adeo group blog » tips for ecommerce shop

Is your ecommerce shop performing?

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

This article is about some common mistakes that are made by many people on their ecommerce shops.Some of these are very simple and some are a little more complicated, but it shows the importance of choosing the right web design company and also analysing your Google analytics and making the relevant changes to the information you are being given from that.

1.	Site Navigation – A good navigation is key, you have to offer your visitor the simplest way to find they products they are looking for. A number of visitors may be lucky enough to land on the exact product they are looking for, however for many they will arrive at your home page or may even want to look at another product after arriving at a product page.Give the visitors the options to help them search, ask them “What are you looking for?” and guide them if you can.

2.	Internal Site Search – Probably around 20% or more of visitors to your website will use your internal search. Take yourself as a visitor for example, you go to Amazon, what do you do? You enter in the search box what you are looking for. Relevant returned searches are a key to converting to sales.One mistake in internal site search is bringing back search results that just are not relevant to what was searched for, nothing worse than having to trawl through the results just to find that 2 pages down you have finally found what you are looking for.

3.	Filter Results – Personally I see this as a key area within any ecommerce site. You have to be able to filter your results by price, brand, colours etc. Depending on the site you have you should be able to choose what the filter options are. Make these relevant to the products you are selling.

4.	Product Page Content – So you have the customer at the product page, how do you make them push the add to cart button. This is the first stage in the buying process, what has to be right?Firstly the layout of the product page has to be right, position of the buttons and colours. Subtle changes can make all the difference and you should spend time on doing some split testing on the pages with button colours etc, monitor this with Google analytics and make the correct decisions based on this.Secondly Images are important, people can’t touch the item so you have to make the images as perfect as possible, even at 360 degree of the product if they are suitable for this. Thirdly product descriptions, this is key. If a user needs more information they have to be able to find it out on the page, you don’t want them searching the web to find it on someone else’s site, give them everything they need to make the buying decision. Fourth I would say give them the extra info, this relates to delivery information and costs, returns info and T&C’s. Build the confidence at all times, if they can find all this info on the page and you satisfy their questions then the chances are they will add to cart.

5.	Basket Conversion – we now have them in the basket, what’s the best way to let anyone continue through this. That’s easy; make it as simple as possible. Nobody will go through a shopping process if they find it hard, remember what may be easy to you is hard to someone else; you have to remember everyone’s skill level of using the web is different. Again build the confidence of the customer by offering contact information, returns info and delivery info.

7.	Payment Options – Giving your visitor and potentially a customer a number of ways to pay is a fantastic way to convert on those latter stages. People like to have the options to pay by whatever card they have or use Google checkout along with other providers like paypal etc.