The sky is the limit. Webstore optimization is an endless process. And its main purpose is improvement of client shopping experience, which in turn leads to increased sales. Sounds simple and it is so, but only if you have a clear plan of actions. So if you have been looking for it, congratulations, here it is.
Table of contents:
Working with guest users
Simplification of the registration process
Navigation improvement
Pre-order opportunity
Working with current customers
Let’s go step by step through all these points and see how you can improve them for your online store.
Working with guest users
Somehow, guest users have fewer opportunities at the webstore than registered customers. And this is easily explained – every entrepreneur wants to receive any information about their client and then use it for further communication. Marketing campaigns will always be more effective when personalized. But if you put yourself in your customer’s position, you will understand why they don’t want to provide their personal information. Be honest, you do exactly the same when shopping online. So your main task as a webstore owner is to win your customers heart. Show your clients that both registered and guest users have equal rights in your store and both are important to you.
For instance, many online shops don’t allow guest users to create a wishlist. Such function seems insignificant for webstore manager, but could be very important for customers. If you think about it carefully, you will understand that to give your visitors an opportunity to add products they like to a wish list is a great idea. Visitors will look through your catalog, notice interesting products, add them to a wish list and after all they will come back to your store and buy them. Complement this function with an opportunity to share guest user’s wish lists with their friends via email and you will get a free promotion as well. You can add these functions to your webstore with the help of Guest Wish List extension.
One more thing that you can do for your customers is to give them an opportunity to buy products without creating an account at your store. Statistics show that almost 50% of customers that put products into the shopping cart never complete the purchase. The reason is that too many information and actions are needed. And here you have two options: give your customers an opportunity to buy products without creating an account or improve the registration procedure. Don’t know how to do it? The answer is in the next paragraph.
Simplification of the registration process
As we have already told you, improvement of the registration process may be beneficial for increasing your sales. The fewer steps your customers should make before purchase, the better. The easiest thing you can do to make the login process simpler is to allow your customers to login via social networks. There are dozens of them: some are known worldwide, while others are local and used only in a certain country. You don’t have to integrate all of them into your webstore. Monitor your market, analyze your customers and you will easily understand what social networks your webstore needs.
For instance, Facebook is one of the most prominent social networks. More than 2 billion people use it. You can be certain that, your customers are among them. At least, you can check our axiom with the help of free Facebook Connect extension for Magento 2.
The same rule of simplicity applies to checkout process. That’s why one-step or one-page checkout is becoming more and more popular. Use best practices to optimize your checkout page and see how it works.
Navigation improvement
There is nothing worse for an online store that bad navigation. When a customer is unable to find the needed product in a few clicks they will most likely leave your site and never come back. Ecommerce is about putting all your cards on the table from the very beginning. Your main goal is to show all your products in the best way, so think carefully about webstore catalog display and navigation. It is extremely important when you have not only the main categories of products in your catalog, but subcategories as well.
Don’t worry if your webstore doesn’t have default opportunity to show categories and subcategories. Turn it to your advantage because in that case you can firstly analyze customers behaviour. There are now different tools that show a heatmap of your website. With their help you can understand what kind of categories display your customers expect to see at the webstore and where to place them.
Once you divide your products into categories and subcategories and understand where on the website to place them, choose one of the multiple modules for subcategories creation. For example, you can use Subcategories extension by BelVG.
Pre-order opportunity
Adding pre-order function to your webstore is one of the ways to increase sales. Just think, you announce a new product and it works for you even before it is in your store. Fantastic! Moreover, pre-order is a multifunctional tool. You can use it for monitoring customers demand. The point is that when thinking about catalog growth you add a new product with “pre order” button, promote it and analyze clients feedback. And if you see their interest, you include this item to the catalog.
Pre-order works great with already available products as well. Bestsellers or hard-to-find products are usually sold quickly. And if you don’t want to lose clients while you are waiting for the next delivery, pre-order is what you need.
Bear in mind that sometimes it is not enough just to replace the “add to cart” button with “pre-order” one. Customers can consider purchasing the product that is out of stock as a risk. Specify the availability date, set a discount or suggest free shipping for pre-order products to avoid such fear. All functions mentioned above will become available as you install Pre-order extension.
Working with current customers
It’s a common misconception to think that when a purchase is made the goal is achieved. Every entrepreneur knows that the database of regular customers is key to webstore success. There are different ways to earn buyers goodwill. All your marketing activities, such as customers services, clients cards, loyalty programmes, are usually focus on this aim. You can optimize your website in such a way that it will help you in this task.
One of the possible options is to loop the purchase process with the help of thank you page. Improve it by adding “thank you” message, video-instruction, block with related products, special offer or promo code. Try your best to make friends with your customers and let Improved Thank You Page extension help you with it.
As you see, there are lots of ways and tools to improve your webstore and increase sales. You don’t have to implement all of them simultaneously. You can choose the most suitable method or test few and see how it works. Go ahead and leave your feedback at comments below.
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