Building an online site that your customers simply love comes down to two main factors – hard work and understanding customer psychology. Knowing different types of customers, their preferences, how and how often they browse your site or analysing what works best for your site are something essential before you design your eCommerce website. Ask yourself – what if a few design tweaks could lead to better conversions? Undoubtedly, it can be a huge boon to the business. However, people still make tons of mistakes when it comes to designing their online site.
Check whether you are making these mistakes while designing your eCommerce site. It is better to take the following advice into consideration before embarking on a new project.
Too many or one option
Imagine a homepage showing everything- from cooking utensils, apparels, toiletries to novels. Aren’t that too many options for a customer? They can paralyze your buyers and create stress for them. Similarly, showcasing only one feature of a particular product can leave the customer baffled about whether to buy the product or not.
Give customers the option to filter your products. Allow them to narrow down the search. Instead of making them scroll through dozens of items that don’t fit their needs, let them drill down to the products they love. Moreover the detail shots of specific features of one particular image including the front, back and sides can go a long way towards making a viewer buy from you.
Lack of product description or duplicate description
Customers have the liberty to see, touch and feel a product as well as read the product information on the packaging or labels when they’re shopping from a brick-and-mortar store. However, online shopping lacks this interaction. Moreover, there are a few retailers who still use the default description for their products. From Google’s algorithm perspective, this is a deadly practice. Duplicate content can dramatically impact the organic search ranking.
Therefore, provide as much product information as you can. The information may include the size, weight, fabric, length or dimension of a product. Spend time and resources to write unique and engaging product description. Good content engage your customers and prospects.
Non-existence of value proposition
Value proposition will determine whether your customers will bother reading more about your products or will simply hit the back button. A strong value proposition convinces your customers as why they should buy from YOU and not from your competitors. Unfortunately, many sites not only have poor value proposition, but even have difficulty communicating what exactly they sell.
To incorporate a strong value proposition, you need the following elements
- A catchy heading and subheadings that uses simple language to explain why customers should buy from you
- Explaining why buying this product is the best option? What else do you offer that others don’t? What makes you stand out of the crowd?
People often do not know why they might need your product until you tell them.
Hidden contact information
Consumers should believe that they are actually dealing with a genuine company. They want to know that if they face a problem with the item, there should be someone authentic to guide them and solve their problem. However, if your site lacks the basic contact information page, they’re less likely to trust your site.
Put your contact information in an easy-to-find place on every page of your site. The best place to showcase your contact is either in the header, top of the sidebar or footer of the page. Provide multiple forms of contact such as phone number, email address and contact form all add to the level of customer trust.
Incorrect product alignment
Human beings perceive products differently when they are laid out horizontally and when they’re laid out vertically. Researchers found that viewing a collection of products laid out horizontally leads to more perceived variety than viewing the collection vertically. Placing your products horizontally will make customers think that there’s a greater variety of products than when you arrange them vertically. Similarly, arranging product from up to down allow customers to feel that a product in another row is of a totally different category.
The consequence of this research is that; place the variety of products horizontally to make customers perceive even more variety than is already there.
Poor quality images
Since customers cannot physically feel and touch a product when they shop online, you need to do as much as you can to improve upon that experience. When you sell items that are mostly dependant on look, you must focus on the visuals of the products. However, inaccurate size of images can have an adverse effect.
Either provide large image on the product page or allow users to click on an image to zoom in. Allow users to view images as large as is practical on an average monitor. A crucial factor is to check with the quality of the images. The better the quality of an image, the higher is the conversion rate.
Insufficient site search engine
If you can ensure that the search elements on your website works fine, and has filters for allowing customers hone their results, your audiences are more likely to buy. Variety of options are good, however, if those results are nothing as what you’re looking for, it’s more an inconvenience than anything else.
Make sure that your online site has good built-in search engine or plugins to extend its functionalities. Your site search engine should allow users search by keywords and then enhance the results based on the categories your site includes.
If you do not use categories or separate your merchandise for your online store, you are actually making it difficult for the customer to find the specific type of products they want. In addition, if they find only one or two products in multiple categories, things will not work out the way you want. Moreover, the more distance you put between them placing a product in the cart and essentially paying for it, the more opportunities you provide them to leave your site without completing the purchasing process.
Design your navigation categories and elements carefully before you put products in your catalog. Make sure that every category has enough number of products and make it easy for customers to look through different categories, get their shopping cart and move around your site. Also the check-out process should include a single page for customers to check their orders, their billing and shipping information, and a confirmation before they submit their orders.
So what do you think?
Think of as many ways as possible to showcase your products without overwhelming your customers.
Images: “Make online purchases directly using a blue button with shopping cart icon in a elegant keyboard/ Shutterstock.com“
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