5 Effective Ecommerce Product Pages

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SEPTEMBER 16, 2014 • JOE ROBISON

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Product pages on ecommerce sites are a crucial step before visitors decide to buy, or not. Subtle design and user experience cues can entice shoppers to complete the purchase, or send them away. This article will review five effective ecommerce product pages. I will highlight strengths and weaknesses of each. All five examples come from WordPress ecommerce sites.

OVER Clothing: OVER Bolt Logo T-Shirt

OVER Clothing is a Serbia-based clothing company that grew from word-of-mouth referrals. OVER Clothing most recently won WooCommerce’s recent Golden Ticket design competition – and for good reason.

OVER Clothing is a Serbia-based clothing company.

• Strengths. The entire site is attractive, but the product pages are exceptionally well done, especially for a WordPress ecommerce site. The flat design and harmonious pastels exude quality, which presumably helps conversions. Secondly, OVER has multiple, highly effective photos for each product from different angles and levels of detail. The add-to-cart button is large, clear, and simple.

• Weaknesses. The product description text is a light gray, which can look good in design, but is poor for user experience. Also, the descriptions could use more details to help shoppers that need more information.

Nic Socks: The Carnival Sock

Nic Socks is South African ecommerce company that sells unique socks. It has created a fun and quirky product that shows on its website and on product pages. Nic Socks offers a subscription, as well as the ability to purchase individual pairs of socks.

Nic Socks is South African ecommerce company that sells unique socks.

• Strengths. The product pages use color to focus the eye on the add-to-cart button. That button and the price of the product are burnt orange, which stands out against the white background and gray text on the page. The “Talk to us” chat button (at lower left) is also noticeable. The right sidebar of text is in a lighter gray that doesn’t distract, but is there to provide additional information as needed.

• Weaknesses. These are unique socks at a premium price. The product descriptions could use additional details about why they’re special. There was a reference to bamboo fiber in one description, but it’s not listed on each one. The site could use more images for each product.

Topeca Coffee Roasters: Breakfast Blend

Topeca Coffee Roasters is an El Salvador-based integrated coffee company that controls the entire process – from coffee seeds to the final roasting. The website reflects the company’s heritage and commitment to family-owned coffee farms.

Topeca Coffee Roasters is an El Salvador-based integrated coffee company.

• Strengths. The product pages highlight the coffee producer and the farm location. This emotional connection encourages loyalty and incentive to support a product with values. The site describes each coffee product in detail and makes it easy to purchase multiple quantities and roasting styles.

• Weaknesses. The site has a built-in customer review function, but very few actual reviews. The company should seek more reviews to help create trust. Also, since the website highlights the company’s location in El Salvador, more information on the product page about shipping time and costs would be helpful.

Picky Bars: Blueberry Boomdizzle Bar

Picky Bars sells nutritional bars for athletes. Invented by a triathlete and Stanford graduate, Picky Bars was voted the best bar for training recovery by Outside magazine.

Picky Bars sells nutritional bars for athletes.

• Strengths. Picky Bars product pages reflect the fun and carefree spirit of the company with playful typography and copy. The site provides detailed information about each bar on the product page. The site also has a large add-to-cart button.

• Weaknesses. The primary weakness is the lack of product photos. Many shoppers will not buy a 10-pack of these bars online without knowing what they look like. Secondly, the unique color palette for each product page is a nice touch but the add-to-cart should stand out from the header, heading, and ingredients.

Wyatt Bicycle Company: Street King Blackout Bicycle

Wyatt Bicycle Company is a La Crosse, Wisc.-based company that sells bikes assembled in that city. A University of Wisconsin graduate started the company in 2011 when he saw opportunity for quality and affordable fixed-gear bikes.

Wyatt Bicycle Company is a La Crosse, Wisc.-based company that sells bikes assembled in that city.

• Strengths. This Cart66-built website showcases the uniqueness of the bicycles on each product page. This is supported by the large, high-quality, and plentiful images of each product. Quality images are key for conversions on higher-price products. Also, there many detailed specifications of each bike to answer seemingly every question. Also, the product pages highlight free shipping and lifetime warranty — two huge conversion boosters.

• Weaknesses. The add-to-cart button is small compared to the rest of the page. Another small improvement would be to add a caption beneath each bicycle photo so the visitor knows what she should be looking for.

