Everyday more and more consumers are turning to the web for their shopping needs and you’re hoping those happy-go-lucky customers come swirling down your conversion funnel like a rubber ducky down the bath drain. If only it were so simple! But wait… maybe it is. eCommerce websites have come a long way since the early days of 1990s AOL “mall shopping” and consumer expectations and habits have adjusted accordingly. We pulled our design and marketing team into a room to come up with a few basic best practices for designing your eCommerce website for the best conversion rates possible. A few dozen yellow legal pads later, here’s what we came up with.
Quality Product Photography
Sometimes it’s the easy solutions that are the most often overlooked. Consumers all agree, if you don’t have quality imagery to showcase your product from multiple angles in good lighting, they won’t be eager to Add to Cart. You don’t have to drape Scarlett Johansson across the product to make it look professional and desirable. Just get some nice high-angle overview shots and a handful of closer detail shots and fit them all together in the scrolling trundle. If your consumers like what they see, they’re more likely to have it shipped to them.
I Need a Hero… Image!
While a plethora of quality product shots that demonstrate the uses and appearance of products is key in the shopping experience, good marketing says you need something on display as your primary showcase piece. We call this the hero image. Pick your best product—or something on sale this week—and add a well-designed hero image to the top of the shopping page overlaid with some clear calls to action. Allowing one or more of your products to shine like this takes a page from the book of traditional retail marketing where premium products are featured in the best lighting at the front of the store.
Strategic Merchandising
Continuing to snoop the old retail playbook, it’s important that you are properly merchandising your products throughout the store and particularly at checkout. This means pairing featured products with relevant accessories that can increase the final sale and placing products next to one another in a way that shows how they can work together. In clothing retail, this means creating “outfits” of various pieces that can be purchased together for a specific look. Good eCommerce conversion is optimizing the shopping experience to get as many relevant products in front of the shopper as possible so they can happily fill their cart.
Ecommerce and digital shopping is becoming the norm and, as with any sales and marketing niche, it’s developing its own core of best practices and proper techniques. Start with these three and continue to build the Macy’s of the digital mall. (Oh, and let us know if you’re running a special on yellow legal pads.)
At Incredible, we have plenty of insight on eCommerce sites and how to utilize it best for our client’s success. Give us a call at (800) 949-0133 or schedule a one-on-one and find out how we can help you!
Erving
Incredible Marketing
