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7 ways to boost your ecommerce sales with Hotjar
While traditional analytics tell you what’s happening and where—e.g. there’s an increase in users dropping out of the checkout page—behavior analytics uncover what’s wrong and why those users aren't converting. Hotjar's ecommerce tools and integrations offer access to these in-depth insights, helping improve your conversions and, ultimately, sales.
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You’ve done everything, from investing in a site redesign to implementing all the best practices in the conversion playbook…but your ecommerce store is still stuck in that classic “traffic is up, sales are down” scenario.
Want to turn the situation around? This chapter shows you how Hotjar’s tools and integrations enable you to develop user-centric solutions for your site or product: a surefire way to improve your sales.
Get closer to your customers
And give them what they need. Hotjar provides access to the information and insights that grow ecommerce businesses.
The best way to meet your customers’ needs (and your business goals)
When you aim to make your site’s UX seamless, it’s essential to empathize with your users. But empathy doesn’t always come easily—especially when users’ behavior baffles you.
Perhaps you notice potential customers consistently flock to your product pages, then bounce off without buying anything. It’s far easier to feel frustration rather than empathy when you see the number of abandoned carts eclipsing your sales.
Fortunately, there’s Hotjar (hello! 👋), a behavior analytics platform that helps you understand your users more intimately. Our platform allows you to:
With Hotjar, you can introduce changes that make a genuine impact instead of being sidetracked by what you ‘think’ will work.
How Hotjar tools and integrations improve your ecommerce sales
Better UX and an optimized customer journey are keys to selling more.
So whether you’re lean and still growing or expanding aggressively, equip your organization with tools that empower you to understand your customers: what motivates them, what makes them hesitate, and what they need to enjoy their experience of your product or online store.
At your disposal are Hotjar’s helpful tools for ecommerce sites:
Heatmaps
Recordings
Feedback
Surveys
Let’s touch quickly on how these tools, alongside Hotjar’s integrations, help you deliver an experience that delights customers and dramatically improves your bottom line.
1. Combine hard data with in-depth customer behavior insights
You’re probably no stranger to tools like Google Analytics, which gives you an overview of important business metrics like traffic and conversions. This quantitative data points you to specific pages, including those driving the highest traffic or bounce rate.
However, the numbers alone can’t tell you why users love or leave your site. You need qualitative data to deepen your analysis.
Hotjar’s Recordings and Heatmaps for ecommerce (Observe tools) offer user behavior insights, so you can:
Get a complete picture
Go beyond the numbers, and dig deeper into how real users experience your website.
Let’s return to the classic example of product pages with high traffic but a low conversion rate. Here, you can watch session recordings to see if there’s any issue causing customers to abandon the page. It could be a page element that’s hard to see or an out-of-stock notification that appears at the wrong time.
Gather actionable data
Integrating a handful of recordings into your analysis can inspire you to make user-centric improvements. Using the example above, you can recommend new design and color options to make a critical page element more visible; or ask the development team to review the backend and fix the timing of an important message.
Beyond numbers: growing online stores with Recordings and Surveys
Ecommerce Warriors helps outdoor retailers increase growth metrics like average order values, revenue, and profits. Working with high-profile ecommerce clients and agencies, Founder and Business Analyst Jeff Bronson uses Surveys for ecommerce and Recordings for ecommerce to understand the why behind the numbers.
Bronson relies on these Hotjar tools to provide a fresh perspective and actionable advice to online brands:
“Showing clients analytical numbers about what happened and where isn’t always enough. When I introduced visual insights into “why” shoppers behave certain ways, specifically session recordings, I saw jaws drop and excitement build.
“Hotjar is a critical component of helping retailers improve conversions, since showing visual proof is priceless.”
2. Track, analyze, and optimize metrics that drive sales
We know sales data is a key component of your growth strategy, but it’s also a valuable metric in the customer journey—particularly in the decision stage. It goes hand-in-hand with other key performance indicators (KPIs) like conversion rate and cost per conversion (CPC).
You can track these metrics using Google Analytics or sales analytics software. But the cool part is that you can also send the data to Hotjar with our integrations. Hotjar will work its magic, connecting quantitative and qualitative data for more in-depth analysis. (You can read more about Hotjar’s integrations for ecommerce in a later chapter.)
We also have a dedicated sub-chapter detailing how each of our Hotjar tools and integrations benefits ecommerce brands. The following are just a few examples:
The Observe tools, comprising Heatmaps and Recordings, let you locate any barrier or issue on your site, which may be relevant to a current sales drop.
Feedback and Surveys for ecommerce, known as the Ask tools, enable you to listen to users and tailor solutions to their needs.
User interviews and testing, available via our brand-new Engage product, help you stay on top of your customers and their ever-evolving needs.
3. Discover pain points and opportunities for improvement
The detailed numbers derived from traditional analytics may hint at a problem. But you need user behavior analytics to see the problem from the users’ perspective.
Again, incorporating both hard data and behavioral insights comes with many benefits, including the following:
Easily find drop-offs in the user flow
Let’s say you discover that users are dropping off. You use Google Analytics to understand what’s happening across your website, while a combination of Hotjar tools helps you diagnose the problem.
This sequence allows you to narrow down the possible causes of drop-offs and come up with real solutions. It eliminates guesswork and keeps you from chasing hypothetical solutions.
