Spring Cleaning Tips for Your Web Shop

It’s spring cleaning time for your web shop. Time to clear away those cobwebs, move a few things around and maybe add or take some things away all while keeping the goal  in mind of improving the shopping experience for your customers and improving your sales.

Ideally, you will want to look at your web shop from the customer’s point of view. I know this may be difficult to do when you are “in” your shop all day long, so fresh eyes might be needed instead. Ask for a friend’s help in evaluating your shop as if he/she were a customer.

Some tips on freshening your shop:

Don’t have too cluttered a landing page or “shop front”. Think of this page as your shop window and signage if you were a brick and mortar shop. Your should be highlighting your products here in such a way to encourage shoppers to investigate more.

Include your products in multiple categories. Multiple portals to products offer more chances for customers to interact with them.

Along the same line, consider creating special collections, gift buying guides or other curated exhibits of your products. New Arrivals, Gifts for Guys, Color Studies, Designer Spotlight, On a Theme, etc. It’s a fun way for customers to interact with your goods and they may discover new items!

Make sure to have a search function! I find it maddening when I come across a shop that does not have search capabilities and shops have lost my business because I couldn’t find a product a friend told me about.

Have your policies easily accessible and readable. Making your customers hunt for your return policy may be one of the surest ways to lose future sales.

By the same token, make sure your contact info is easy to find and consider including all manner of ways to contact you...email, phone, fax, smoke signals. Having multiple ways to contact you can make customers feel more secure about purchasing from your shop.

Consider adding ways that customers can interact with your products. Offer ways that they can leave feedback, rate or share products easily on social media sites. Customers like to have fun shopping!

Keep your product descriptions short, but do try to make them as descriptive as possible. Do you have all the product specs in those descriptions? Also, people tend to scan on the Internet, think about that when formatting your product explanations.

Make it easy for customers to buy stuff! This is one of my pet peeves of online shopping, please do not make me register for your site in order to make a purchase. Offer it as an option or instead offer an easy way for people to opt-out.

Make sure to include an About page. Include info about your shop, but also about you. This is good for many reasons. It makes shoppers feel more comfortable with making purchases and it helps to build your brand.

Do not hide the prices! It is another pet peeve of mine when shops do not include pricing info on their category pages, but make visitors click on the product to find out the price. It is a turn-off if you waste my time.

Remember, you do want to make your shop as inviting as possible to customers so they will stick around and browse...and the longer they browse, the more likely it is that they will make a purchase.

What are you doing to spring clean your shop?

image credit: stephaniecb

Jen Wallace shares her indie life at Indie Fixx where she writes about making, creating, cooking, learning, playing, loving, and pretty much anything else that strikes her fancy.

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