10 key elements to succeed in your e-commerce store
To be successful in your online business eCommerce store, you should treat your website as if it were a real life store. First impressions are important, right? If you approached a shop and found that there were boxes at the front door, cobwebs in the window, and an inch of dust on the shelves would you stick around?
We need to consider the user experience of our website in the same way we would if customers were visiting us in real life. By creating the best possible experience, you can ensure happy shoppers and the best outcome for your business. Here’s how!
1). A strong homepage
Your ecommerce store home page is the first page of your website that your customers land on so it needs to be super clear who you are, who you serve and what it is you do. There's nothing worse than landing on a webpage and having to scroll around to try and figure out what on earth it is actually being sold. Potential customers need to know exactly what it is that you sell to encourage them to scroll down or click through to another page.
This is done with great looking banners or lifestyle images at the very top of your website, or above the fold, without having to scroll down. It’s also ideal to have a message bar or hello bar there that would tell people exactly what it is.
2) Social proof
Social proof is some sort of evidence to your customer or visitor that you are a real life, legitimate, professional business. Reviews are a great way of doing this, as well as those badges if you've ever been featured in a newspaper, magazine or on television, where you would have ‘as seen in’ and have those logos.
Any sort of social proof instils trust in your customers that will help them feel confident to make a purchase from a new business. Knowing that they can see reviews from previous people, lets customers know that you're not some sort of online scam that’s going to take all their money and run!
3) Easy navigation
It goes without saying that your ecommerce store website needs to be easy to navigate. Having confusing menus, or pop ups that keep popping up even after you've closed them are a no go! These factors will contribute to people bouncing off very quickly from your website.
Think about your customer's shopping journey with you and map out the logical steps or clicks they need to take to purchase from you easily. Remember, the less necessary steps, the better. The shortest amount of steps will result in the highest number of conversions and the least number of abandoned carts. Check this process yourself and get family and friends too as well, and seek their feedback.
4) Killer product pages
Now think again about that in store shopping experience, where people can go and touch and feel and try things on. Obviously online people can't do that! We need to make sure our product pages give them as much information and good information as possible in order for them to feel confident to make that purchase. This includes detailed size guides, detailed product descriptions, sharing what the fabrication is,how to care for it and good high res images of your product so that people can make an informed decision before adding to cart.
5) FOMO apps
So we've all heard of fomo right? Fear of missing out, and this definitely applies to online shopping too. Scarcity creates urgency, as does seeing what other people are buying. We always like to see what the best sellers are right, so having one of those apps on your store that pops up and shows ‘this person just purchased this’ is a great way of creating some fomo and and some interest. Also things like showing when stock is limited will help create urgency to help people go ahead and make that purchase.
6) Quality imagery and videos
Your whole entire brand needs quality imagery and videos if you can get them. Not just on product pages, but your homepage and collections page. High quality product photos and videos that will help absolutely increase your conversion rates. More and more customers are wanting videos where you see them sort of walk on into camera and do a little sort of cat walk up and down and a twirl, because you can see how the garment moves, you can see how it fits. And that definitely will help the customer feel confident making that purchase and will also help reduce your number of refund requests .
7) Links
You need to make sure that there's up to date links for customers to reach out to stalk your brand. Now, if you have a dead link, that takes them just to an old Instagram account or to a contact form that doesn't work that will definitely hamper and kill your conversion rate. We want to make sure that we're available for customers to ask a question should they want to and ultimately, we need to be very diligent in responding in a reasonable amount of time.
8) Mobile friendly
Now 80% of your ecommerce store website visitors will be coming to your website by their mobile phone so it's crucial that your website is fully optimised for different size screens and devices. If you're not sure if yours is, pull it out and test it. Test it from your phone or laptop or tablet and check yourself that everything is still functional and it's still a great shopping experience. Now remember, if you use any of those other pop up style apps and they are hampering the user experience, perhaps blocking too much of the screen, you may need to adjust it. Considering that most of your traffic will be coming to your store for a small screen on a mobile phone, you need to make sure that your website still looks great on that size device.
9) Plenty of payment options
What payment options do you currently have on your ecommerce store website? Is it just credit card? Maybe it's just PayPal. Many people are quite lazy sitting on the couch, watching TV when they find a nice dress to buy and don’t have their card nearby. They say to themselves, oh I won’t worry, I’ll do it tomorrow and then they forget.
So whether that's Credit Card Plus or PayPal, or afterpay zippay having options is a great way to help people make that purchase. Just don't forget there are transaction fees involved in that, but making it as easy as possible for customers to give you their money means you’ll see a dramatic increase in your conversion rates.
10) Opt in box
Most ecommerce business owners understand that we're in a numbers game and that most visitors won't actually purchase from us on the very first site visit. Rather, they'll come back a few times before they're ready to buy.
This means that you need to encourage and remind visitors to come back time and time again. And one of the best, cheapest, most efficient ways to do this is via email marketing. Be sure that you have a really obvious clear space for customers or visitors to jump on and enter in their email address in order for them to stay in contact with you. Ideally, incentivise visitors in some sort of way to hand over their emails with the promise of maybe a small discount, or a gift or maybe they get a downloadable PDF style guide for example.
