questions. Be available to assist them without interrupting their browsing experience, providing them with 24*7 live chat assistance.

Here are some tips for implementing live chat effectively:

1️⃣ Encourage shoppers to initiate the live chat rather than having it pop up automatically.

2️⃣ Avoid using sticky live chat on mobile devices, as it can disrupt the user experience.

3️⃣ Position the chat feature where shoppers expect it, typically on the right side in the footer.

4️⃣ To improve efficiency, consider including common FAQs in your chat so customers can quickly access basic information like return and refund policies, product specifications, and shipping details.

5. Create FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)

Even if shoppers like a product, they often delay purchasing it, thinking they can always return later. We know how that usually ends.

In this case, create a sense of urgency by limiting availability and letting customers know that the product might not be available later. Use visual cues and FOMO (fear of missing out) to encourage immediate action:

1️⃣ Display the remaining stock in the buy section.

2️⃣ Mention how many people have purchased the product that day or how many are currently viewing it.

3️⃣ Highlight these alerts in red to emphasize urgency.

Satisfying shoppers will not solely work when it comes to reducing the bounce rate in e-commerce. You have to keep an eye on a customer-centric approach to ensure your visitors have the best possible experience they can while engaging with your online site.

When you focus on addressing their pain points, improving navigation, and delivering the value they seek, the numbers will naturally follow. By making your website a place where users feel understood and satisfied, you are not just reducing bounce rate; you’re building lasting relationships that drive long-term success for your eCommerce business.

FAQs

(1) What does a high ecommerce bounce rate mean?

A high e-commerce bounce rate indicates how many visitors leave your site after viewing just one page, often signaling issues with user experience, irrelevant content, or slow page loading times.

(2) What’s a good bounce rate for ecommerce?

According to the analysis, a good bounce rate is around <50%, though it totally depends on the industry. Moreover, a good bounce rate for a blog is 70%.

(3) What’s the difference between bounce rate and exit rate?

The bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing a single page. The exit rate tracks the percentage of visitors who leave after visiting any page, regardless of how many they’ve viewed before.