People often think to improve their e-commerce store; they need to hire a team of specialists that create custom code and mean business.
While you can benefit from a site redesign, the hard truth is that simple solutions are always the best.
Before you even contact a marketing agency to help you improve your store, you should try this simple list of suggestions that go a long way to improving your store and the way people perceive it.
Visually, these are the most important aspects of any e-commerce store and need to be paid close attention to.
How to Improve Your E-Commerce Store
Every word counts so rewriting product descriptions might benefit you a lot. The second most important thing about your product pages are the words, second only to the images. You need content that pulls the reader in and can tip them over the edge from “not quite sure” to “I’m totally buying this!” Don’t forget to incorporate proven SEO strategies for your content.
Reviews are king. People trust product reviews from actual people than they do your business. Listing your products on a popular review site and gaining rank is an awesome way to improve your e-commerce store. Make sure the tools you use to integrate these reviews with your store are compatible.
As stated above, the images are what customers look at when they decide to buy something. If you have poor product shots, then you’re likely to see and equally poor return. In fact, Etsy users found bad pictures can negatively impact sales up to 50%.
Even if your photos are pristine, they might be too boring. It’s hard to imagine if a necklace will look good if it’s featured floating in an endless sea of white space. Having background or models to showcase your products is a good way to engage with your audience visually.
Keeping with that mindset, lookbooks (digital collages) for each of your products is another great way customers can browse the many facets of your products. You could have the simple product shot against white as the main image, then a collection of model and background shots in your workbook.
Speed should be a critical aspect of your site. Bottom line, people get frustrated if they need to wait and, more often than not, they’ll just leave for bigger and better things. In 2016 Google said, according to the most recent data, “40% of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. And 79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with site performance say they’re less likely to purchase from the same site again.” Make sure the check-out process is super speedy too.
If your landing page doesn’t blow them away then a good backup to have is a powerful search engine for your website. Maybe they like the style of your clothing but not the exact shirt you took them too. If a search bar were immediately in view, they might just click it and search for what they need instead, getting you that conversion after all.
Another thing you could do is make videos for your products. 2016 was the rise of video marketing and now it’s a fundamental staple. A simple video showcasing your product and someone talking about its uses and benefits can go a long way to making that conversion for your store.
On the paid marketing side of things, the landing pages you choose are extremely important. Never send someone to your homepage with paid ads. You need to send them to category pages that match the intent of the user.
Making simple changes like these can help you in improving your e-commerce store.
Simple is usually best.