JOE ROBISON
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15 Online Shopping Pet Peeves

via Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/61536-15-Online-Shopping-Pet-Peeves

Being an avid online shopper, I buy from many ecommerce sites. Most of these sites are helpful and effective. But there are some that have annoying features.

Here are my top 15 pet peeves.

1. Slow Site

A site that is slow is a complete turn off. I switch to another site unless I need a specialized product that is only sold there. Slow, for me, is a page that takes more than three seconds to load. Unfortunately, based on a recent Marketing Land report, the average page load time for the top 2,000 U.S. retail sites is 7.25 seconds.

Make the home page and key landing pages faster to load to avoid losing customers.

2. No Support for Guest Checkout

It is important for retailers to identify shoppers and personalize their experiences, to increase the chances of closing a sale. But this should not be done at the cost of losing the customer by not offering guest checkout. Many sites still require shoppers to create accounts or log in using their Facebook accounts.

Allow guest checkout and offer an option to set up an account during the checkout process after the shopper has entered her shipping and billing information.

3. Incorrect Product Recommendations

Most retail sites have some sort of recommendations functionality — though the logic used to display these recommendations varies from site to site. It’s annoying when sites continue to recommend a product even after the product has been purchased. Some other sites base their recommendations on a shopper’s search terms, his browsing history or preferences. These recommendations are not always helpful.

The best way to avoid annoying shoppers with meaningless recommendations is to offer an option to indicate if the recommendation was useful or not. This can be done using a small icon overlaid on top of the recommended product’s image that asks the shopper if the recommendation was helpful.

4. Misleading Product Availability

Ecommerce sites sometimes allow a shopper to add a product to the cart and go through the complete check out process before displaying a warning about the product being “out of stock.”

This is annoying. If a product is not in stock, it should be displayed on the product page or before the product can be added to the cart.

5. Pricing Variations

Some of the omnichannel retailers that I shop with price the same product differently depending on whether it is online or in the physical store. I understand that the cost of carrying the product is different across channels. But these days when consumers use multiple channels, it is a must to offer consistent pricing for products regardless of the channel.

6. Complicated Use of Promotion Codes

Promotions are a popular way to attract shoppers to a site. But it is frustrating if the promotion code can be used only if rules or conditions are met. For instance, I have received promotion codes in emails and when I try them on the site, a message appears saying that this product is already on sale (so I cannot use the promotion code), or the promotion code is not yet active, or promotion code only works on a subset of products.

Promotion codes are helpful only if they are simple to use.

7. Product Page without Pricing

A brick-and-mortar store does not have products on shelves that are not available for sale. So it is frustrating to search for a product on-site and then find that it is not for sale.

If there is a product shown on the site, there has to be a way to purchase it.

8. Lack of Channel Integration

Consumers are becoming omnichannel shoppers. It is annoying when, for example, a product added to a cart using the mobile site does not show up in the desktop site. Or something purchased online cannot be returned in the store.

Omnichannel is here to stay and it is important to have a seamless integration across channels to avoid customer frustration.

9. Too Much Email

Unfortunately there are some sites that do not respect their shopper’s time and send multiple emails for product campaigns, news, product releases, and more. In some cases, the site does not even have an option for a customer to opt out of these emails.

Too much email is an easy way to lose shoppers.

10. Needing to Log In Repeatedly

Though I do not register or change passwords frequently, it is still annoying if a site asks me to log in when I have just registered or changed my password. It should be straightforward to authenticate a user based on the password that was just set up instead of introducing another step.

11. Not Secure

Most shoppers do not pay much attention to security features of a site. But a frequent online shopper will see the difference if your site does not support a strong password policy or allows credit card information to be transmitted without using SSL. A customer account can be easily hacked or a credit card can be misused if the site is not secure.

12. Browser Favoritism

Some retailers do not take the time to test their site on different browsers. They assume that if the site works on one browser, it will work the same way on others. I run into this frequently, as I am a Apple Safari user.

Retailers should review their analytics periodically to identify their visitors’ browsers and ensure that their site works on all of them.

13. Bad Customer Service

A good customer service team resolves issues quickly and ensures that telephone hold times are short. Sites that do not have such teams and policies struggle to retain customers.

This is an easy fix and should be a priority for all retailers.

