Top 4 Tips To Increase Session Time On Your Shopify Store

The most valuable asset you have in your eCommerce business is your website, and as such, the experience it provides to visitors matters. 86% of consumers say they would pay more for an improved customer experience (so, yes, it’s something you should invest in, too.)

One way to measure customer engagement is by studying the metric known as session-time. This refers to the time your store visitor (also known as a potential customer) spends on your Shopify store.

Here’s how you get this number: Total duration of all sessions (in seconds) / The total number of sessions

A session starts when someone visits your store and ends when they leave it (or when they don't interact for 30 minutes.) Most marketers believe a good average session duration should be between two to three minutes. 

Time on page, on the other hand, varies depending on numerous factors, including the type of page, number of words per store page, and even the industry your company falls within. 62 seconds is the average time spent on-page across industries, according to a 2020 benchmark report.

The next question, then, is: How do you bump this number up?

How to increase session time for your Shopify store

The more time visitors spend browsing your Shopify store, the more likely they are to convert. Time = interest, right?

The following tips will help you increase visitors’ average session time on your Shopify store.

1. Create a user-friendly & mobile-friendly Shopify store

How do you feel about shows with too many plot twists and a weak ending? Not great, right? Over-designed Shopify stores are no different. 

Within 50 milliseconds, visitors decide whether or not they like your store. What’s more: The same data set indicated a poor online experience will reduce 88% of consumers' likelihood of returning to a site. 

When it comes to web design, simplicity is key.

Another way to make your Shopify store user-friendly is to make your store easy to navigate. Forget the frills. Instead, provide clear paths for your visitors so they can quickly get where they want to go.

Apart from a simple design, it’s also a good idea to check on the following:

• Page loading time. The quicker, the better.
• Responsiveness. Most people browse the internet on their mobile devices these days, so be sure your site works well in these formats.
• Links. Broken links can hurt your user’s experience on your site.
• Clear call-to-actions (CTAs). Having easy-to-find CTAs on your web page helps drive conversions.

2. Enhance your Shopify product pages’ readability

If you’re looking for a quick “readability” fix, you can start by finding the right font size. Shopify particularly values typography in user interface (UI) design. 

It’s best to have fonts that are large enough so that they are easy to read. However, going too large can result in unnecessarily scrolling, which can push readers to move on. 

Another technique is to break down walls of text into more digestible paragraphs using headings, multiple sections, and bullets. This creates white space, which improves comprehension by almost 20%.

Don’t overcrowd your Shopify store. Give each element room to breathe.

3. Optimize your product page images

As a Shopify store owner, you know the importance of beautiful photography and its impact on consumers. 93% of audiences base their purchasing decisions on the visual appearance of products. 

However, eCommerce photography can set store owners back a pretty penny. According to research, the cost of a product photo for an eCommerce listing should be somewhere between $20 to $50 per image. If you’ve got hundreds of products, that adds up quickly.

To make the most of your carefully curated images, don’t forget to optimize them before putting them on your Shopify store pages. The goal is to maintain their high quality without compromising your store’s page speed, so use the smallest file size possible without distorting the image. 

If it takes more than five seconds for your page to load due to large images, data shows bounce rates can soar up to 38%.

4. Enhance customer engagement & conversions with shoppable videos

People love watching videos: It probably has to do with the fact that videos are easier to consume. Visual information is processed 60,000 times faster by our brains than text.

It’s also one of the reasons YouTube is the world’s second-most visited website, next to Google. 55% of shoppers research a product on Google and then watch a YouTube video to find out more information before buying it.  That’s more than half of your target audience out the door. Shoppers should not leave your Shopify store to browse YouTube for product review videos. 

If you want to keep them on your store's product pages instead, satisfy their wants. Add shoppable product videos to your store to make your pages more engaging using Videowise. With Videowise, they can find the videos they’re looking for without leaving your Shopify store, and the videos are engineered for increasing conversions and session time.

As a result, this helps transform leads into actual paying customers: A whopping 74% of marketers believe video has a better return on investment than static visuals. This shows as Videowise customers have reached ROI's as high as 1,000x, empowering their Shopify stores through video.

It works, too: One Shopify merchant found that adding videos increased time on site by 22%. Another merchant found that shoppers watched an average of 2.5 videos per visit and spent 1,000+ more hours on their Shopify store’s product pages as a result.