When was the last time you walked down the shopping street in a city and stopped to admire a fabulous window display? I’m sure you remember the shop and what they sold! First impressions are critical for customer appeal.
In your online store, your homepage is the store front, the entry-point of your site. This is where you start seducing your visitor down the funnel. And it takes just a quick glance, maybe three seconds, for someone to form an opinion about you and your company and decide whether he or she will bounce off or make it to the checkout stage.
In this post, we’ve compiled the best techniques used by some great WooCommerce websites and the top WordPress 2015 @inc5000 websites that you can put in practice in your ecommerce.
Let’s see what your website should include…
Large and Moving Background Images
To give users maximum impact as soon as they land on your site, a large and moving background image is a good alternative. One of my favorites examples is a website of the construction industry: DuChâteau® website. DuChâteau® is an encompassing lifestyle brand, specializing in the fine manufacture of luxury architectural finishes from hardwood and vinyl flooring to wall coverings, doors and beyond.
Great images of products
This is very critical for success. Use only high quality pictures of products to attract customers. Visitors will shoo away from shabby presentation and images. Have these pictures from different angles to provide clarity and aid selection.
A nice example is shown in JOCO Cups. They make glass reusable coffee cups and for each one, you may see at least 6 pictures from different perspectives. Do you need any more?
Good product description
In addition to pictures, the description you provide for your products needs to be comprehensive. This renders complete understanding about your product and provokes visitors to purchase them. See for example, the description of one of the products of Yousli.
Search and filter options
Only a small number of shoppers will arrive at an ecommerce site knowing the exact product they’re looking for, while most will prefer to browse and consider different options. Good navigation, proper search options and collaborative filter options are needed to support buyers to find the right product. The least time they spend in finding their pick, the better it is for you.
You may be interested in reading more about it in: Site search for e-commerce: 13 best practice tips by Graham Charlton and Nine tips to help improve your product filtering option by David Moth.
Note also that you may find different search & filter plugins that may help you to improve this feature in WordPress.
Service Support is Critical
Customer service is a key differentiation in retailing and e-commerce. We have all felt the growing frustration of waiting unnecessarily, being ignored or facing inefficiency when shopping. As a seller, you also know that it’s easier and cheaper to sell to existing customers than to go out and find new ones. Therefore, once a sale is done, you can’t forget about service support. When you provide after-sales support, trust increases with regards to your site.
Take a look at this nice FAQs section of Wootten to help shoppers.
Highlight Value of the Day
Displaying a new offer or deal every day adds a fresh element to the homepage. It both arouses and feeds the curiosity of the users. Once you have got the users hooked, it becomes a habit for them to check out the day’s deal.
To offer new deals in your WooCommerce, you may consider to use a plugin such as Pricing Deals for WooCommerce.
Nelio A/B Testing
I was very impressed by the quality of this plugin, how easy it was to set up, and the outstanding support Nelio provides. I highly recommend Nelio A/B Testing.
Josette Millar
Comparison charts
When people are searching to buy something, they want information and they want to be able to compare different options. For many people, the easiest way to compare the pros and cons of different products is to have a list of all the top products along with prices, reviews, features, and more right in front of them on one page.
Take a look at this comparison table of Best Survival Knife Guide site:
Reviews are important
According to BrightLocal, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Reading testimonials and reviews from past customers and experts always creates an impression on new buyers. Hence, allow people to review your site and products.
Upsell & Cross-sell
An upsell is to induce the customer to purchase more expensive products and a cross-sell is to sell an additional product or service to an existing customer.
A typical upselling example is: a customer purchasing a computer being up-sold an extended warranty, more storage capacity, a bigger, higher-res screen… and typical examples of cross-selling are travel agencies: when you book a flight, you’ll also receive suggestions of hotels, rental cars, and other travel related services.
A/B Test
In addition to all the previous tips, increasing conversion rates in an ecommerce (and in any website) usually involves measuring visitors, gathering insights, testing hypothesis and evaluation results. To do so, the best marketing techniques is to create A/B testing experiments.
If you want a full list of ideas of what type of A/B tests you can create in your website, you may be interested in the full series that shows you the importance of conversion rate optimization through all the marketing funnel and provide different ideas and examples to improve your website:
- Motivation – Optimizing Your Visitor’s Journey
- Acquisition – Optimizing Your Website for Customer Acquisition
- Activation (I) – How to create a great first experience in Your website
- Activation (II) – How to Improve the CheckOut Experience
- Retention – How to Retain Your Customers
- Revenue – How to Increase the Revenues on Your Website
- Referrals – How to Improve Your Customers Loyalty and Referrals
Now, let’s start to improve conversion in your ecommerce!!
Featured Image by Teerkrizkova
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