Ecommerce

Have you been to threadless.com? It’s a website that highlights graphic designers, and some of the best t-shirt designs on the web. It has also been featured on a number of the top web design blogs as one of the best online ecommerce in the apparel industry.

Here are a few reasons why I love Threadless.com:

• They constantly update the web design, and continue to stay on top of web design trends;
• they know how to promote both the apparel and the designers;
• every day they add new products, and continue to use social media to promote each new design;
• they have designs for all different styles;
• their pricing is extremely competitive among other top online apparel retailers.

If you have a few minutes to browse their online store, you will see why so many people continue to return to their site, and why it’s one of the best ecommerce sites in the business.

Do you consider your product category page a marketing vehicle? Have you invested as much time in the design and layout of your category landing page as you have for your homepage, product page or shopping cart? To run an ecommerce successfully, every page in your shopping workflow needs to be designed creatively, organized properly, and constantly changing.

Here are a few must have elements on any category landing page:

• Headline call-to-action (if you are running a promotion on your website, it’s always good practice including it on your category page so that your vistiors know what deals they have available before entering your product pages);
• large product thumbnails (most ecommerce fall short when organizing products on their category landing pages because the category images are too small);
• filtering options (if your products have a variety of characteristics, its always smart to let your visitors narrow down their product search quickly using filtering options);
• sorting options (allowing your vistiors to perform a quick sorting filter to change the order of your products lets those customer who are shopping based on price find what they are looking for as quickly as possible).

If you are able to include these elements as basic features on your category landing pages you will find conversion rates from those pages will increase, and it will increase the enjoyment of browsing your website.

How often do you read the product reviews when you are researching your next (big or small) purchase? Do you find them helpful or do you think they are fake? As bad as it sounds, there are many online retailers that don’t approve reviews based on the rating they have submitted because they think that any negative feedback will hinder sales. Not allowing all reviews to be posted on your product pages starts to create an unrealistic review of your products. When you go to a website that only has positive (five star) ratings you start to ask yourself if they are legitimate comments or if they are added by employees at the company in question.

Allowing negative reviews to be posted on your product pages gives the customer a fair view of each item, expands the limits of your products, and allows the online retailer to suggest another product that better meets the basic requirements of the purchaser. Of course, you still need to moderate your product reviews for inappropriate content or spam submissions, but always consider your negative reviews as a sales function or insights into product reviews that you didn’t obtain internally when developing your products.

Have you thought about which elements on your ecommerce product page are the most important? Or have you thought about what the main call-to-actions are, or what’s driving your conversions from the product page? Other than your homepage, the product page is the most important page on any ecommerce website. Being able to understand what the important pieces of information are, and what information is just nice to have, will enable you to design each element proportionally.

Here are the top 5 most important things to include on any product page: 

1. High-res images – No matter what the product is, you should always include one or more high-res images. This allows your customers to see every little detail about the product without having to visit a store.
2. Detailed product description – This is one of the most commonly neglected pieces of information on most ecommerce, and if done well you will find the number of customer service requests about each product will decline.
3. Related items – If you have products that are related to other items in your ecommerce, then it’s always good practice to suggest other items the visitor might be interested in (cross-sell).
4. Comments – Most websites are nervous about posting orignal customer comments on their website because they fear that the posts will not all be positive, but if you are an online shopper you know the importance of negative feedback. Negative feedback allows your visitors to see both sides of the fence, and provides more real product information behind their purchase.
5. Share tools – As an online marketer I know the importance of building your brand exposure outside of your website, and giving your visitors the ability to share your products among friends will drastically help grow online sales.

Of course there are many other great features to add to a product page, but if you are looking for the best bang for your buck when looking at high conversion tools to add to your pages, then these five elements will help you a lot.