By: Thomas Smale
Ecommerce plays an increasingly integral role in both our online and offline lives. Whether we're purchasing electronics, books, clothing or groceries, chances are we at least occasionally use an ecommerce platform to do so.
Related: The Small Business Owner's Guide to Choosing the Right Ecommerce Platform
So, have you ever thought about what makes some ecommerce websites more appealing than others? If you're running a business, you need to do just that. Here are proven steps any ecommerce entrepreneur can take to optimize his or her storefront window.
1. Design
Steve Jobs famously said that, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
So, follow Jobs's lead: The first page of your website that most of your customers will see is your “landing page.” That's why it's important to make a good first impression there. Keep the navigation bar simple and straightforward. If you have a variety of different products, make sure you provide search-bar functionality so customers can find what they need quickly.
Meanwhile, resist the temptation to clutter your landing page (or any page) with too much information and ads that blink on-and-off like strobe lights. Think about the ecommerce sites you buy from -- what works for you? What kind of experience do you want your visitors to walk away with? Even if they don’t make a purchase on their first visit, your job is to not scare them off from bookmarking your site for later.
Design is of extreme importance to a successful ecommerce business. Many platforms emphasize ease of customization, giving a merchant the ability to create a unique customer experience. Services like Volusion allow for engaging, responsive design -- without coding -- for burgeoning ecommerce websites.
You can dive deeper into ecommerce design best practices here.
2. Color psychology 101
Perhaps you think the color of your website should reflect your personality. But if you don’t take color psychology into account, you're missing a valuable opportunity to brand your ecommerce store effectively and drive customer engagement. Here’s the psychology breakdown of the color spectrum, ROYGBIV, plus a few bonus colors thrown in:
Related: Will a Specific Color Change the Behavior of Your Website Visitors?
>> Red signals: attention, excitement, anger, love, warmth, comfort, life
>> Orange signals: enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, determination, attraction, success, encouragement
>> Yellow signals: adventure, happiness, competence, enthusiasm, wealth, sophistication.
>> Green signals: Balance, good taste, health, money, harmony
>> Indigo/blue signals: Honesty, corporate, high-quality, masculinity, competence, loyalty, trust, reliability
>> Violet and purple signal: Creativity, authority, rower, royalty, respect, mystery
>> Pink signals: Love, compassion, sophistication, sincerity, romance, gentleness
>> Brown signals: Friendliness, ruggedness, sadness, comfort, organic, natural
>> Black signals: Grief, sophistication, expensive, intelligent, slimming
>> White signals: Simplicity, order, innocence, purity, cleanliness and neutrality
>> Gray and silver signals: Timelessness, practicality, neutrality, refinement and the quality of being contemporary
(these descriptions courtesy, Practical Ecommerce)
Now that you've got the colors' message under your belt, next think about your ideal customer and the brand message you want to convey.
For instance, if you have an extreme sports ecommerce, you’ll probably want to stay away from pink.
3. Plug-Ins
Plug-ins and apps for eccommerce platforms like Shopify and Magento can greatly enhance the performance of your websites. Using those platforms as an example, here are three handy plugins for Shopify and what they can do to supercharge your sales:
>> MailChimp For Shopify: Easily integrates your email marketing campaigns
>> Yotpo: Builds social proof for your ecommerce business by allowing customer reviews on your site. Got a rave review from a happy customer? Yotpo lets you share it with your social media followers.
>> Aftership: Integrates all your shipping methods (USPS, UPS, FedEx etc.) into one interface. You can track packages and respond quickly to customer queries, all under one roof.
Here are plug-ins for Magento merchants:
>> MageMail: An estimated 76.9 percent of shopping carts were abandoned in 2Q, 2017. MageMail can help merchants recover lost revenue through triggered emails. Almost half of abandoned-cart emails are opened. Over one-third of clicked cart-recovery emails convert to a sale. MageMail offers a suite of triggered emails, including welcome emails, replenishment reminders, order confirmations, etc. Put email automation to work for you.
>> LiveChat: Some 92 percent of customers feel satisfied when they use a live chat feature. Consumers surveyed ranked it highest in terms of satisfaction, as compared to voice (88 percent); email (85 percent); and even social media messaging (Facebook, 84 percent; Twitter, 77 percent).
>> Affiliate Plus:- Affiliate marketing has long been one of the best ways to drive customers and sales to your ecommerce site. Effective use of this srategy has helped Amazon grow into the behemoth it is today. The Affiliate Plus extension makes adding affiliate marketing to your Magento ecommerce store easy.
Read More >> https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/305003
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