How Session Replay Can Boost Your E-Commerce Sales?

By Veronica Barkley
How Session Replay Can Boost Your E-Commerce Sales?

Among all the web analytics tools, session replays are arguably among the most important ones. They can give you the edge over your competitors, and in this article, we will take a look at how they can achieve that.

Nowadays, understanding your online customers has become easier, even if you don’t physically know them. From a few clicks on your site to a single session, you can use certain analytics tools to understand how they think and how they react to the content on your site.

So here is how session replays can boost your e-commerce sales.

What is Session Replay?

Session replay is a web analytics tool that shows the direct mouse movement from each user session on your site. Data from Google Analytics and other similar analytics tools tell you the measures of your website, but they don’t tell you the reasons behind the behavior of your users.

This is where session replay comes in. However, quantitative and qualitative web analytics should be used in a combination, which is the only way to use the maximum potential out of them.

Session replay tries to recreate how the user navigated your site as closely as possible. It captures mouse movements, clicks, scrolling, typing, and almost every other activity that the user does on your site. They do not create a video; rather, they are a reconstruction of the events on your site.

There are many providers of session replays that offer the tool on their own, or the tool can be a part of a larger toolbox or a feature of codeless automation testing tools. For e-commerce sites, having session replays and other tools is essential for providing the best possible user experience.

How do They Improve Your E-Commerce Site?

Session replays allow you to make some adjustments and improvements that will increase your conversion rates, which is one of the most important measures in the case of e-commerce sites.

Here are some of the best ways of how session replays can help you boost your e-commerce sales.

1. They Help You Solve Bugs

One of the most frustrating things that can ruin the user experience on your website is bugs. Not only can they ruin the experience, but they also harm your conversion rates and consequently, the rest of your business.

For e-commerce sites, it is even more important to solve these bugs on a regular basis. Session replays can save you hours and a lot of extra work on this because they recreate the bugs as the users experienced them on the website. The hardest thing with bug solving is understanding the bugitself, and why it happened.

There are almost infinite examples of how bugs and errors occur. They might be the result of poor coding, software incompatibility, various screen size issues, resolutions, and many more. Instead of spending time finding out the cause of the error, session replays will enable you to work towards solving the issue.

2. They Improve Your Conversion Rates

This is the big one. Session replays are one of the best tools for optimizing your conversion rates. They help you understand the users and only that way you will be able to work towards better conversion rates.

There are several issues that can be ruining your conversion rates and user experience. Here are some of the most common issues that session replays can help you remedy:

  • Your landing page is not working properly, or an aspect of it, at least. There could be a broken link, or the “add to cart” feature is not working.
  • Where your users are not interacting with your CTA buttons. Perhaps you are frustrated that your users are not interacting with your CTA buttons, which play a very important role on your site. Session replays help you see why that is happening.
  • There is a point of your site where your users give up and lose all interest in continuing. It could be the checkout system, or your cart, or product pages. With session replays, you will see just where the issue lies, which is the first step towards ironing out the problem.
  • You don’t know what is preventing your customers from converting. Maybe there is a bug on the checkout page, or somewhere else along your conversion funnel.
  • One of the most common issues is a poor login system. Perhaps you are not offering your existing users to easily log in to your site without leaving the checkout or the cart.

You need an optimized e-commerce site in order to boost sales. Session replays are one of the most important analytics tools that can help you boost your conversion rates, and as a consequence, boost your sales.

3. Session Replays Can Improve Your Mobile Site

Today, many people prefer to do their shopping online. And with some amazing e-commerce sites, that is completely possible and very easy to do. You could be harming your reputation and your sales by having a very poorly-optimized mobile site.

It could be a part of your mobile site that doesn’t work properly and needs improvement; maybe your CTA buttons are not functioning, or the filters do not work as they should and they expand too much on the mobile site.

Mobile optimization is a very important step towards boosting your sales. Having a good conversion funnel on your mobile site can bring you a lot of income, and might be the area where your site is lacking. Luckily, session replays also offer analytics for mobile sites.

4. Session Replay for Better Customer Support

This can also improve the user experience and consequently, result in a better relationship with your customers, and more sales. understanding why a certain issue has occurred will help you massively towards bringing good customer support.

The only way you can react to user complaints is by understanding the issue behind the complaint. Perhaps you will be able to understand the context behind the problem, and you will have the ability to solve the issues that seem vague. Suddenly, you will have much more clarity with problems that begin with “my …is not working.”

What is more, some session replay tools can even go live and stream the session of the users, where there is only a short latency (1-5 seconds).

5. Session Replay Can Improve User Onboarding

The first step towards more sales and conversions is the user onboarding. And improving user onboarding can be crucial towards boosting your sales.

Perhaps you will notice the possible rage clicks on your onboarding pages, and see where it is lacking. By seeing the user session replay, you will see where the onboarding system fails. It is the first step towards improving your onboarding, and consequently, your sales.

Perhaps your CTA button is not working, or your forms are too frustrating or too long; whatever the reason is, session replays can give you a lot of clarity.

6. Session Replay for Better User Experience

This is a very big area, but session replays can help you cover most of it. Good overall user experience is vital for boosting your conversion rates and sales.

Session replays can give you a general idea towards these issues:

  • Is my design effective, is it working properly?
  • How do users interact with my site over several devices?
  • Is my site too slow, which can generate frustration?

Session replays can help you with providing the best possible user experience. You will be able to see the replays and notice where the users are struggling, maybe there is an element that is causing rage clicks.

Conclusion

Session replays are very important that every e-commerce site should have. They help you improve your conversion rates, onboarding, they help you give the best possible customer support, they allow you to fix bugs, and help the overall user experience. Although they can present an investment, it is surely one that is completely worth it.

By Veronica Barkley