14. Not Mobile Friendly

Some sites still do not function on mobile devices, or they partially function on such devices. I use my phone and tablet for the bulk of my online research and shopping. I much prefer sites that are mobile friendly.

Retailers have no excuse not to support a mobile friendly site, as there are several easy-to-use tools that can instantly convert a website to a mobile friendly version.

15. Third-party Payment Options Hosted on Another Site

Ecommerce sites often support different ways to pay for a purchase. Some of these payment methods take customers to a third-party site for checkout and leave them there. In some cases, there is no confirmation that the payment went through and the order was successful. The only option is to wait for the site to send an order confirmation email.

Top 5 Things to Test in Ecommerce Websites

NOVEMBER 19, 2013 • CHRIS GOWARD

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Back in the day, circa 2008, testing an ecommerce site meant having to write a lot of custom code to run the test and track the results. But now, with the range of testing tools available, site-wide tests no longer have to be a technical hurdle.

Now, running an A/B test can be as easy as copying and pasting a single script snippet into your website templates.

So, now that it’s relatively easy to test everything on your ecommerce site, how do you choose which tests get priority?

Your conversion optimization plan should address all of the key customer and prospect touch points in all of their journeys through your site.

Here are five of the top areas retailers need to test on their ecommerce websites.

1. Product Detail Pages

Getting visitors to click to a specific product page is a win – they’re expressing some interest. Making the most of each visit is crucial. But the typical product page template contains a lot of information: photos of the product, a description, details and specifications, and often options the customer can choose from, such as color and different models or sizes.

That can be a lot to digest. Understanding which is most important in your visitor’s decision-making process is key. And it will often be different for your website versus others.

At WiderFunnel, my testing and optimization firm, our work with AllPopArt, a producer of unique handcrafted pop art portraits and photos on canvas, optimized its product detail page. Following an analysis of its existing product detail page template to identify key problem areas, we developed three variations to test.

The winning template variation brought the product description and value propositions (including the fact that each work of art is hand-crafted by an American artist) above the page “fold.” The user-selectable product options (for things like size, material used, and framing) were moved below. That approach supported the buying decision by emphasizing the key value proposition and played down the options, which reduced the complexity of the purchase decision.

AllPopArt’s original product detail format featured many choices in the upper right, beside the dominant image.

The result? The winning page (below) lifted purchase conversions by 28 percent and – even better – boosted revenue per visitor by 42 percent.

This revised version of AllPopArt’s product detail pages moved the product description and value propositions to the top right. User choices were moved below.

Keep in mind, this was tested across the entire website by A/B split testing the site-wide template. Whenever you test on template pages, make sure to test site-wide so the visitor experience is consistent.

2. Category Pages

Category pages are another prime testing opportunity. These pages show the breadth and range of your products, organized into similar groups, and need to effectively help your visitors quickly find the right product category for them.

Category pages tend to have a lot of information do convey. Finding the right balance and emphasis for your unique site is crucial. Your visitors will be scanning, looking for the information they need to choose products to explore in more detail.

We helped SpinLife, an online retailer of wheelchairs, electric scooters, and other home medical products, strike the right balance on its category pages through a series of conversion optimization tests.

In one test, a variation presented the categories in a grid pattern, which is a typical approach for many ecommerce sites. The second variation showed categories in a stacked list view. Which do you think won?

The split test results showed the list view brought SpinLife a 16.1 percent lift in the sales conversion rate. Some of the reasons for its success include making it easier for people to scan – and compare – the price range of each category. The new layout also allowed room for a column of “best sellers” on the right.

But remember, just because the list view brought SpinLife more sales, doesn’t mean it will work for your site. In another test WiderFunnel ran for eBay, for example, the winning variation was a tiled view. There are enough variables that there’s no one “best” approach. The only “best practice” is a “test practice.”

3. Home Page

Your home page can be a rich source of testing opportunities if you can dodge the inevitable political hurdles that it can create. If you’ve got top-management support and no sacred cows, go for it. Otherwise, you may want to start with a less sensitive page.

For hospitality management company Outrigger Hotels & Resorts’ home page, for example, its reservation booking widget was thought to be a key part of the puzzle. Given its effect on revenue, we tested many different placements of it.

Outrigger Hotels and Resorts’ reservation booking widget — “Reserve a Room” — was thought to be key, as shown in the original version of the home page.

