Are you struggling to get the most out of your product listing? Well, you’ve come to the right place. One of the reasons e-commerce businesses struggle is because the online marketplace is saturated so you need to work hard to stand out from the crowd. You may not believe you don’t need a blog help you do so. Building a blog is essential, though.
Having a blog promotes trust, helps you expand your customer base and creates new leads, to name just a few of the benefits. However, all of the work that goes into developing a fantastic blog for your business will be wasted if you don’t put effort into optimising your e-commerce product listing.
Despite the rapid growth of the e-commerce industry, many companies find it hard increase their conversion rate. People tend to focus on optimising their shopping carts and checkout pages, disregarding the importance of optimising their product pages. It’s vital to create product pages with high conversion rates. We are going to explain how you can optimise your product listing in 11 simple steps.
Without further ado, let’s dive into the detail.
Analyse your e-commerce product pages
Take some time to analyse the different aspects of your product pages to find the ones that you need to work on. Your aim is to give customers a good shopping experience, so you’ll need to know what your customers get from your product pages.
Your product page should engage customers with a clear design and provide enough information to help customers decide to buy. The pages should load quickly, tell visitors about your brand and showcase your products with high quality photography. The copy on those pages should be compelling in order to hold customers’ attention. If the pages provide visitors with a good experience, that’s great. If any of these elements are missing or are not as they should be, endeavour to optimise these pages. This is a sure way to increase your conversion rate and boost sales.
Provide users with detailed product content
As well as having high-quality photos of your products clearly displayed, a first-class product page should give potential customers detailed information about your products. The content should highlight both the features and benefits of your products. This can persuade people to buy from you. A study concluded that 88% of people consider detailed product content as being critically important. The information on a product page should include:
- A product title.
- Important features and component parts.
- What material the product is made from.
- Instructions about how to care for and maintain the product.
- The price of the product.
- Relevant information about the brand.
- The size and dimensions of the product.
It is a good idea to write engaging product descriptions which are polite and have a personal touch. Give your visitors a reason to choose your products as opposed those offered by someone else.
Don’t forget to optimise your page content for search engines. By doing this you can make sure you rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) and thus attract more visitors to your site.
When you set out to write good product descriptions, there are a few things to keep in mind. You should keep them short and to the point and make sure they are clear. Write engaging copy and make use of keywords so that you can rank well in search engines. Use headings and bullet points to make the descriptions easier to read, and make sure all the content is useful and relevant. Remember the all-important call-to-action too. Giving all this information to visitors allows you to help your customers at any stage of their purchasing journey.
E-commerce product pages must feature a clear call-to-action (CTA)
Calls-to-action are another vital element of good product page design, as they serve to boost your conversion rate. Therefore, you’ll want to make sure a call-to-action (CTA) is included on all your product pages, because if you want people to purchase from you, you need to tell them to buy. Clear CTAs instruct your customer what to do next, so make sure they are clearly visible. Don’t try to use fancy or complicated language in CTAs. Use simple phrases like ‘Add to Cart’ and ‘Buy Now’. Make your CTAs stand out through use of colour. Prominent CTAs can give you a great boost in sales.
Optimise your e-commerce product page for mobile
Mobile e-commerce is growing more quickly than the e-commerce in general. The majority of people in the US now shop on their mobiles. That fact, coupled with Google’s mobile-first indexing update, means that if your product pages are not mobile-friendly, you might lose out on traffic and sales. When you optimise your product pages for mobile you can improve the experience for your customers, allow them to buy from anywhere at any time. It also means you can provide a streamlined checkout process using digital wallets.
You can make the shopping experience even better for your customers by providing them with apps for both iOS and Android devices. If you have the resources and budget available, you can develop and launch your own shopping app as a way to increase your e-commerce website’s conversion rate.
Increase trust using customer reviews and ratings
Good product reviews and ratings help you to build trust with your customers. They help to lessen or eliminate any lingering doubts potential customers may have about your brand or your products before they decide to buy. This makes people more likely to buy and so increases conversions. Research shows that as many as 85% of customers trust reviews on an e-commerce website as much as they would a personal recommendation. People have a habit of checking what previous buyers say about an item or product. This helps them decide whether or not a particular product is the one they want to purchase. That is why it’s important to include this type of social proof on your site.
