How to diagnose and improve a high bounce rate?

[amitramani]

Under Google Analytics, I can see a bunch of quite useful information.

One of the most alarming things is the excessively high Bounce Rate. It is 60%. That means, 60% of the visitors to my website (ecommerce site that sells equestrian gear and apparel) are leaving without clicking on any other links.

I would highly appreciate it if someone can provide guidance on how to 
1. Diagnose this issue, i.e. understand why the visitors are leaving.

2. Fix the issues found.

For reference, the site is www.vrtack.com

Any ideas and help is much appreciated.

[EGOL]

Bounce rate is determined by a wide variety of factors....   the quality of your traffic, the attractiveness of your site, the speed with which it loads, the quality of merchandise, the variety of merchandise, many other things.  The software measuring the bounce rate can also be a factor because different programs calculate bounce rate in different ways.

I work on two retail sites in very different niches (one hobby supplies and one close to the office supplies niche).  In the past month they had bounce rates of 22% (average 3 pageviews per visit) and 23% (average 3.5 pageviews per visit).

These are just observations of how your site differs from mine...

Home page... You have 12 CATEGORIES displayed with a lot of wasted space... the 12 categories is close to duplicating your top navigation.   We have about 12 categories like you and they are all shown as a large image and sentence on the homepage but we also include lots of individual, best-selling items and new stuff.    You have about 180 pixels of empty space on the right....  We have a  300 wide column on the right that is completely dedicated to informative content.  Nothing for sale in that column, just links to articles about how to use the products, how to selection them, videos of product use.

Lots of people come into the site and go straight to the free information.  This free information is our credibility and it does really well in the search results.  Lots of people enter these free information pages and then purchase the items that we explained how to use or how to select.    These free info pages attract links, likes, shares, email referrals.  In my opinion they drive the rankings of the website.

Category/Product Pages...    As an example... http://www.vrtack.com/riding-apparel-c-34.html       ...   This page does not render well for me... The top row of three items comes in fine but the second row only has one item.  If a person has a tablet or a small monitor they will see four items and think that is all you have.  Also some of the photos have been resized impropery - stretched or scrunched.  This looks very unprofessional - especially if you are selling clothing! If you want people to click through or buy something get fantastic images on the site.

We really value high quality photos.  We invested in a very good camera, professional lights, light box, etc. to have the equipment.  I have also allowed my webmaster to spend lots of time experimenting to get great shots of each item.  Over time his images have become better and better and the amount of time required for each has dropped.   He  spends 10% to 20% of his time taking photos to improve over what manufacturers provide or photos that illustrate fine details about the product and how they are used or compared.   I don't sweat labor hours spent on images.  Never.   In my opinion, kickass photos are one of the most important characteristics of a retail site.

On your product pages you have a 300x300 image on the left side.  I would allow that to be 300 wide and an unlimited height.  Lots of your clothing products would present better there if a taller image were allowed.   Where you have multiple images of a product, I would show ALL of them in on that left side at full resolution.  Bandwidth is cheap, visual impact is priceless.

I see that you have some links going out to wikipedia.  If this was my site I would be monitoring how many people use those links and writing custom content for my own  site to receive the traffic from those links.  Each of those pages will have related sales items on them, they will pull traffic from search and they will be customized to make the exact point that I want to make.

Some of your product descriptions are quite short and are used verbatim on other websites.  I would spend the time needed to beef them up, make them unique, and include links in them to informative content about that product cateogry that I would create for on my own site.

I see that you have visibility in Google for quite a few of your products.  Nice work.  Improving the content and making it more substantive could improve your rankings, pull in longer tail keywords and make visitors regard your site and your staff as an "expert" place to buy.

Good luck.

[Jonathan1979]

The site looks quite old and dated.

What do your competitors sites look like?  Chances are they would be looking at various sites, and may instantly compare you to some of the new sites, and click the back button.  There are some amazing wordpress themes now with Woocommerce integration, which even if you DIY the website would look alot better, so if you have a little knowledge you can get a site relatively easily.

If you budget or skills do not permit a new site, work on some of the little things.  Get a smarter \ crispier logo, add more features \ articles etc. Try to get more engagement, more help pages, blog etc.  Adjust the padding on the product descriptions so they don't line up against the borders etc.

[Francisco_Meza]

Amit, want to know why you have a high bounce rate?

http://www.vrtack.com/turbo%C2%AE-1000-neck-rug-p-7171.html

Where's your content? It's basically blank?

[Anti-Alex]

1. I would first try and see why the users came to the site in the first place.

Where are your users coming from?
Are they looking for products or information?
Are they actually interested in buying anything?
Can they find your products elsewhere on a more reliable site?

2. Fix any broken images and work on building trust:
http://www.vrtack.com/crusader-fly-mask-standard-p-1212.html

• First link I clicked into had a broken image
  Build trust by including things like your shop address. Clean up the logo and make it a clean crisp image. Encourage your existing customer base to interact with the site, then build on to the site to improve ways for customers to interact. Customer reviews, testimonials, or just an image of your shop location so they feel like they're buying it from the real world.

The Internet is a competitive area where many retailers can sell the same products and services as other retailers. The only way to succeed over the long term is to make your product and website more targeted for a specific niche (making you the authority on the subject), or offer something unique that your competitors don't. People can shop anywhere. The main question will be why would someone want to buy something off your site and not someone elses?