Now you have your online store up and running, you’re probably excited to start designing it and selling it! Creating websites using these kinds of tools is a lot of fun because all the technical stuff is done for you. All you need to worry about is choosing the themes you like the looks of, deciding what colors to use etc.
But don’t get too carried away. While it’s true that you can have a lot of fun here, remember that the end objective is to sell more items – and that means you need to think carefully about the layout and design of your site.
And specifically, you need to make sure that it is designed in a way that will encourage sales. This in turn comes down to a number of considerations and design choices.
Laying Out Your Store
If you were the manager of a highstreet store or a supermarket, then a big part of your job would be to decide how to layout all of the products in that store so that they would sell optimally. That means getting people to walk through specific aisles in order to find the best sellers, thereby being exposed to other products they might be interested in but hadn’t considered for example.
In other words, the way you set out a brick and mortar store can end up having a big impact on the number of sales you make and this comes down to basic psychology. Of course there aren’t quite as many factors for you to consider if you’re going to be selling products online but there are still some ways you can influence the decisions of your buyers. Here are just a few things to keep in mind…
Security and ‘Barrier to Sale’
One very important consideration for your store is the security and the ‘barrier to sale’. Remember right at the start of this book, we discussed the growth of ecommerce and why it hadn’t already grown to beyond brick and mortar store sales. The reason? People are concerned about spending money online.
If you want to sell to the broadest range of people possible, then you need to ensure that your site looks official and trustworthy. This is why it’s so important to use a professional looking design and to create a professional looking brand with a high quality logo. Something as simple as a low resolution image, a typo or ‘Copyright 2010’ can make your website look less trustworthy and cause people to leave.
Another way to overcome this barrier to sale is to let people leave reviews on your store. This is something that many people will be nervous to do, seeing as it can potentially mean people end up leaving bad reviews! But overall, letting people leave reviews means that your customers can see other people have bought from you and received your products. If you respond to negative reviews, this will also reassure your customers that you’re listening and that you care about what they have to say.
Easy Checkout
Another ‘barrier to sale’ is the time and effort involved in making a purchase. Believe it or not, this is actually a big deal and surveys show that people are much less likely to buy from a store if they need to set up an account first.
If you want to sell as much as possible then, you need to make the process of buying from you as streamlined and simple as possible. Amazon does this incredibly well with its ‘Buy With One Click’ system. But even if you were to mimic something like this for your site, your visitors might still be required to create an account the first time they shopped with you, which could mean having to input their card details, their delivery address etc. etc.
Again, try to make all this as simple as possible to make sure it isn’t off-putting for your visitors. For example, one thing you can do is to use PayPal to handle your checkout process. This can help people feel more secure shopping with your site (as they don’t have to input their details) and makes it a lot easier for them to buy from you.
POS
POS stands for ‘Point of Sale’ and is a concept that relates to the ‘barrier to sale’ we were just talking about.
In a highstreet store, you will often find something called a ‘Point of Sale Display’. This is a display that will promote and sell a cheap product while people are waiting in the queue. You’ve no doubt encountered these before and that’s because they work.
The thing to understand, is that when someone has made the decision to buy from you, they will already have made that important psychological step that turns them into a prospective buyer. Prior to this point, they are still umming and ahing about whether they want to bother setting up and account or whether they want the guilt of spending money.
Once they’re checking out then, they’ve already gone through the hard bit. Convincing someone to add something small to their order now then is actually relatively easy and means you can increase your profits further.
Of course you don’t have a queue online, so your ‘point of sale’ is the checkout page. That’s why you’ll often find sites offering you to add extras to your order like gift wrapping for a small fee.
Color Scheme
On an unrelated note, you also need to think carefully about the color scheme and palette of your ecommerce site design.
What’s key to understand here is that different colors can have different effects on your customers. For example, the colors red and orange actually make people feel slightly more impatient and have even been shown to elevate the heartrate. People find very red color schemes somewhat ‘uncomfortable’ and this can be used to your advantage.
For example, this is actually the reason that a lot of fast food joints are red or orange in their color scheme. The uncomfortable color palette means that people don’t quite feel comfortable to spend a long time eating and this means that the store can accommodate a higher turnover of customers and make more profit as a result! And likewise, it turns out that if a ‘buy now’ button is red, it becomes more likely to be clicked more regularly!
Conversely though, if you want people to take their time and leisurely explore your site, then you need to make sure that you use cool and relaxing colours like blues.
Also important is to make sure that your colour scheme allows you to use contrast. In other words, you need to avoid making your colour palette too bright and your layout too busy. If you do that, then it will be impossible to draw attention to anything. Your aim is to make sure you can control the attention of your visitors and to get them to look at the products you’re interested in selling. If everything is red and moving, then people won’t know where they should be looking.