Monday, March 31, 2014

Convert Shoppers Into Buyers: 5 Things Your Ecommerce Website Absolutely Must Have

Online shopping

It’s been reported that 83% of online users have made an Internet purchase and 73% of people shop online because it saves them time. With so many people shopping on the Internet these days, how do you get people to buy from your site instead of the competition? How do you get your site to stand out from the rest?

Here are 5 things you should have for a successful ecommerce website that converts shoppers into buyers:

1. Simple design
Don’t overwhelm shoppers with too much information on one page. Keep your product descriptions short and sweet, but if it is necessary to provide further details, use tabs with headings to organize information into bite-size chunks.

An example of this is the product page for gud’s Mango Moonbreeze body wash. The page is simple, which allows the shopper to just focus on the product without being distracted by unnecessary information. At the bottom you’ll see a box with tabs for customer Reviews, Ingredients, and “How to Use It” if a shopper does want more information.

gud product page

2. Call to action
In regular life people don’t want to be told what to do, but shopping online is a different story. People sometimes need a little nudge or a big bright button so they know what to do to make a purchase or how to proceed in order to business with you. Calls to action can include phrases like “Add to cart”, “Buy now”, or “Get more information”. I recommend reading this article by Cameron Chapman about call to action buttons to get a better idea on how to incorporate them into the design of your site.

3. Reviews
People are more likely to purchase products based on a recommendation, especially if that recommendation is from a family or friend. However, people also like to see other buyers’ experiences with your products. You can post reviews of your products on your blog, on social media, or right on your website. If you’ve ever visited Amazon.com, you know that there is a whole section dedicated to reviews for each product. I don’t know about you, but I spend time reading through the reviews before I decide whether or not to make a purchase.

Reviews also give you an opportunity to improve products or product offerings. If there is an item that is getting poor reviews, maybe you can find a vendor who offers something similar with better quality.

4. Responsive design
In a previous post I mentioned the importance of responsive design and that anaZana now offers responsive design websites. With so many people shopping via their tablets or mobile phone nowadays, your site needs to be able to adapt to each user and provide a very seamless shopping experience.

5. Lead capture form
What if a person browsing your site is still shopping and hasn’t quite decided to make a purchase yet? Are you just going to let them leave and possibly forget about you forever?

Entice people to give you their email address with a special discount or exclusive content delivered to their inbox. This lead capture form could be placed at the top or bottom of each page or in a sidebar if space permits.

In the screenshot below, you can see that Home Depot added a lead capture form in the left sidebar at the bottom of their website.

Home Depot footer


Are you using all of these elements to convert shoppers to buyers? If you need help integrating these suggestions on your anaZana hosted website, don’t hesitate to contact us!

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