For many of today’s retailers, a customer’s first impression (and maybe their only impression) of your brand is of your eCommerce site. How you present yourself online and how smoothly and seamlessly your store functions determines whether or not you’ve engaged with your new best customer or turned a casual shopper towards one of your competitors.
With online sales expected to top out around $278.9 billion this year, it’s not something you can afford to overlook. Luckily, there are three things you can do today to improve your first impression, keep old customers coming back, and optimize your entire eCommerce experience.
1. SEO is the Way to Go
Search engine optimization (SEO) has been a major buzzword for years now, but don’t take its immense advantage for granted. The better your SEO, the more qualified customers can find you and your products, and that translates into higher sales.
To get the most SEO value out of your eCommerce site, make sure your keywords are on-target and well-deployed without being clunky or intrusive. There are many great tools available to help tweak your copy and improve your findability. These 15 free SEO tools can get you started down the right path and help support your ongoing efforts to make sure potential customers can find you easily.
2. Proper Attributes & Clean Links are Essential
SEO is one piece of a good eCommerce strategy, but good product tagging helps complete the puzzle. Properly assigning product attributes will help new customers searching for a specific product category find your brand, and it keeps a large inventory tightly organized. A detailed, thorough attribute system broken down by a healthy number of variables (size, color, material, etc.) will ensure customers are landing right where you want them to - face-to-face with the perfect product.
It’s also important to remember that all your title tags are well-written and your images have metadata that will get customers back to your store. Clean, well-written links will also help ensure that customers know where they’re going and are on the right track. All of these small details add up to more powerful, seamless eCommerce and lead to a better rate of conversion.
3. Overcome Cart Abandonment
There’s almost nothing more irritating than cart abandonment - customers have picked out their products, but when the time comes to seal the deal they leave the site. Approximately $4 trillion worth of merchandise will be abandoned in online shopping carts this year, and about 63% of that is potentially recoverable by savvy online retailers, according to BI Intelligence estimates.
There are many ways to fight shopping cart abandonment, including:
- increasing your site’s trust factor with customers
- streamlining the checkout process
- improving the visibility of your return policy
Make it easier for your customers to confidently complete their purchases and watch your bottom line improve. Track your abandonment and take the appropriate steps to help close the gap and make sure you’re not losing sales.
The difference between a great eCommerce site and one that falls short of expectations can be as simple as taking the time to really see what’s working and what’s not. Great eCommerce software will help you track your customers’ experiences and determine where a nudge in the right direction is needed. With a little work and help from the experts, you’ll see improvements in no time at all.
Improving the customer experience (and in turn conversion rates) is at the top of all eCommerce merchandiser’s to-do lists which is why we’ve created The Digital Merchandiser’s Guide to Maximizing Margins with Visualized Data eBook. Download it today!
