Thankfully, my Christmas shopping has concluded and I managed to avoid the hustle and bustle of town centre Christmas season shopping by buying all my gifts online, like many others this year. Having spent ridiculous amounts of money, I’m now just waiting for a few items to turn up (providing the weather is forgiving!).
One of my gifts arrived yesterday, something I purchased from Amazon. Fondling the packaging I was somewhat mystified as to what the item was, recalling that I had not bought any items with this texture. After carefully opening the package, I soon realised. The problem was it’s not what I wanted. It was in fact an optional extra to the original item I thought I had purchased.
My first reaction was to think that there was a mix up at the distribution and packaging centre. It was clear to see how the two could be mixed up, and then I wondered if I was the victim of miss-selling. But this was Amazon – not eBay! Upon final evaluation, I also considered the prospect that I had got it wrong and picked entirely the wrong item. So I went online, logged in and checked my previous purchases.
What a surprise, it was in fact my mistake. £15.00 needlessly spent, if only I had properly read the ridiculously long product title, I would have spotted it. So was it my fault? Was it the sellers fault? Well actually, I think it was a bit of both. I should have read the title properly, plain and simple, but what could the seller have done to make my buying experience less tainted with automatic conclusions about their service as a result?
I know what you’re thinking, probably nothing, after all he got his conversion and I correctly identified that the fault was predominantly mine. However, that doesn’t stop me from coming to quick conclusions, doubting their service, experiencing urges to provide poor feedback, having a rant and not buying from them again. Is this a feeling you would want to leave your customers with?
So I think there’s a lesson to be learned here, an E-Commerce lesson.
Although this post is a bit on the late side for Christmas, it does apply across the board, and can be applied throughout E-Commerce practice.
When you own or run an E-Commerce site, apart from using Search Engine Optimisation to get potential buyers to the site, your next consideration is getting those visitors to buy from you and convert. One important factor to consider in conversion optimisation is usability. This includes ‘error tolerance’. I don’t mean that your website needs good manners when it gets something wrong, I mean your website has to be able to cope with those visitors who can’t tell the difference between a website and a lollypop. It’s about offering clear direction and navigation, succinct call to actions and a clear flow of those actions.
My little experience is a good example of ensuring that the right information is in the right place, where you would expect it to be and readability is crystal clear. For some reason the seller in this case decided it would be a good idea to put the actual product title at the end of a 3 line title which I completely missed while scanning and saw the words matching the original product I wanted at the beginning of the title. Not to mention the image depicting the same thing and not highlighting what I was actually buying.
Okay, I was using Amazon where both space and flexibility is limited to the seller, however the principle is still applicable to E-Commerce sites overall and I’ve seen this kind of thing happen on smaller E-Commerce sites in the past. So here are a few tips I’d like to share to help your product pages convert to their maximum ability:
- Keep the title short and clear – It should be clear and visible within a brief glance of it, the most important information should be at the front for those customers scanning (like me!).
- Use 3-5 ‘hero shots’ to ensure that there is plenty of visual information available for the buyer about the product. This would have really helped me, and because of the intangible nature of the web, I like to get as close as possible to touching and trying a product online before I buy it. A few more detailed pictures, from different angles, types, sizes etc can really help with this.
- Use a description that does exactly that – describes the product. Once that is done, you can then write to sell it – how good it is, how practical, differentiate it from other products etc. The user will be keener to buy and providing as much information as possible will help error tolerance.
- Clear call to action – there is nothing more frustrating than finding just the right product only to find out you can’t buy it because the ‘buy’ button looks like any other part of the page or it is buried below the fold of the site or amongst other clutter.
- Clarity – Use white space effectively to create visual cues to different sections. This is far more efficient for information retrieval and gathering than flooding the page with no room to move. This will help page organisation and help the user come to that conclusive buying decision quicker.
So there we are, 5 tips to create better product pages and hopefully higher conversions. It’s important to remember that you might think that your website looks and handles great, but for your customers and potential buyers, this might not be the case at all.
By the way, I didn’t send the product back. The only reason I didn’t is because I get more brownie points for getting my wife more presents!
Merry Christmas!
