Making the best out of your e-shop catalog takes time, a lot, and it's totally worth it. Every specialist will tell you not to stuff a website catalog with a bunch of products, like HVACs, having no idea about the market or purpose of the products. Yet, what are the aspects to consider when shaping your online store? Here are five simple tips on how to boost your e-shop catalog.
Use filters for real people.
Price, brand, size, and other typical filters aren't always enough. Imagine you need to buy a sink. Do you know lots of sink brands? I guess not. What interests you most is where you're going to put that sink, its usage, its purpose. Be creative and offer more pragmatic filters. The more diverse, the better.
Time matters.
According to a recent research conducted by Wolfgang Digital, Average Session Duration has a strong correlation with Conversion Rate. Correlation shows correspondence between two metrics. They are measured on a scale between 1 and 0, where 1 is complete correlation, and 0 is no correlation. You can keep your users for more than 35 secs, you will increase your Conversion Rate by 10%. However, there's opposite correlation between Server's Respond Time and Conversion rate (0.26). It means that the longer it takes to load a page, the less likely you are to keep your users on your website.
Only Hi-Res images.
The first thing that gets your customers hooked is product's image. Your store must look clean and professional, with lots of large, Hi-Res images. As stated by Optimax, a marketing research agency from London, for 67% of users, the quality of product's images is more important than product's description, rating, and reviews. Increase the quality of your products representation to boost User Engagement.
Optimize your website
There are many instructions in this point. I'll single out the four aspects that many e-shops tend to leave behind:
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User-friendly design
When somebody comes to your website, it must be obvious what you sell. To achieve this use less text and more picture. You don't want your shoppers to get distracted by cluttered images and texts.
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Lay out trustmarks, payment methods you use and major brands you sell
These tiny, at first glance, badges can increase your sales by 36% according to a study by McAfee and VeriSign.
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Clear prices and shipping
Nobody likes being deceived. To avoid this, show the total price and shipping before proceeding to payment. Oneupweb consumer study states that 95.5% of consumers expect to see clear price and shipping.
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Simplify the checkout process
For online shoppers, it's critical to be able to pay for selected products easily. To increase your chances of closing the deal, set up a smooth and simple check out. Try linking your site to your preferred ERP and accounting systems to ease the customer management, payment, and inventory process.
Get a decent search bar
Every area has some confusing names or different terms for the same products. You need to be ready that your customers may confuse something. To assure they find the one product, follow these simple tips:
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Make your search bar detect typos, misreading, transpositions, etc. For example, if a product's full name is 'Adidas NMD Cs2', customers may search for 'adidas mnd', 'adias nmd sc', or even 'nike nmd', if they only remember the keyword 'NMD' but forgot the make.
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Use Autocomplete. Autocomplete saves the time of your shoppers and is more likely to turn them into buyers. Customers who land on an autocomplete page suggestion are six times more likely to convert than those who don't. Autocomplete is especially valuable if you have different products of the same make.
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Suggest Popular Queries. It happens that consumers don't know exactly what they're looking for, so it's vital that you show your most popular products below the search results. Make sure suggested products are relevant to the query.
Although it may seem that running an online shop is easy, many people eventually turn it into a fiasco. Follow our simple rules when optimizing your website, and it’s performance will improve.
