The following are some basic tips that I have learned over the years from setting up online shopping carts for clients and helping them to make their online shopping carts more profitable.
- Avoid intro movies or minimize the use of movies. You will lose many potential customers right off the bat, if they do not want to wait for the movie to load or if they can’t find the skip movie button.
- Make sure your Online Store loads quickly. If it takes too long, then you will lose potential customers before they even see your products.
- Be sure to always display stock levels, have an out-of-stock message, or not display out-of-stock items at all. Potential customers will be dissatisfied if they choose a product only to find out when placing their order that the item is out-of-stock.
- Set up your online shopping cart to be persistent, so that, when the user leaves your site and comes back later, their items are still in their cart.
- Enable customers to view their shopping basket whenever they like. It should be easily accessible.
- Make the journey to check-out as easy, quick and efficient as possible.
- Be sure that the customer doesn’t have to leave your site to check-out.
- Know and understand the customer’s journey on your online shopping cart well and constantly be on the lookout for potential problems. You can easily track the customer’s journey by setting up Google Analytics on your online shopping cart. You will need to set a “goal or conversion” which is usually a “Thank You” page that comes up when a customer completes a sale on your website. Then you will be able to analyze the journey by viewing the goal funnel which shows you where you are losing potential customers (what page they are abandoning the site).
Keep these guidelines in mind and you will be on your way to boost your online sales.
Tags: Branding, ecommerce, marketing, web design, webdesign