Your ecommerce website should convert interested visitors into customers. Your potential customers will spend a significant amount of time looking at your website and so you should optimize it for them and potential sales. The design of your pages and the website as a whole should not only give your customers a reason to complete purchases but also make it easier for them to do so. To achieve this, you need to build a professional-looking website that also includes elements that improve user experience and encourage sales. Here are six elements that all high-converting ecommerce websites have.
An Attractive Hero Fold
Above-the-fold content is the content you first see when you open a website before you start scrolling. This content should quickly answer two questions:
- Why should customers choose you over your competition?
- What do you provide?
You can answer in different ways, including showcasing your unique value proposition, showing how you solve a problem that customers have, and showing why you are the better option. Answer these questions while connecting the answers to the content or ad that brought them to your ecommerce website in the first place. A typical alternative for ecommerce websites is showcasing the different products they have available and accompanying sales or promotions.
Regardless of how you use the hero fold, it should be attractive, clear, and crisp to encourage people to scroll down the page to see what you offer.
High Quality Images and Videos
Visual presentation of products is critical on ecommerce websites. Because customers cannot hold the products they are buying before doing so, they have to be presented in the right way. This can be achieved through composition, shooting different angles, and, critically, high-quality images.
High-quality images say a lot about a business, such as how it carries itself and how much it cares about user experience. It is, therefore, best to find a company with experience shooting product images. Make sure you choose an established company with a sizable body of work before going forward so you have something to work with when you start discussing your website’s images.
If you can, provide a 360-degree view and have a model wear the product if possible. Both of these help people better understand things like dimensions, critical for retail and fashion businesses and brands. Adding videos can provide an additional persuasive effect. Video works very well to show how to wear or use a product while also showing potential customers why they should do so.
Optimized Product Copy
Textual content is critical for all websites for different reasons, but it is critical for ecommerce websites. Remember, you are not only fighting your competitors, but you are also trying to convince people to complete purchases. Creating fun, optimized and engaging copy will help with both.
To get started, understand your audience, understand your brand and create its voice, and familiarize yourself with SEO. The first two will help you know how to talk to your potential customers, while the latter will help your ecommerce website rank higher and thus be easier to find.
It is also a good idea to consider shifting from only talking about features to talking about advantages and benefits. Answer the question, “what does this product do for me and why should I buy it?”.
No Distractions and Clear Calls to Action
The website’s design should be clear, easy to navigate, and developed to help convert visitors. Start by considering tabs instead of multiple links to keep clutter at a minimum. Next, create clear calls to action that stand out from the rest of the page. Make the buttons clean and use colors that help them easier to see.
Lastly, you need to ensure the ecommerce website is easy to use on mobile devices which means it has to be responsive. The number of mobile shoppers is always increasing, and you do not want to miss sales from this massive demographic. Check your website to make sure everything is clear, there is no clutter, and it is easy to use on smaller devices.
Trust Signals
Trust signals have less to do with user experience and functionality and more to do with helping convince potential customers to complete their purchases. Showcasing that your business and its products are trustworthy is key to reducing abandoned cart rates.
There are several trust signals you can add, starting with social media symbols. You can ask your web developer to add these for you. Websites and pages with these badges signal that the business has nothing to hide, it has an established online presence, and thus can be trusted.
Your contact information should go hand in hand with your social media icons. Let people know that your business is a registered and trustworthy business by making it easier for people to find you physically and virtually.
The second is payment assurance and trust badges. You want to display badges of the different payment options and their certifications as well as badges that show your website and its payment options are secure.
Critically, you should also include reviews and ratings — these are more for your internal pages but they can be added anywhere on the website. Social signals are very strong drivers and conversions of sales because if people leave positive reviews, people see they can trust the business.
A Flowing Checkout
Your checkout process should be straightforward, simple, fast, and transparent. People should not be forced to try to figure it out because they will abandon their carts if they are forced to do this. This makes abandoned cart rates one of the strongest indicators of a flawed checkout process.
Go through your checkout process to try to find potential bottlenecks. Once you fix those, consider accepting guest checkouts. Many people do not like signing up when trying to check out. This is an unnecessary burden that you should remove. Lastly, consider adding a progress indicator. This shows people the steps remaining to complete the checkout process.
These are just some of the elements high-converting ecommerce websites have in common. They are elements you should consider adding to your website as they can increase conversions.