As we get ready to enter 2011 the sales figures for the 2010 Christmas season are already making their way through the news networks. Daily online sales exceeded $1 Billion in six days – twice as much as last year (and half as much as the Federal government spent in the last 8 hours). So with all of this money floating around, why are so many small ecommerce sites, even those who noticed an increase in traffic, feeling like they didn’t get a piece of the action?
If you’re getting relevant traffic but they just aren’t converting, the problem might be as simple as how your website is presenting your products. Here are some subtle changes you can make to product page layouts and general policies that will help convert those visitors.
1. Get to the Point!
When people visit an ecommerce site, they expect to see your products almost immediately – they should be no more than one click away from the home page, if not on the home page. Lots of written content is great for attracting search engines, but you’ll lose them if they have to scroll through pages of text just to get to your products. Forty five percent of visitors leave the site if they don’t find what they want on the first page. Look at your analytics. See where people are going first, and think about what they might have been looking for when they clicked that link. Did they find it?
2. Make the PRODUCT the focus of the Product’s page.
Take a look at your stats and tell me how many visitors actually started their journey through your website on your home page? Very few! Yet so many sites put a ton of effort into making a great looking home page, then drop the ball on category and product pages. Half of your site’s visitors will never see your home page, they came in from a search engine that landed them right on a product. If that page doesn’t capture them, they’re moving on. Customer’s eyes will naturally be attracted to the photo, that’s what’s going to sell the product. Anything else that draws attention is a distraction!
3. Small Text, Big Photos.
Smaller font sizes are better for product descriptions and item/pricing details. Not so small you’re squinting to read, but you want to eliminate or minimize the need for vertical scrolling. Remember what I said above about the photo – keep that product photo in full view as much as possible. Those who are new to ecommerce will always ask their web designers to make the text bigger, this is a mistake! Look at how small the text is on Facebook, the most successful site on the Internet. Your visitors can read it just fine. In fact, it’s actually more difficult to read large text – small text keeps the user focused on what they’re reading. Besides, did you ever get one of those chain mails where someone jacked up the font size and you’re only able to see one or two lines at a time and you have to scroll and scroll just to finish what should have been a paragraph or two? Annoying, wasn’t it.
4. The price should blend in, not stand out.
Whenever one of our customers wants to make the price stand out, I always try to talk them out of it. Usually they don’t listen, then wonder why they aren’t getting any sales later. By making the price stand out, you’re making the price the focus of the page and diverting their attention away from the product. Don’t hide it, but don’t automatically bring their attention to it either. Keep it the same text size and color as the rest of the items on the page. I promise no one will leave your site because they couldn’t find the price, they’ll see it.
5. Cross-promoting related products is secondary.
Many carts, Cartooga included, have a built-in mechanism for establishing a link between products. You know what I mean… “Related Items”, or “customers who bought this also bought…”, etc. When you’re displaying these on a product’s page, the images and text should be significantly smaller than the main item they’re viewing. The “customers who bought” function is designed to get people to spend more money, but don’t let it be at the expense of what they’re already looking at. “Related Items” should be more for establishing a relationship for link building than to actually get someone to click it. Product grouping can make or break your site, and most store owners do this wrong by grouping the wrong types of products together. You want to link items that people will buy in addition to the item they’re currently looking at, not “instead of”. Often times store owners will link “related” items that are competitive products, forcing the user to go back & forth between the two trying to decide the best one for their application. When they can’t, they visit a review site to read side by side comparisons. And what do they see on the review site? An ad for some other ecommerce site selling it cheaper. So when they’re looking at that TomTom GPS, don’t show them the Magellan GPS as a related product – show them an extra battery, car charger, or second cradle for their other vehicle.
6. Offer gift cards and capitalize on the wrong traffic.
No matter how targeted your advertising efforts are, you’re going to get people who stumble across your site and have no idea how they got there. But that doesn’t mean you still can’t potentially sell them something. Your products aren’t for every person who lands on your site, but they are for someone that person knows. A link to buy a gift card should be somewhere on every page of your site. Use Card9.com to create plastic gift cards that work in your online store.
7. “Send this to a friend”.
If you don’t have a way of sharing a link on every product page on your site, go to AddThis.com and get one with a couple of clicks. The great thing about AddThis is that they’ve already written the code for all of the social media sites, and it supports direct e-mail. Don’t let the “social media mavens” trick you into thinking e-mail isn’t still relevant! Sharing via social media is great, but sometimes you don’t want to post a product to your Facebook wall, you just want to tell the one person you know would like it.
8. Re-Evaluate your shipping policies.
If you’re one of those retailers who thinks you’re being clever by making your product prices artificially low and tacking on a couple extra bucks to the shipping, it’s hurting you more than it’s helping. Customers who make regular online purchases have a reasonable expectation of what shipping should cost – if your shipping rates feel higher than they should be, they’ll leave without checking out. Remember, most of the big retailers – the ones who got the largest chunk of that $1 Billion I mentioned – offered either free or flat-rate shipping. No matter what you’re selling, odds are it’s also on Amazon or Overstock.com, so don’t send your hard-earned traffic to them by making the customer think you’re trying to stick it to them courtesy of the UPS man.
9. Add a Search Box
According to ecommercetrends.com, sales conversion rates increase by 150% when a search box is added to an ecommerce site. Remember what I said about how many people leave if they don’t find what they want on the first page…
10. Comments and Ratings
eMarketer reports that retailers see a 73% increase in customer retention and loyalty by implementing customer-generated reviews and ratings. It’s also a great way of letting your customers tell you what kind of products they want to buy – if a product consistently gets poor reviews, stop carrying it and focus on the ones that get the thumbs-up.
11. Trust Badges Make a Difference
When all other things are equal, customers are more likely to purchase from a site displaying one or more “trust badges” than a site without them. But that doesn’t mean you have to go flip down $400 – $700 for TrustE, BBBOnline, or Trust Guard. Honesty in Commerce and UpFront are both free and equally effective.
Now it’s time to go to work! Thanks for reading, and hopefully these simple rules will help your online stores as much as they’ve helped ours.
Second point is worth mentioning twice, “2. Make the PRODUCT the focus of the Product’s page.”
these tips are really amazing thankz a lot helped me a lot…
Great tips, thanks
Thanks for the post! It was very informative. However as per my point of view creativity is required to create and maintain any e-commercial portal. It should be simple, easy to understand and user friendly for the customers. That’s more important because it will save time of the user to find anything online.
Cheers,
Susan Smith.
You are so awesome for helping me solve this mystery.