Your Online store website is there for one reason, to sell a product. Make sure you think about these easy tips to help your store achieve records.
Unless you’re the size of Amazon, you might have found it’s hard to attract people to your website. You have to do a thousand times more work than Amazon for a fraction of their sales.
That’s because you’re small, new, and people either can’t find you or don’t trust you. Your job is to change that. It’s time to be found and build trust.
I’ll help you do that.
The first thing you need to start with is an overall amazing online store website. That’s an article of its own.
I’ll just say you need it and then move to the details of what you need to make it all work for eCommerce.
Good Content
Good content for your online store website is at the center of your growth.
Your products aren’t likely to draw people to your website, it’s the content that will do it. Good content is at the center of all good strategies.
Story
Tell a story that weaves one or a few of your products into it. Running a fitness store? Tell a story of your recent outing, pictures and all.
Fashion? Tell the story of your night on the town with pictures to cement the story and the products that made you look like a million bucks.
Teach
Tell people something new about your product and how it works.
Food companies are great at teaching people different ways of using their product.
Frame your product differently by teaching people a new way to use it. Share on XEver seen a recipe on the back of a box? That’s a great strategy and one you can learn from.
You can even tie teaching into a contest. Give people the opportunity to show others how they use your product and win a prize too!
Describe
If anybody’s going to buy your product from your online store website, they better know what they’re getting.
Make sure you aren’t just throwing up one picture and a single line description.
Take the time to offer people lots of pictures. Include every angle, close-ups, far aways, everything.
Pictures tell the story of your business, and product.
Someone should be able to visualize the product in their hands just by the pictures. A short video also would be awesome!
You need more, though. Use some words to help describe and give the story that pictures can’t tell.
What are the dimensions of the product? What’s it made of? Maybe even a bit about how it’s made.
The more useful text you use to describe your product, the better understood it is.
Not only that but you’ll get a bump from search engines that depend on text to rank your product pages.
Offer
This isn’t necessarily about good content but you have to be ready to capture visitors information once they find good content.
Offer new customers an awesome first time coupon for signing up for your email list.
Don’t let good content turn into one time content. Make sure visitors last.
Good content will help, but can people find it easily?
Easy Product Navigation
How easy is it for people to get from one page to another?
Is there a menu but it’s hidden behind a hamburger menu? Not everyone knows what those are.
If someone lands on your home page, can they find what they’re looking for?
Two of the most important things that should be on your home page are:
- Featured product(s)
- Top level categories
Clear Categories
Not just any categories will do, though. Your categories should be clear and make sense in the scheme of the product type you’re selling.
If you try to cover too much ground on your store to start, that’s a big risk. You’ll be a jack of all trades, master of none.
Don’t try to be a sports store, beauty store, electronics store, auto store, and more all in one. Leave that to Amazon because they have the resources.
When you’re a small shop, stick with your specialty and go deep.
Few Clicks
Accessing any product should need only a few clicks. Three at most but two is preferred.
Navigating to a product should take no more than two or three clicks. Share on XOne of the reasons I mentioned your home page having featured products?
They’re probably popular and you want it easy for people to get to them.
Clear Product Page
Navigating around a product page should be easy and clear.
Having everything on the page all at once is a mess, don’t do that.
On the other hand, it should be easy to get the all pictures, a full description, and product details (size, weight, etc.)
I like product pages that have a very short description (one short sentence) followed by some bullet points.
Large pictures are better than small and they should be easy to navigate to them all.
I want more information available but I don’t want to be overwhelmed when I get to a product page.
A product page should be clear, simple, and visually appealing. If it’s not, the page runs the risk of losing my trust and interest.
A product page is the center of an online store website. That means you should spend a lot of time perfecting this page.
When you’re just starting, nobody knows about you. How do you let people know about you?
Useful Advertising
Sometimes the only way for a new online store website is to pay for advertising.
The problem is, most advertising is bad.
Very bad.
I don’t want to see a product that’s not relevant and then just see a picture of it.
Make sure your advertising shows the wow factor of the product.
I also want to see products that are relevant. You can do that through re-marketing or at least targeting the right audience.
Facebook and Google make it easy to target a specific audience.
Learn how to target before you spend any money.
Sometimes you just have to make the offer too good to refuse.
Even if you lose at first, bringing in a valuable new customer might be worth it.
Let me recap:
- Show your product wow factor.
- Make it relevant.
- Make a can’t refuse offer.
You may take a hit at first with advertising. If you can’t take the hit, you may be in the wrong business.
There’s more hits you’ll need to take!
Give Some Away
Sometimes you just have to give a product or two away.
Influencers are used to getting products for free and many will gladly accept your offer.
You’ll see some invaluable benefits to giving your product away to influencers:
- Better product visibility.
- Link to your website means better SEO.
- Increase demand for your product (so and so wants it? I want it too!)
Sometimes you can get your store going just by sending out some free samples to influencers.
You’ll get your product in the hands of the right people, people who influence others.
Influencers can help you reach more people in an organic way. Share on XMake it a point to give away at least a few things every month. The more you give away, the more you’ll benefit.
Don’t just start handing your product out, though. Find the right influencers for your industry and approach them.
They’re used to being approached and will either tell you sure, send it to me or no. It never hurts to ask.
I’ve given you a lot of great pointers on growing an awesome online store website. Now it’s your job to make sure your website is ready.
Prepare Your Shop
You might start your store out and have little traffic. That could change in a second.
Make sure your website can scale to traffic, it’s important. If it can’t, you can potentially lose a lot of business.
There’s nothing worse than being featured somewhere that goes viral and your website shuts down.
A platform and host that can handle traffic is important to eCommerce.
Your website has to load fast and always be up.
Online shoppers have high expectations and you either meet expectations or lose a customer forever.
And then there’s security. With an online store you’re responsible for people’s personal information.
You either commit to keeping your visitors information safe or you’ll lose trust.
Not only that but you have to balance all of this with a process that is extremely easy for visitors to use.
Ready to talk about your online store website to make sure you’re on the right track?
You can either contact me directly or better yet, check out the free Online Presence Report.