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Unlike online stores, brick-and-mortar stores give you the the advantage of closely examining the product by being able to pick it up, look at it from every angle, feel it and read the information found on the packaging. And when consumers are used to that kind of interaction and expect it of from retailers regardlessly, then e-commerce sites need to meet those expectations by trying to make the online sopping experience as close as possible to offline shopping experience.
There are many sites on the net that have little or no information in their description of the product at hand. And trust us, you cannot afford to have customers left confused or unaware about the specifics of the product, because they will go elsewhere, right to your competitors.
It’s simple isn’t it? All you have to do is provide as much product information as possible. Some examples of details that you may want to include in your product description are as follows: Colour, sizes, types, dimensions, weight, accessories, etc. For example, with an online clothing e-tailer, you may want to include such things as the different sizes and colors available, a size chart, the thickness of the product, wash and dry instructions, and other pertinent information that would help the shopper make an informed decision.
Let’s have a look at an example set forth by one of our clients who uses our Halixo shopping cart software.
1) This is the brief introduction description to the product. Just a brief paragraph, you do not want to overwhelm your visitors with the specs right away. Offer the specs in a tabbed box that they can click should they choose to.
2) These are the options for this particular two-way radio. If you didn’t provide them with these options, then they will most likely go elsewhere to purchase this product with the right frequency and channels. Nobody wants to buy the wrong product, especially when you know exactly what you need.
3) Even more options! Once again, ensure that your shoppers are making an informed purchase and that they are getting the exact product they need. Besides, you don’t want customers returning products because you didn’t provide a sufficient description.
4) Even more images from different views. Whatever you can do to help the customer make an informed purchase. It is as if they are shopping at a brick-n-mortar store.
Well, it depends on your product. In this case, this is amount of information is not sufficient due to the complexity of two-way radios and the amount of specs that go along with it. This is why our client went even further by providing a world more of information to help make the shopper comfortable in buying from them. Just have a look at the below screen shot to notice that there are tabbed boxes with information on things like accessories, videos, more specs, articles, more images, reviews, and so on. Learn from the successes of other e-tailers to help your store convert more visitors by doing things such as providing detailed or sufficient product descriptions.
Ever wonder what ticks off shoppers most when they are browsing your online store? More importantly, what drives them to abandon their shopping cart all of a sudden? There are many reasons for this but time and space will not allow us to cover each factor, so let us take a close look at the number one reason why visitors abandon shopping carts during an online purchase.
Required registration, there, we said it! Forrester Research reports that 23% of customers abandoned the last online store that asked them to register. And how do you fix this? Do not make it mandatory for your shoppers to register in order for them to checkout. In other words, allow them to checkout without creating an account. By choosing this option none of their user information will be kept in site’s records, however, the shoppers will not be able to review their order status, nor keep track of their previous orders. But the important thing is that they checkout quickly and painlessly; without creating an account and giving more information than they need to. Have a look at how we have the checkout process set up with Halixo in order to give this kind of freedom for shoppers:
Notice how we’ve got three options for shoppers to choose from. The third one allowing them to checkout with registration (marked with an arrow pointing down on it). But one might ask, but what is the difference? These shoppers have to put in the same personal information regardless of whether they create an account or continue on as a guest. The difference is that their information is not stored into the site’s database. A lot of shoppers resist registration because they are afraid of receiving spam sales emails.
So the moral of the story is, listen to your customers and give them what they want. If it’s ensuring them that their information is safe and will not lead them to receiving unwanted emails, then so be it. Whatever it will take to make them happy in completing the purchase. After all, it’s the sale we are going after, not their personal information and email. And fortunately, Halixo is optimized to attain the most important goal of the online store: sales, sales, sales!
One of the biggest challenges of having a Website, let alone an online store, is deciding what content to put on it and what gets the top priority. This excludes all of the useless content that many businesses put on their Websites. We are talking about good, useful content that provides actual value to visitors. When you have an overload of content, you make your site look too busy and may distract your shoppers from paying attention to what is more important.
Fortunately, we’ve got a solution for that as well, and it’s called tabbed boxes. One might ask, what are tabbed boxes? Well, we will let the following image answer that question for you on our behalf.
You will notice from the above screen shot that the “description” tabbed box is the one that is active right, and thereby presents the content that pertains to it. In the next screen shot, you will notice that the “images” tabbed box is the one that is active and therefore displays images right under it.
Just imagine how messy the site would look if tried present all of the content all at once, without such a method of organizing it for your viewers. It would confuse the visitors. Now here comes the next question, does the Halixo shopping cart contain tabbed boxes? Where do you think we got the screen shots from? Just another example of how we keep our shopping cart software updated to meet the industry standards of effective e-commerce practices.
January 5th, 2010
