18 Ways To Add More “WOW!” To Ecommerce

Zip. Zazzle. Wow. These are all intimated psychological reactions in consumers that should occur when they visit your online store. But adding these to the mixing bowl when baking your ecommerce cake can prove to be troublesome. We’ll help you cut to chase with these 18 easy ways that you can make your home page snap, crackle, pop (no silly elves required).

WOW Tip: Let your customers easily find or search for the products that they want by featuring a convenient search bar on the home page for them. Think tank Baymard advises that you should focus on relative position, contrast and size when adding a search bar to ecommerce. The leading online stores typically position this at the top in either the center or offset to the right. Doing so has been known to lead to more sales, but to what extent is unclear.

WOW Tip: The one surest thing that will deter your shoppers is having to make too many clicks for a purchase. Instead, you should use the fewest clicks possible in your navigation, explains Econsultancy. What’s more, you should feature organized, detailed navigation that makes it possible for shoppers to find the nested section they want in as few clicks as possible. Less is more here.

WOW Tip: Recommending products that your shoppers might like is a tried and true staple at the largest online stores for one solitary reason: it improves the sales funnel exponentially. But before you go and set your algorithms for this, Evergage says that you take into account three important aspects: individual preferences, product popularity and integrated social data.

WOW Tip: Consider this ecommerce statistic, courtesy of nopAccelerate: 56% of shoppers have left items purposely in their shopping cart and have navigated away from an online store because they wanted to come back later and resume their session. The thing is, if you do not feature a persistent shopping cart, the customer will have to start over again, leading to much higher rate of shopping cart abandonment.

WOW Tip: Premier website designer, Bizango, suggests that you provide easy-to-find contact information for customers. One reason is that you want to add credibility to your store. Simply adding a visible phone number assures consumers that you are a real operation, and have humans who answer the phone during regular business hours. What a concept.

But even more importantly, according to Ripen Commerce, over 90% of retail sales still occur offline. Encouraging customer contact adds the reassurance that it’s easier for them to make an online purchase through your store, instead of making that same purchase locally.

WOW Tip: If you are partnered with key companies, large or small, that help heighten brand awareness, you should brag about them on your website to add even more clout. In addition, you should also seek regular publicity and use the credibility that you get from that as a form of advertising, instructs a write-up in Marketing Your Small Business. This is because publicity creates instant credibility and awareness that helps you better position your store for success.

WOW Tip: Here’s the big scoop on product carousels: they just don’t work. Yep, you didn’t read that wrong. In a study that was cited by Conversion XL, it was found that fewer then 1% of shoppers actually clicked the carousel. Basically, they are a big, fat waste of time with any ecommerce store.

WOW Tip: If you’ve got an awesome sales event you’re offering, make sure that your shopper’s can easily find it. Unless you are not fond of selling more products and making more money, of course. By offering hard-to-beat sales and featuring them online, you can outdo other top retailers that offer similar items, KissMetrics points out; and you can start to slowly grab your piece of this crowded market share in the process, too.

WOW Tip: There’s a commonality shared among the most popular online shopping destinations: they all feature updates, sales, contact information and even search bars in their headers. As Practical Commerce deduces, it’s part of creating an intrinsic design that alludes to increased conversions. In other words: update shoppers in your header if you want to get more sales. Does that make enough sense?

WOW Tip: We all want to save money. It’s the top reason why sales are so popular with bargain savvy shoppers. And with the next deal just a click or a search away, you only have so many seconds to impress shoppers. So make sure you capitalize on this by offering a “powerful discount incentive,” explains Big Mouth Marketing. Doing so is highly conducive to seeing a healthier conversion ratio.

WOW Tip: Now you may have already written off featuring a live chat option for your customers. Not so fast, turbo. Here are five reasons why you need live chat on your ecommerce store, according to Who’s On. These include: increase sales, improve conversions, enhance customer loyalty, offer better customer service and competitive advantage.

WOW Tip: Boring backgrounds only do one thing: bore the life out of your customers. Backgrounds that add zazzle are so important, in fact, that Smashing Magazine touts them as one of the most critical aspects of your website layout. Using backgrounds that pop help create more synergy with your shoppers, and serve to make the entire shopping experience more engaging.

WOW Tip: In the wake of massive data breaches, which seemingly make headlines every month now, consumers want to be reassured that their financial payment information is secure. If your site is not conforming to biding FTC standards, you are missing out on sales. Basically, if you don’t feature security badging to instill confidence, nobody will want to shop at your store. And why would they… would you?

WOW Tip: Featuring your best-selling products is a tried and true method of selling more of an item that you already know is popular. This one, as Amazon has demonstrated so openly over the years, truly is a no-brainer. If you already know a product sells well, then increase sales by also including it in your “best sellers” nested section.

WOW Tip: One of the oldest tricks in the books for getting more sales in just about every sector of retailing is by featuring limited-time offers. But how do you go about maximizing the potential of said offers? According to Adage, there are several areas of focus that you should include: sense of urgency, uniqueness and a/b testing. Basically, you want to make consumers act fast, “before the sale is over” on a unique item that they won’t find for a better deal anywhere else. Got it?

WOW Tip: What makes your store stand apart from others? Is it your awesome returns policy? Is it because you always offer free shipping? Perhaps you add a one-year warranty to all electronics purchased at no extra cost to the customer. Whatever your unique value propositions may be, make sure that your customers are well aware of them on your home page. Don’t leave them guessing.

WOW Tip: It’s a social media world. The uncanny social platforms of the present day have been known to incite revolutions, create entirely new governments, feed cult followings… and… AND… also generate 157 million ecommerce referrals that resulted in conversions this past year alone. By allowing people to share products that they find at your store, you are really saying: “Hey, please advertise for my store for free for me, so I can make more sales. Thank you!”

WOW Tip: If you offer free shipping, make sure that everyone knows. Recent studies have found that over 81% of consumers want free shipping. But the reality is that 100% of us want free shipping 100% of the time. With shopping cart abandonment rates hovering at about 67%, you should try to close the deal any way that you can. Free shipping, or offering a free shipping threshold, are two of the smartest ways to drive more sales.