Be sure to make it as easy as possible for customers to rate or review your products. Lots of people prefer not to leave reviews, but like to rate something out of 5 stars instead. Make sure you provide customers with an opportunity to do this, write a review, or to do both as they like.
Reviews also let you see what people like and dislike about your products. Having a small number of negative reviews can be helpful, as your customers will realise that the reviews are genuine. If a problem is identified in a negative review, you have a duty to solve the problem or fix the fault. Always listen to what people have to say and try to address any issues they may have. Fixing problems for people will make your customers more loyal to you and increase your credibility. Display average ratings of products on your product pages for the benefit of those who don’t have time to leave a review. This means they can take in the information via a quick scan of the page.
Cross-sell and upsell relevant products
You shouldn’t miss a chance to promote other products when you’re selling to customers, even though most of your focus will be on selling customers the products that they are specifically looking for. You can suggest that people take a look at similar products you have to offer, or recommend other relevant products when people are viewing a given product page. This can help you engage with people and encourage them to buy other things from you. It can help shoppers meet all their shopping needs and wants. Many brands use upselling and cross-selling techniques to maximise the average order size of a customer’s shop. You can display products which are often brought together to help people buy all they might need in one go. You can also showcase personal recommendations based on products they have looked at or brought in the past to improve your conversion rate.
Give your e-commerce product pages engaging titles
It’s critical to give your product pages catchy titles that are sure to engage customers. The title is often the first impression visitors to your site get of your product. It should be a single line to hook people in a catch their attention. Make your titles stand out by increasing the font size and placing them in the centre of the page. You can use contrasting colours to make your titles more eye-catching. Visitors to your site attach a lot of importance to a product title, so getting this element of your product page right is great recipe for success in e-commerce. Plus it’s a fabulous way to optimise your product pages.
E-commerce product page speed
The loading speed of your product pages is crucial to the success of your e-commerce business, so you need to ensure it is optimal. Everyone is short for time in today’s world, and so buyers have a short attention span. Therefore, poor loading speeds can put people off.
While you do need to use elements of different media on your site to make it attractive and keep people interested, you should try to keep pages as light as you can. You can use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to test your page loading speeds. This tool will not only give you a general overview of your website loading speeds, but will also give you suggestions as to how you can improve this factor.
Making visitors’ shopping experience as fast and easy as possible is a sure-fire way to boost your website’s conversion rate.
Create a sense of urgency
One of the best ways to increase the conversion rate of your product pages is to create a sense of urgency in shoppers. Use the power of FOMO (the fear of missing out). Make customers think that if they fail to take action immediately, they risk missing out on a great opportunity. You can do this by announcing a limited-time sale and that they will miss out on a deal if they’re too late. One great way to show the time left before an offer or sale ends is to add a countdown clock to a product page.
Another thing you can do is to highlight the stock levels of a particular product and let people know how many are left. This might serve to give people a nudge and make them buy the product while stocks last. Adding these elements to product pages help create a sense of urgency in your customers and thus help to drive sales.
Shipping costs and pricing
Obviously, you need to include the price of your products on your product pages. However, it is also essential that you clearly show the shipping and packing costs of each product. This is something very few e-commerce sites remember to do. Often, businesses are not transparent about their charges which erodes people’s trust in your brand and puts people off. Make sure you include any VAT as well. If you are upfront about the costs involved in a purchase, people are more likely to trust you, which can increase conversion rates. A great way to boost sales is to offer free shipping to customers, as this makes a purchase seem less risky.
Display the return policy on your ecommerce product page
You should attempt to remain as transparent as possible in your e-commerce business. A fantastic way you can do this is by outlining your returns policy on your product page. Customers must be made aware of the steps they may need to go through should they wish to return something. If you give people this information upfront, they know what they will be getting into before deciding to buy a product. Displaying a returns policy on your product page will make things clear, and make things seem more straightforward. This may help dispel any doubts a buyer may have after they have brought a product too. Make the returns policy as easy for people to spot.
Conclusion
It takes time and effort to drive traffic to your e-commerce site. All that effort would be pointless if you fail to optimise your product pages in order to boost your conversion rate. We hope that by following the steps outlined above you can boost the number of conversions and encourage people to shop with you. By bearing these 11 simple steps in mind when designing your product page, you can get your e-commerce business off to a truly great start.