Materials Market, a website connecting construction material suppliers with customers across the United Kingdom, had this exact experience. Here’s how they reduced their checkout exits by 86%:
The problem: Andrew, a co-founder of the ecommerce brand, spotted a problem while watching Recordings—one in four customers was dropping out at checkout.
The real-world, impactful solution: after figuring out that an additional signup step was causing users to leave, he reduced steps in the checkout flow and made it more engaging. Now, only one in 25 users dropped out at checkout.
Materials Market’s checkout flow before and after Hotjar
Effectively identify bugs and UX issues
Sometimes, it’s difficult to spot exact problems or find top pain points. By launching a survey on exit pages, you’ll hear what users need right before they leave. You can also watch recorded sessions of users who encountered a problem to see if there are missing links or broken features.
The discovery empowers you to prioritize a fix and achieve results immediately. It also opens up opportunities to add additional features and similar changes, with the ultimate goal of generating more conversions and sales.
4. Fine-tune your customer journey
The customer journey often starts even before users visit your site. But in the context of this guide, most of the stages are set in motion when they reach your online store.
That’s why it’s vital to remember that users—both new and returning—constantly form opinions about your brand based on the sum of their interactions with your website.
You can rely on behavior analytics to improve the UX and deliver a satisfying customer journey all throughout. Aim to become a brand customers trust, because the greater their trust, the greater your sales.
Here’s a quick overview of what you can do:
Discovery: know your customers—where they’re coming from, the pages they land and navigate to—to build a picture of what they’re looking for on your site
Interest: uncover opportunities to get prospects to browse more products and help them find what they’re looking for
Intent: identify pages and page elements that are getting prospects to add products to their wishlists or shopping carts
Purchase: start building a long-term relationship with customers; send a post-purchase survey to users who just completed a purchase, asking them what worked (or what didn’t), so you can better serve them in the future
Engagement: figure out how to keep customers engaged, make them come back to browse more products, and convert them into brand advocates
5. Share data across different collaborators (teams)
Do you want to get buy-in and alignment within a team or across different departments?
Hotjar was made with cross-functional collaboration in mind. The platform provides you with the tools needed to build your case so that you can:
Add colleagues to your team’s Organization on Hotjar
Give access to team members by inviting them and setting their permission level based on their area of responsibility. Note that there’s no limit to the number of team members you can add to your Hotjar Organization.
Create highlights of your most valuable insights
When you access a session recording or heatmap, you can capture a relevant insight as a snippet and store this as a highlight. Highlights can be further grouped into collections. Share and analyze them with your team to spot patterns and validate assumptions.
Share your findings using integrations
Make the most of integrations to boost your team collaboration. Share recordings and forward survey or feedback responses directly to Slack channels. Or set Surveys and Feedback for ecommerce to send the responses to multiple email addresses.
6. Make user-centric (and much better) business decisions
These days, customers seek online brands and businesses that cater to their exact needs. And while they may not need (or want) insight into what goes on inside your organization, it’s always great to have someone advocate for your customers internally.
This is why user research and testing should be ingrained in your company culture. Start by checking out our new product, Hotjar Engage, to learn something new about your ideal customer. Turn that information into more revenue.
💡Pro-tip: not all steps have to be bold and big. Watching session recordings for 15 minutes each morning can make a difference, as does sending an open-ended survey at the right moment. These small acts may lead to spotting an issue that annoys a particular user segment. And what makes it effective is that you’re there to fix it when it happens—just what your customers need to have a smooth-sailing website experience.
7. Optimize your cross-functional tech stack
Hotjar integrates with top tools for planning, communication, workflow, testing, and many more. Connect with Google Analytics to automate website tracking and monitor critical metrics. And share findings with teammates in real-time via the Slack integration.
It’s also possible to install Hotjar on your ecommerce platform, whether you’re using WordPress or Shopify. Visit our Help Center to set up the plugin in seconds and be on your way to unlocking priceless qualitative insights.
A simpler, smarter way to boost sales
User behavior data can be the foundation of many other decisions that impact your bottom line. Did you notice a sudden sales drop after implementing a change? Connect the dots by watching recordings or viewing heatmaps. Will customers still be willing to buy if you adjust a certain product’s pricing? Create a survey and ask for feedback.
Numbers won’t be enough to get your growth metrics to where they should be. The quantitative needs to meet the qualitative for in-depth analysis to happen.
Take that game-changing step now.
Access meaningful, actionable insights within a few clicks using Hotjar’s various tools and integrations. Then turn the information you gather about user behavior into plans and strategies that generate more revenue for your ecommerce brand.
This is just the beginning of what you can do with Hotjar
Excited about the possibilities? We have so much more to show you. Check out the next five chapters of our Hotjar for ecommerce guide, where we unpack all the ways to increase your ecommerce conversions and boost your customer experience with Hotjar's tools.
🤝 Top Hotjar ecommerce integrations that make it easier to sell more online
📹 Hotjar Recordings best practices to find bugs and boost ecommerce conversions
📄 Setting up Hotjar Surveys to understand your customers on a deeper level
📢 Hotjar Feedback tips and tricks to improve your ecommerce customer experience
Achieve quick results using the right tools
With Hotjar, you can seamlessly combine traditional analytics with user behavior data. Leverage deeper insights to deliver an ecommerce experience your customers will love.
