Make Your Home Page Brilliant

As the owner of an online shop, you have to think about your home page as if it were a physical shopfront. In other words, it needs to accurately represent your brand and, more importantly, encourage your customer to probe further. One simple and widespread way of doing this is by inserting numerous calls to action. If you have them already, are they included in clickable buttons that take you straight to the products? Are they compelling, or are they a bit boring and straightforward? Consider these questions when looking at your calls to action. They can make a big difference.

Any case of ‘high traffic, low sales’ must be met with the question: how do we get more people from the home page to my products page? Calls to action are one obvious way. But what about the basic navigation of your website? Is it as easy as it can be? Navigation bars normally sit at the top of your website. Depending on your business, you can include different areas – an About Us page or FAQs, for example – that give your customer more options to look for. Moreover, another navigation bar at the bottom looks highly professional and gives customers an even greater opportunity to navigate your online shop.

Interact With Customers

If you are a relatively new online shop, customers may like the look of your products but perhaps lack the same trust in you that they have in, say, eBay or Amazon. Uncertainty will always cause your customer to click away, so the best way to counteract this feeling is through engaging with as many customers as possible. By showing the human aspect to your shop through a detailed ‘About Us’ page and answering customer questions, you are building a bridge between your website and its visitors.

The easiest way to do this? Insert a live chat function into your ecommerce website design, with ‘Chat With Us!’ buttons dotted around the website. This enables customers to immediately receive answers to any questions that they have. Instant gratification is always a good thing to offer. Moreover, if you haven’t already, make full use of social media to interact with customers and market your products in a language and tone that suits the platform you are using.

Optimise the Checkout Process

So, you’re aware that you are getting high traffic but comparatively few sales, and you want to do something about. A good place to start would be to look at the data for basket abandonment rate. Chances are that the figure will be high. Research suggests that between 60 and 70 percent of all shopping carts are abandoned by their users. In other words, it is highly likely that people have selected your product, added it to their basket, and then clicked off for some reason. Your job as the owner of an online shop is to funnel more customers through to the payment stage.

To combat this issue, make sure that you have abandoned basket emails set up for any customer who leaves your shop with items in their basket. You could even include a discount offer inside the same email. On a more basic level, how many steps are there in between the ‘Add to Basket’ button and the payment details? Look over it carefully and consider ways in which the process could be made quicker. Amazon, unsurprisingly, is quite good at this – making the process from product to payment as easy as possible.

Start a Mailing List… If You Haven’t Already

Any successful ecommerce website finds a way to stay in touch with its customers, to maintain its presence in their minds. A beautiful website is often not enough to achieve this goal. One hugely popular and successful way of reminding customers that you exist is through creating a bulk mailing list – something that keeps growing from day one until, eventually, you have a powerful base of customers to whom you can regularly send important information about your website.

If you haven’t done this already, well, I’d suggest you get started. If you have, however, perhaps consider whether you can use popups on your online shop that entice people to enter their email address. Make sure that you are targeting people who, in accordance with data, are genuinely interested in your products. And, of course, don’t overload people with custom emails, yet at the same time send enough emails to consistently remind them of your website. There is a fine line to be struck here but, when done well, mailing lists can be a fantastic way to grow a customer base.