Having an online store that can be open all day, every day to take advantage of customers who want to shop from the comfort of their couch can open up new marketing possibilities for many businesses. But when designing that store, it pays to remember that the products must generally sell themselves. As a website developer, you should always ensure that the tools site owners need are available in your site’s product management system.
Make detailed descriptions and specifications easy.
People shopping online can’t physically pick up the products listed to read the label, or ask a shop attendant for help. It’s up to the website to provide the information that would normally be on product packaging to the customer – and in a way that makes it easy for the customer to find the information that is most useful to them. Customers often skim rather than reading long blocks of text – highlight important information by using headings, bold emphasis and lists rather than concealing it in a long paragraph.
This, of course, requires a product management system that makes it easy to create formatted content - especially when site owners would like to be able to add and update products themselves. Although rich text and WYSIWYG editors are commonplace on standard pages, some off-the-shelf e-commerce packages fail to provide the same functionality in the product manager. Add a WYSIWYG editor to the product management page to make it much easier to create detailed descriptions geared towards the scanning behaviour of website customers.
Editors we’d recommend include:
- TinyMCE (and there’s a useful add-on for this, TinyBrowser, which extends the toolkit available)
- CKeditor
Pictures speak a thousand words.
Be aware of what the pictures say about the products.
A tiny and distorted product thumbnail is unlikely to convince a customer to click through to a product page. When uploading pictures, it’s always helpful if the product management software can resize images gracefully to create clear, sharp thumbnail images - or allows the site owner to upload a separate, smaller image for the thumbnail.
Adding multiple images – and the ability to view much larger detail images - to the main product page will help customers get a better idea of what your product is – the virtual equivalent of picking it up to check out the label.
Product pages that get it right…
The Writers Bureau makes it easy on each of their writing course pages to find out crucial information about their guarantee for each individual course. This is an often-overlooked piece of description that increases customer confidence in a product.
Farmer Copleys has product detail pages that make use of clean resized thumbnails, medium product images and click-throughs to larger images, which display their farm produce to best advantage. In addition, the product description does not omit details like weight and number of servings – important for a customer who is shopping online.
Making it easy to maintain the products on an e-commerce site can help keep a site’s content fresh and help with search engine optimisation, too – so don’t forget the descriptions and the people adding them!
