You are so concerned about having one step checkout, and a way to monitor abandoned orders on your website. But you never ask about product page abandonment. Did you know that sixty percent of your potential customers abandon your website from the product page before they even reach the shopping cart or checkout? There is so much hype about trying to save 10 orders per month from abandon carts, but no action about saving the majority of your potential customers.
Many online business owners just dont understand the value of a product webpage. They believe it is just another product on their website, and the more products they add, the higher chance theyll have of selling more.
What they fail to realize after months and sometimes years of being in business is that most of their sales are usually for a handful of products, and the majority of their products either never sell or sell a few at best.
REAL WORLD vs. PRODUCT WEBPAGE
Imagine youre in the market for a new laptop computer. You go to Best Buy and you start approaching the computer area with 30 different laptops on display. You are looking around for someone to help you, and you notice an employee in a uniform named Mike looking at you. Mike asks you, Do you need some help? He waits for you to reply. One glance at Mike and you notice that hes not particularly presentable. He is sweaty, hairy, overweight, and smells like rotten eggs. You reply, No Thanks just looking, and you start looking at all the different laptops yourself. You walk by the aisles, and you are making your decision strictly on price, bullet points next to the price and the color of the laptop. Little did you know that the pretty, cheaper laptop is super slow, and the ugly black laptop is the one you need for your work.
Mike would have given you terrific advice if you gave him a chance, but you didnt. Now what do you do as you are comparing laptops? You are comparing prices online on your smart phone, you are convincing yourself why you shouldnt buy that particular laptop, and why you shouldnt buy it today. The typical consumer behavior when left alone to decide will always use emotion to make buying decisions, and unfortunately, 80% of the time we think about the negative facts versus of the positive.
Usually you make poor buying decisions, by purchasing a cheaper, lower quality product or you make no decisions at all and leave the store.
HOW THIS STORY IS RELATED TO YOU
Your website is like Best Buy. You advertise and get customers into your door. Your featureless, unfriendly, content-less product webpages are the Dirty, Ugly, Sweaty Mike from Best Buy. In other words, you have little chance of making a sale on that product webpage.
Why bother wasting your time and energy loading your website with products that will never sell? Now it is possible if you add a million products to your website, the odd products will sell, and random impulsive buyers will make random purchases as well, and maybe you will have a successful store. However, for the majority of us with fewer than a thousand products, you need to go back and look at your catalog.
Treat your website like the giant chain stores. Every product webpage is something you have in inventory, and you have to do everything in your power to sell it. Just because, you might be drop shipping most of your products, treat every product webpage as if you are stocking this product and it must be sold.
Once you understand and embrace the fact that your product webpage is your dedicated virtual salesman for your products, you will then understand what needs to be done to improve it. If you keep thinking of your product webpages as just more products and more webpages, then you will keep losing 60% of your potential customers, and thats a FACT.
DO YOU GET IT?
Instead of over exaggerating on how to over design your website, you need to focus on making your product webpages look fantastic, content rich, and SEO optimized. It amazes me how very few understand what makes a great web design.
NO, ITS NOT THE PRETTY GRAPHICS ON YOUR HOMEPAGE, HEADER AND FOOTER THAT WILL MAKE YOU LOOK LIKE YOUR TOP COMPETITOR.
It is the professional photos that you choose to use (and pay for), the videos you make (and pay for), the headlines you invent, and the sales copy you write is what will make all the difference between you and the competition.
This does not mean that you should go to Google Images to find your photos, and get some clip art to make your videos. If you are not skilled at those tasks, then outsource it.
If you cant afford to outsource it, then learn how to do it yourself or find an inexpensive part time designer to do the work for a flat price (we can help find you one).
ANATOMONY OF A PRODUCT WEBPAGE
I dont want to go too deep into how to do it, I just wanted to give you the idea that it must be done. Here is the product webpage that I like to reference because they took my recommendations to heart and did a pretty decent job themselves.
Product Sample A
Category Sample A
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Once you create beautiful HTML descriptions, great images, FAQ, Sales Copy, Videos, etc. on every product webpage, then you will immediately see better conversions. In addition, this content can then be multi channeled over to other websites such as eBay.
MEASURING VISITOR BEHAVIOR ON THE PRODUCT WEBPAGES
Once you are happy with your new product webpage, then it is time to monitor it. Using TEA in Shopping Cart Elite you can group all your high engaged visitors who abandoned the product webpages and start looking at the screen shots of what they did on that page.
Here is an example of a screenshot generated by TEA. The screen shot shows you that the visitor engaged with
Now this website has a very good product webpage, however, it seems like the potential customer had more questions that were not addressed in the sales copy. He tried live help but it was past business hours (notice it was 9pm EST in the screenshot). So after spending two minutes on the website he left without making a sale. Maybe he will return another day, maybe not. Maybe the store owner should see how many sales he loses due to his limited business hours, and consider providing after business hours support. All of this needs to be implemented and tested, and best of all you can see all of this information in TEA (Google Analytics does not have this).
If TEA tells you that you have Poor Product Sales Copy you must first start with optimizing your product webpages, there is no need to look for a magic formula or shortcuts if your product webpage looks like disgusting sweaty Mike from Best Buy. Once you have optimized your product webpage then you need to fine tune it until the Poor Product Sales Copy is eliminated from each product webpage.
TEA is available in Shopping Cart Elite for all customers.
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