Professional Ecommerce Strategies – Part 1

We’ve been spending a lot of time recently scratching deep in our barrel of knowledge (and other peoples) to squeeze every last conversion out of our clients’ sites.

For us professional web design is almost a science, the creative design and branding is only one layer of a complicated process that requires real diligence and attention to detail. The correct combination of design, usability, SEO (top Google Rankings) and calls to action/sales hooks can make or break a site.

Below are some of our top tips for creating an ecommerce site that rockets your sales conversions skywords.

Searching

The search box could be engineered to only return products and not news/resources and sitemaps etc.

If you must have a site search then fine, but perhaps have a second search bar just for products. In any case, place ‘Find Products’ or similar so the user knows to expect products to appear in the results page.

Auto Focus

Auto focusing the cursor on the search field on page load is a nice touch and is popular on sites such as Google and Youtube.

It basically allows your site visitors to just start typing immediately rather than having to click to select the search box. Sound lazy, well yes that’s the point… internet users are lazy and don’t want to be challenged at all so it’s well worth your development teams time if it saves the user time.

Auto Complete

Having Auto-completing search suggestions popup as the user types will help to clarify what products you do and don’t stock. As well as increasing the odds of returning related products in the search results.

More over, it’s another time saver which users will appreciate.

Share, Share, Share

Share Links are a dead easy way to help promote your website and encourage people to add you as a friend which is a great SEO and buzz tool.

Benefits and Hooks

We always try to list the main key benefits on the home page, such as Wide selection, Fast delivery, UK based, etc.

We also like to place the telephone number at the top and testimonials to instil trust.

One simple special offer banner is usually enough to provide a strong hook. This banner could rotate through 2 or 3 offers.

All this should not be to the detriment of usability of course.

Social Proof

Displaying some popular products on the homepage that other customers are snapping up can prompt an impulse purchase. Perhaps actively selling items while that celebrity is still wearing them or an industry pro recommends at that moment in time.

A stat for the number of each item sold this week or the last time it was purchased could be used to prove the items popularity.

In a similar vain, an ‘Other customers that bought this also bought’ section is another powerful selling tool. These blocks of targeted feature products we’re pioneered by Amazon and have proliferated to other online retailers such as ASOS and John Lewis.

It’s cognitive and it’s powerful, so use it just like the pro’s do!

Personalised recommendations

Displaying a ‘You Might Like:’ block helps to create a customised shopping experience. Products can be selected based on items the user has viewed and/or purchased on a previous site visit.

Filtering

We like to make products searchable by Brand, Model, Gender, size, price range (to -> from price), colour (multiple selection), etc.

All products in a category should be displayed to start with but customers should then be able to filter (or drill down) to specific items of interest to them.

Why make customers look through a bunch of items they aren’t interested in, it’s annoying and cumbersome. That said, a badly designed search and filter system will be more cumbersome, so it’s important to get it right.

An extension on this idea would be a ‘Compare this’ feature allowing users to select items via a tickbox and filter out the rest leaving only the items they like. The Dell website makes good use of this.