I don’t always like focusing on issues or problems.
Positive feedback is good and with a post like this one it’s just as helpful to show what is being done right in the ecommerce world.
And that’s something I need to focus on more in the future, but we’re going to focus on some issues for this post. I’ll try to keep it positive, though, with the suggestions for making things really good for your ecommerce site.
And while you might have these issues know that it’s usually not too bad, but if you can make a few changes in these following areas you should see an increase in sales, which is usually the main point companies are looking at.
So let’s get rolling with this post.
1. Clutter
Clutter is something that seems to creep into many areas in life. I’m certainly guilty of it and from time to time I just have to go through an area of my life and clean house.
Sometimes that literally involves cleaning an area of the house. I just did it with a storage area in the basement that was getting a little full. It wasn’t overflowing, but it was bothering me. And it turned out that we had empty boxes, still intact, just taking up space.
It didn’t take much of an assessment to realize that these things could go. It also included a pile for Goodwill and things to throw out. It felt good and now the basement looks better.
The same thing can work with ecommerce websites and it’s usually not a conscious thing.
Like in basements, ecommerce websites just kind of get cluttered over time. We add things. We don’t even realize we’re doing it, but after a while the pages on the site get too cluttered.
Let’s look at the homepage of ecommerce sites as an example. Visit a few ecommerce homepages and you’ll often find:
- Banners
- Chat Windows
- Logos
- Search Bars
- Box Ads
- Cart Icons
- Navigations
- Featured Images
- Secondary Featured Images
- Lists
- More Banners
- More Images
- More Logos
- And on and on and on
Is all that necessary?
Not really. Maybe?
I think the best approach is to look at it from a priority perspective. For each page on your website, focus on the goal that you want the visitor to achieve. It can be different for each page.
Then when it comes to all the elements on the page, focus on the ones that help to achieve the main goal. You’ll have secondary things, but the key there is to have them appear secondary on the page where people can find them if they want, but they aren’t in-your-face items.
You’ll be surprised how many things you can start removing from your pages while still getting the results you want, which is usually getting the visitor to the next logical step in the sales funnel.
2. Ineffective Search
One of the most-used elements of ecommerce sites is the search function. Yet most ecommerce sites don’t put a lot of focus on how effective their search function is.
The most frustrating thing for an ecommerce customer (okay that might be exaggeration) is to search for something and get a “No Results” indicator when they’ve only barely misspelled a word or if they typed in something close, but not exactly what they were searching for.
Search is usually the preferred navigation for people online. They do click on navigation panels and lists and things like that, but they also like using search because that’s how they’re used to finding things.
Google gets billions of searches every day.
Every day.
Internet uses like using search to find things. It’s just the way it is and maybe it’s because search is the best way find things, I don’t know.
Your ecommerce site needs to return relevant search results for visitors. You can include a few promotional items just as Google uses ads in search results, but focus on the quality of the results.
The person that can really figure out ecommerce search will be very wealthy because it seems like a real need even on the major ecommerce sites.
3. Top-Of-Funnel Marketing
Ecommerce sites do a really, really good job with bottom-of-the-funnel marketing. They’ve perfected online advertising so that when people are searching for specific products and keywords in that realm that they can get the traffic and convert it.
Top-of-funnel is not as sexy in marketing because it doesn’t convert as well at least initially.
But I read a stat somewhere or heard it from someone that consumers are only in the buying stage of the sales funnel 3% of the time.
And that makes sense when you think about your life.
Let’s take the example of buying a shirt. How much of your life is spent shopping for shirts?
3% actually seems like it might be kind of high.
But that’s what bottom-of-funnel marketing is focused on, the 3%.
So you have all this other time that you can still focus on to build rapport and trust with your target customers. If you can earn their trust today and their business in the future you would do that just about all the time.
But yet it’s easy to overlook this 97% of the time because it doesn’t convert as well as the 3%. I’m not saying you should give up focus on the 3%, but give a little more effort to the 97% because it’s a really good long-term strategy.
How do you attract your target customer during the 97% of the time when they’re not shopping for your product?
Answer the questions they have as it relates to your general industry, their lives, their jobs, etc.
You can answer those questions with content in various forms including:
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Tweetups
- Blogs
- Guides
- Etc.
Conclusion
Again, I’m sorry for focusing on issues. I think I’ve been doing that a bit too much lately, but hopefully this article still provided some actionable things you can focus on. The third one is a little stretch when it comes to the actual website, but it does involve putting content on your site that is not all about your product.
I think these are big issues. Not big in the sense that they’re making your site go out of business, but they are probably costing you sales and profit and that’s something to focus on.
So take the advice and look at your site and see if you can make some improvements.
