E-commerce: Strategies to Increase Traffic, Visibility and Sales
The days of easy profit simply by having an online shop are long gone. In order to compete in the rapidly evolving marketplace, you simply cant afford to ignore some things. These 7 ways to boost your e-commerce success are a good place to start.
Landing Pages
Send paid traffic to landing pages for products not to the homepage. Or send paid traffic to categories that match the users intent. Optimizing landing pages is a must, if youre not doing it read this article first.
Products descriptions and SEO
Use product descriptions, and make sure they are both engaging and original. There are reasons for both of these rules.
The text description gives search engines something to index and well-chosen key words ensure that you can be found. Creating unique descriptions prevents you from being accidentally filtered out as spam by search engines.
Site-wide search means sales
Attracting customers to your site is only half the battle. Helping them find products on your page is essential to close the sale. And the best way to do this is with an easy-to-find and easy-to-use search function. Utilize every aspect of design to help it stand out: placement, color, cursor focus, and the all-important white space. And make sure to do your own on-site keyword analysis to improve descriptions.
Speed
Page abandonment is an avoidable annoyance for any website, but for sales-based sites it can be disastrous. See THIS ARTICLE (tech note: also link to speed article prev written) for details on how crucial page loading speed is to converting prospects into sales.
Checkout challenge: Speed 2
Your customer is entering the home stretch - now is not the time to slow things down! Overly complex and lengthy checkout process lead to abandonment, right when all of the hard work of identifying and satisfying the customers needs has been done.
Ways to shorten checkout include selecting the cheapest default for shipping and other options, making it easy for returning customers to sign in, and smart algorithms to save the customer a step. For example, the credit card type is easily determined based on the first few digits of the number. Dont waste time asking for it!
Avoid shipping sticker shock
Be upfront about shipping costs. Always. Although over half of shopping carts are abandoned, on average, about half of those quitters were driven away by shipping costs. Either shipping costs were kept hidden too long or the purchase didnt qualify for free shipping. Be up-front about shipping, and try to keep costs low. Never try to gouge your customers with inflated shipping costs.
Tablets are the new shop window
The decline of the PC has been predicted for years. And although it is far from dead, the growth of mobile web access through tablets and phones is now a clear trend. If you do e-commerce, you must optimise for tablets. Mobile site visits are increasing steadily just as PC sales are declining. A seamless mobile sales flow will help you secure your part of this crucial new channel.
BONUS: Pin the tail on the profit
Pinterest has enjoyed dramatic exponential growth and is already a significant source of Shopify referrals. It also enjoys the highest average order value of any major channel - twice as high as Facebook. So get pinning!
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