Did you know Shopify is a Canadian company?
Well, it is (although you would be forgiven for assuming it’s American).
Americanisms like “shipping” and “cart” are default terms on the Shopify platform.
These words tend to make users assume a company is based in America. This is fine if the company actually is American, but not so great if you are based in the UK and you are trying to attract a UK audience.
There are a lot of UK customers who feel more trusting of UK based companies than they do of American ones. Rightly or wrongly, the feeling of security which comes from buying from a (relatively) local business impacts on a user’s likelihood to buy from you.
Showing your registered UK business address in your website footer will go some way towards increasing trust. But you should also consider replacing all of those Americanisms to improve your Shopify Conversion Rate as well.
People subconsciously feel threatened by unfamiliar words and reassured by the familiar.
Using more familiar words to those based in the UK such as “delivery” and “basket”, will send unconscious trust signals to your users.
If you don’t believe that changing such little things can have an impact, then I don’t blame you. But it does honestly work!
De-Americanising one of my client’s Shopify sites saw a conversion uplift of 6.7% in just one month. This was on top of the previous month’s uplift of 24.48%. In case you were wondering, the 24.48% uplift was due to implementing changes based on a CRO Audit, (but that is a topic for another day).
At it’s heart, de-Americanising your Shopify site is about tailoring language to your target audience.
De-Americanising your Shopify website aims to make the language more familiar to users. It can be done as part of a wider strategy to connect with your target audience through the language used.
Different target audiences will use different language in their everyday lives. Using words your target audience are likely to use will increase identification with your brand and increase the chance that users will respond to what you are saying. So, you don’t want to be sending the wrong message about who your target audience is (and where they live) though a misuse of language.
Check back next week for a new instalment of my CRO for Shopify series!
This article number 2 in a 5-week series of articles helping you to improve your Shopify Conversion Rate.
Last week we discussed winning back lost customers with a basket abandonment plugin. So check it out if you haven’t already.
And still to come we have:
- Getting users to where they want to be by making your navigation more intuitive.
- Improving your product pages.
- Collecting email addresses and nurturing the customer relationship.
