Are you a merchant? Here are some tips for you
But is everything that simple? In reality, having a site is not enough. There are plenty of, seemingly, good online stores that nobody knows about. This means you should work hard to make your store visible to potential customers and search engines. Moreover, you’ll need to set up tracking of visitors’ actions and transactions in your store to optimize conversion rate and other stats in the store. Let’s start with the overall image of an online store.
Appealing design
We make our judgments on the quality of goods according to their look: if a thing looks good we assume that it is of high-quality and vice versa. This can also be applied to the image of an online store as customers will more likely trust a store with good and friendly design rather than store with floating images and music, in other words, back-to-90es design.Look at this:
And this:
I think now you really get what I mean.
Homepage
The homepage of an online store is a face of the company standing behind it, so it should be attractive, clear and welcoming. I’m not talking about design only, I’m talking about the message you’re sending to potential customers who visit you for the first time. Remember that many potential clients can leave your store for you competitor’s as they haven’t understood whether you suit them or not.
We are living in the world of constant lack of time, so it’s important to use time wisely. You should manage to show visitors who you are and what you are selling in a few seconds. Don’t say too much with text, show them! Add most popular goods, reviews, your current promotions, etc. But don’t make the page too clustered; look again at the first example to get to know why.
Category pages
Treat a category page like a department in a large store. Here you provide a list of goods grouped together by particular criteria. Make navigation even easier by adding sorting options (best sellers, reviews, price, etc) – this is something an offline store lacks.
It’s up to you whether to include add to cart, add to wishlist options, reviews, etc. on a category page, but one thing is for sure: you must take time to add good images to display products in each of your “departments”.
By the way, all the images in your store should be of high resolution. This adds to credibility and trust.
Product pages
Product pages are those pages that bring you money as most buying decisions are taken here. The most important items on such pages are:
- Images. Yes, again.
- Selling and unique description that reflects advantages of your product.
- Related items. They help to increase average order value.
- Customer reviews as they add trust and are good source of social proof.
You can also add other options like color switcher; adding to wishlist, etc.
Meta tags
Meta tags include titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords. The latter can be ignored as Google doesn’t treat it as a ranking factor anymore.
Titles are the most important and thus they should include your target keywords. The descriptions are seen as ads and should be appealing enough for users in search. They can also include some keywords. The main rule here is to keep meta tags relevant and unique across your site, even if you have 20 000+ products.
Product feeds
Spreading word about your products across different comparison shopping sites is a good way of getting new customers and sales. You can create product feeds for Google Shopping, Amazon, Bing, etc. and sell items through them.
Take into account that each shopping site has its guidelines on product feed files: some accept only XML or CSV, others accept both file types. Be careful with fields mapping to correctly reflect all the important product info like price, condition and description.
Traffic analysis
You are taking steps to attract customers to your store, so you need to know the sources of their visit to optimize your strategy. There 2 free tools that will cover all your needs:
- Google Analytics
- YandexMetrika
Their purpose is mostly the same but each of them gives some unique opportunities: the first will let you create A/B tests; the second will give you an access to heat and click maps. Both tools give great overview of traffic sources, goal completions and your visitors on the whole.
By the way, Google Analytics provides great tools for transactions tracking – Enhanced E-commerce. With the right configuration you’ll get access to the following info: which products users add to shopping cards and which they delete from it; usage statistics of coupons; performance of each product, etc. You should try it!
Summing up
I listed the main things which every online store requires. Of course, there is almost a need for more, so once you complete these steps, you will think about new ones, more complicated and challenging. This is how and e-Commerce world works: you should always be up-to-date to stay in.
|
|
