Complete online shopping including shopping cart, security, & traffic
Posts Tagged ‘online store’
5 Ways to Promote Free Shipping
If you search online for a particular product you probably find lots of people who are selling what you want or what you are selling. How does a person choose who to buy from? You may think that price is important though you may be surprised it isn’t the only factor. Plus, many websites have similar prices that don’t make significant differences, so it is how you differentiate what makes your business special that makes a difference.
For promotions like “Free Shipping” to work you need to make it obvious for online shoppers
For the tips listed below you can substitute what ever promotion your website has including flat rate shipping, free returns, gift with purchase, or etc.
Especially with the holiday season approaches, research has shown that promotions like free shipping or free returns is what makes the difference for holiday shoppers.
5 Ways to Promotion Your Promotion Like Free Shipping
- Meta tags: meta tags are the information that is displayed in the search engine results like Google. Adding your promotion into your meta tags means that online searchers are going to see that your organic listing offers free shipping which can be the reason a customer chooses to click on your search results over your competition.
- Home page: is your promotion obvious on your home page? That doesn’t mean at the bottom right of your navigation. If your promotion is a business differentiator than highlight it in your header of your website so very visitor sees your promotion.
- Product feeds: if you are using shopping portals like Shopping.com or Nextag.com as examples check out to see if the shopping portals allow you to put “free shipping” into your product feed. In comparison shopping portals “free shipping” will drastically increase your click throughs and conversions.
- Category pages: for your online store your category page shows a list of your products in that category. This page may seem obvious so most people over look its potential. This page is one of the #1 pages visitors look at so showing your promotion like “free shipping” underneath each product listing adds another opportunity for visitors to get your message.
- Product pages: add your promotion in the title of your product pages so as people find the product they are looking for they automatically see your promotion. Also, add your promotion right next to the “add to cart” button. You can never over state your online store’s differentiators.
3 Ecommerce Website Store Trends
If you want to open an Ecommerce online store it is easier than ever. There are many different options that allow users with no to little programming experience build an online store to sell their products. The question comes how do you seperate yourself from your competition. My first answer would be SEO. If you can out rank your competition for not just major keywords though the thousands of different ways your customers are searching for your products right now you will be successful.
Videos are one Ecommerce trend you could implement without any tech knowledge
For the purpose of this post though we are looking at Ecommerce website store trends which are going to demonstrate more professionalism and hopefully work to convert more visitors to sales. The goal of these trends are to increase conversion percentage though these are not listed as tested ways to increase conversions, simply trends in where online stores are going.
3 Ecommerce Website Store Trends
- Videos: with the use of embed codes videos are easy to add to your website. Videos offer the visitor greater access to what your products or services offer. Also, videos increase time on the site which Google tracks and uses as a way to determine if people are liking your website. Load your video onto a any of the video sites and then copy and paste the embed code into your website. I personally really like Vimeo.com which has professional options that you can customize into your look and feel.
- Content Sliders: content sliders are the carousels that websites use to showcase certain products with photos and descriptions that visitors can rotate through. Content sliders increase the tech “know how” which in turns increases the web visitors confidence that your online store is professional.
- Go Large: if you have noticed big is in. Large product images, big banners, gigantic font, and so on is the latest trend in Ecommerce websites. More people now have larger screen sizes and better updated browsers can handle the load times. All of these factors allow bigger to be better. Larger images and text draw the eyes to where you want them and are easier to read. You have 3-5 seconds to grab your visitor into staying. Going large makes that job easier for people to instantly understand what your website is about.
Lowering Prices is Not the Only Way to Increase Conversions on Your Online Store
With every online merchant, you are constantly looking at how to improve your conversion rates. Conversion rates are the percentage of visitors that follow through and make a purchase. The average ecommerce website typically has a conversion rate of less than 2%. If you use Google Adwords instead of organic search then expect an even smaller percentage of your visitors to buy. You need to keep that number in mind when you estimate the revenue that your website can generate.
You can also do the math to realize that if you could move the needle to a consistent 3% what that would do to your revenue stream. Many online stores are always looking at how they get more traffic though are not spending the same energy on how they can retain more customers and increase their conversion percentage. There is one fool proof way to increase conversion percentage and that is to lower prices or have a sale. I would warn you though as this may give you the instant satisfaction of increased conversions in the short term; it could hurt more than you know in the long term.
When you use price to drive customers than having the lowest price will always have to be your priority. What happens when the website next to you lowers their price? Are you going to match him/ her and get into a price war. No one wins in a price war. You could say the customer does though price wars run companies out of business, reduce service, and when companies go out of business less competition means higher prices than before.





