After testing multiple variations of the product imagery, layout, and booking form placement, the winning version (below) brought Outrigger a 47 percent increase in bookings from the home page.

For Outrigger Hotels and Resorts, showing the breadth of property locations was even more important than the booking widget placement. This revised home page resulted in 47 percent more bookings.

It turned out that, in this case, showing the breadth of property locations was even more important than the booking widget placement. Prospective travelers needed to get into the property details before booking. The widget didn’t need to be as prominent as some on the team thought.

4. Persistent Calls to Action

Many ecommerce sites feature a call-to-action that repeats throughout the entire site. It’s called a persistent call-to-action. Given the exposure these elements receive, it’s always worthwhile testing them to boost conversions.

For CanaDream RV Rentals & Sales, a recreational vehicle rental and sales company, the persistent call-to-action is the booking form. CanaDream understood the website had to work at differentiating its unique value proposition for its web visitors. But the booking form was not doing the job. Visitors could not easily understand their rental options and all the benefits they would receive from booking with the company.

The winning variation included a new design that addressed some of the challenges our team identified with the control version. Changes included increasing the prominence of the headline, aligning input fields to ease eye flow, and changing the headline text and call-to-action button to reflect a sense of urgency.

Thanks to testing, CanaDream now gets 106 percent more bookings with the same traffic across the entire website.

5. Forms

For ecommerce sites, forms – whether lead generation forms or the checkout path – are a key conversion point. Too often forms are left to developers to design, and not enough time is spent testing the flow of these crucial elements.

We’ve found that optimizing forms through careful testing can have a huge impact on conversion rates. One example comes to mind. During the beta launch of its online golf game, EA SPORTS™ was aggressively targeting new player signups.

WiderFunnel worked to rethink the registration process, analyzing on-page variables like site navigation controls, testimonials, calls-to-action, design, images, and layout, as well as the overall registration experience.

By applying the LIFT™ analysis — Landing page Influence Function for Tests— techniques to the registration flow, we isolated 13 areas that were reducing the player registration rate. The team designed four new registration flows to test.

One of the four new signup flows resulted in a 12.8 percent lift in new player registrations. Importantly, some design elements that were considered “best practices” were proven in testing to have more opportunity for improvement than the client expected.

One of the test isolations on this form showed clearly that, even in 2-field form, stacking form fields worked much better than orienting fields beside each other. Be careful, in other words, how you design your “log in” forms.

If this much improvement is possible with changes to a relatively simple form, think about what can be accomplished by throughout testing your shopping cart checkout process.

TAGS:  TESTING

via Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/61010-Top-5-Things-to-Test-in-Ecommerce-Websites

Mobile Commerce: More than Closing Transactions

OCTOBER 22, 2013 • DALE TRAXLER

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Here’s a quick summary of mobile devices and their impact on commerce.

• Mobile devices are ubiquitous.
• More than 50 percent of Americans have a smartphone and that percentage is increasing.
• Tablets are replacing desktops and laptops.
• Tablets are a preferred platform for ecommerce transactions.
• Smartphones are used more for research than actual purchases.
• Apple iOS devices are the most heavily used devices for commerce.
• People are becoming increasingly dependent on their smartphones — it’s the first and last thing many adults do every day.

When most ecommerce merchants think of mobile commerce, the first thing that comes to mind is closing transactions. But there are many other activities that are being done daily on mobile devices that may impact your future online business strategies.

Will all of them affect your revenue stream? That depends on the products you sell. As an example, for a long time online merchants benefitted from showrooming, the practice of using a smartphone to research products and do price comparisons while in a brick-and-mortar store. Ecommerce merchants could simply present a better price, free shipping, and possibly no tax and close a deal by being present in an organic search.

Today, it’s much harder to get seen in a mobile organic search because the volume of advertising is much higher. Brick-and-mortar retailers are fighting back by offering price matching and free shipping for out-of-stock items. Consumers also use shopping apps for comparison shopping as they showroom, making it more difficult for online retailers to be found.

This article introduces many mobile activities and applications that you should be aware of as you evaluate mobile strategies. I am an iPhone user and all the apps listed here are on the iOS platform. I am not recommending any of these apps — they are simply the first ones that appeared in different categories I searched on, which usually included dozens of similar apps.

Ecommerce

Let’s start with ecommerce. All online merchants should develop a mobile friendly store. There are several options to do this.

