The design of the website is vital to the success of the site. A good design will encourage sales whereas a bad design will scare off customers.
The first sale
It starts when the customer arrives on your site. You need to ensure that that the customer could find what they want and has the confidence to add that item to the shopping basket and continue to the checkout and pay. It sounds easy, but you could loose a lit of business along the way.
Making sure that the prospective customer could find what they want is easy. Make the web site navigation simple and simple to follow and well categorised. Make the categories clear so that the budding customer could find what they are looking for by clicking an obvious category. Also add a search box somewhere to the header, or to a side bar. This way they might search for the item if they are not sure where to find it.
Now they have found what they want provide good quality photographs of the image with full details. If you are asked questions round certain items, add the answers to the item description. Spell out everything that the customer may want to know and make it easy for them to find out more.
Part of this is to spell out what taxes and postage is included or needs to be added. Numerous customers will add an item to the basket merely to abandon it when they see there is postage to be added on. Though the cost is still competitive, the surprise of suddenly adding tax and postage could scare them off. State what these are at item level.
Now, add some sales
Getting that first item into the basket is important, but getting more items in the basket is crucial and where the profit might really roll in. This could either be through more normal priced products or sales add on.
By using a custom shopping basket you might examine the basket contents to see what is in it and look at other buyers’ baskets to see what similar products they have also purchased. Suggest to the customer at the end of the basket that they might also like to view these items.
Alternately, maybe in conjunction with the items in the basket, offer add on sales of discounted items. Or make offers for instance free postage with certain basket quantities. Take a look at your average basket amount over the previous month and make an offer of a free product or free postage when the total basket is, let's say, round 10% more than the average. Run that for a month and see if your average basket has increased. If so, try the trick again until you find you cannot push the value any more.
Offer alternatives
Just because the visitor is looking at a certain item does not mean that is what they want to buy. So keep a track of what previous customers have looked at and finally bought. Tell the reader that customers looking at that item in the past have previously ended up buying certain other products. They may then buy the alternative, or buy both!
Your site design must help customer find what they are looking for, not give them any nasty surprises, give them confidence that you are genuine and then close the sale, whilst adding further items to the basket. Not simple, but it might be done!
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Written by Keith Lunt, who offers a web design Southport service. For more useful tips, call into the web design blog .
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