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15% increase in CR?
According to TrustPulse, activity notifications (such as purchases by other shoppers) have been shown to increase conversions by up to 15%. These typically appear in a small popup as purchases happen, at the bottom of the screen.
Types of activities
There are different types of activities you can notify your users about, for example:
- purchased
- limited stock
- signup
- total viewed
- total signups
- total purchased
My recommendations
- Only show these popup notifications on product pages and perhaps category pages, definitely not on the homepage, nor in the cart or checkout.
- Make sure they’re very real notifications, relevant and valuable to the shopper, and not spammy / scammy
Shopify apps
Below are some of the shopify apps that offer these types of notifications:
- https://apps.shopify.com/shoppop
- https://apps.shopify.com/mps-sales-notification
- https://apps.shopify.com/provesource
- https://apps.shopify.com/bizzy-social-proof
Some nuance
Below is a comment from one of the members of my Ecom Convert group, which gives another perspective:
I can handle a cookie/GDPR popup, or even 1 opt-in popup or slider, but not constant screen interruptions. **Especially on mobile!**
There’s not a lot of screen on a phone anyway. Taking 10% of my viewport with constant popup notifications because other people bought something is annoying enough that I usually leave. I’ll never use them on my websites, for sure, lol.
And some thoughts by Lori Appleman over at Redline Minds:
The odd thing is that absolutely no data exists on this. The only data is produced by companies that sell it. My thoughts – this is something we only see on small, inexperienced stores. It isn’t something used by companies large enough to A/B test everything, nor is it a feature larger stores want (we work with several). It is our belief that these are not only worthless but since most shoppers know many are fake, that they hurt credibility and thus lower conversions.
That said, this is absolutely something to test. The problem is that in order to A/B test, you are going to need significant traffic – in the range of 5000 to 10000 visitors or the data is worthless. Given this tool is primarily in the small business realm, few stores have enough traffic to host a meaningful test. This would also require a tool that is easily set to only show 50% of the time, and to be able to measure the overall conversion rate for those that saw it vs those that did not.
Mistakes to avoid
- Don’t hide any important component such as the header. That heavily disrupts the user experience by making it incredibly annoying for them to use the menu.
- Don’t show them too often. Every 3 seconds is definitely too frequent.
Example notifications
- Want it by Wednesday, November 11th? Order within 1 day 14 hrs 55 mins
- 51 people have recently viewed this product
- Only 5 left in stock!
- Not sure yet? Return your product within 30 days
- 9 people have recently purchased this product
- This product has been rated 5 out of 5 stars by The Recipe Critic