• Responsive site. Adapts to virtually any device or screen size.
• Mobile site template. Presents your store in a mobile-friendly manner.
• Third-party hosted site. Manages your store and displays your product catalog as if it were part of your main domain.

Your mobile store should deliver a customer experience that is consistent with your desktop version. You should include the same product content, branding, ratings and reviews, pricing, search, and navigation. You may present some of content in a more mobile friendly way — like tabs for detailed information — but it’s important to offer all of your product content.

The Electrolux site displays on both desktop and mobile devices.

To be successful on mobile devices, include alternative methods of payment like PayPal to eliminate the need for your buyers to have to fumble around with credit cards while making a mobile purchase.

Mobile transaction currently account for about 10 percent of all commerce in the U.S. This number is expected to increase significantly over the next few years, led by sales on tablets.

Vertical Shopping Apps

Have you shopped for a new house, car, or apartment lately? There are many new apps that serve as a marketplace for those industries.

Apps like Zillow and Realtor.com reduce the need to have a real estate agent showing you properties. You can shop virtually or simply drive around town using your GPS to guide you to properties that meet your search criteria. Can you buy these online? Not currently. But they facilitate research, thus changing the role of a real estate agent. CarSoup is a similar app for finding automobiles.

Realtor.com mobile app.

Product Research

Product research is a popular mobile activity. Most adults use tablets or smartphones for some type of research before making a purchase. With showrooming, you do the research while in a physical store. Research could include looking for product details, alternatives, deals, and availability. Local stores, including large retailers like Home Depot, are finally presenting on their mobile sites product availability in those physical stores, eliminating driving all over town looking for an item. They also make it easy to order online and pick up your goods in the local store. This will have an impact on pure-play online retailers as they face more competitive pressure from physical stores.

Beyond obvious starting points like Google search, many consumers use blogs, other online retailers, brand websites, and catalog apps to research products. Here are a few product-research vehicles I found in a quick search.

• Catalog Spree
• Coffee Table
• Amazon Mobile
• Decide

Price Comparisons

In-store and online price comparisons are becoming standard for many product purchase decisions. Consumers can use tools like Google, Shopping.com, and Bing. Amazon and Ebay are good places to compare prices too.

There are also many apps that are popular with showroomers. These apps allow shoppers to scan a UPC code and receive a broad range of price comparisons among different retailers. Most link to the retailers’ sites, where shoppers complete the purchase. Many brick-and-mortar retailers will allow you to use these apps in real time to negotiate an in-store price match. Here are a few apps that support scanners and comparison tools.

• Decide
• RedLaser (Ebay)
• Price Check (Amazon)
• Quick Scan Pro
• myShopanion

Social Shopping

Many consumers like to share their shopping lists with family and friends. Many also want feedback on their purchases. Sites like Wanelo and Pinterest facilitate sharing of products and other ideas. There are also wish-list apps to save and share product ideas. Consider a wish list in your mobile site if you don’t already have one.

• Wish
• Wanelo
• Pinterest
• WishList.com
• GiftIdeas.com

Email Marketing

A key mobile activity is reading emails on smartphones. Be sure your emails and landing pages are mobile friendly.

Flash Sales

Mobile devices are ideal for facilitating flash sales. Merchants can display a limited number of items and offer a quick checkout. Many new mobile apps and sites enable flash sales. Here are few that I found in a quick search.

• Ebay Fashion
• Joss & Main
• PLNDR

Shopping Lists

Shopping lists on mobile devices are common. Many of them also offer coupons in the app. There are shopping lists that are specific for groceries. Others are more general. Many can be shared.

• Grocery List
• Grocery IQ
• AnyList

Coupons and Deals

Many shoppers look for deals. Daily deal sites like Groupon are well known. There are also many other specialized apps and sites that focus on more specific industries. Here are a few.

• Grocery Pal
• Saviry
• The Coupons App
• RetailMeNot

Payments

Apps like Square, PayPal Here, PaySimple, Intuit Go, and others make it possible to accept credit card payments by swiping on a dongle — i.e., a mini card scanner that plugs into a smartphone. These apps do not require a separate merchant account, payment gateway, or virtual terminal. Rates and fees are competitive with traditional point-of-sale solutions.

via Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/60052-Mobile-Commerce-More-than-Closing-Transactions