E-Commerce conversion optimization- Is your home page the only consideration?
When we talk about eCommerce conversion optimization, mostly we just don't get into its actual considerations. E-Commerce is a vast and diverse field of business, and many experts by bounded by a series of misconceptions. For example, they take it like a joke when someone says you can compete with the eBay. Most of them think that indulging with paid searches and providing to the point product descriptions would be enough to improve their conversion optimization. For most of them, they think that optimizing their homepage is enough to lure the customers on their site. They would apply their best to make the home page precise and alluring. With all these sizzling with the home page, they forget about the other considerations or an eCommerce conversion optimization strategy. They forget that customers are not at all interested in their home page. They really don't want to know about the variety of item you offers. They are just concerned about the particular product they seek and it is just because of that they have come online on your site. The main goal of any eCommerce website or any offline shopper is to buy the product they seek. They will search for their desired product directly in the site search box. For shoppers like me, I never look on the home page of an eCommerce site first. My only target when I land on an eCommerce site is to find my desired product, and for this, I directly go to the search box above the fold and type my search string. I might look to the home page occasionally when I would want to look for any offer or discount on any random product. But, despite the offers on the homepage, I am never assured of buying the product, unlike the situation when I am more likely to buy once I visit the site with
an intention to search my already desired product With this discussion, I just want to clarify that homepage is never the crucial consideration when it comes to eCommerce conversion optimization. Homepage is a showcase for random customers As I mentioned earlier, A home page is just like an Ad block on any other site. People to certain intention to buy a specific product or people who are more likely to get converted, never care about the item on the homepage. Instead, they prefer to search the product directly and visit the product page. It clears two very basic yet easily forgettable points. 1. Search box is more crucial 2. Product pages are the final destination Search optimization is more important than homepage optimization- Searching is the only interface that will present the precise product to your customers. You might have thousands of product on your, but the customers would be interested in a particular product itself. They do not care about what offers you have on the watches deal if their intention is to buy a smartphone. Let take an example, Say you have a lost of products on your site. You motive is to make your products accessible to the users as quick as possible. So, you start paying with your homepage, sparkling up the banners and the CTAs. Here, all you care about is your homepage. Do they care about your homepage? They just want to see your product pages. But, the condition is, can they actually reach to your product pages or not? It is the product pages that they would see and get persuaded to buy. Tinkering your homepage won't magically improve your eCommerce conversion optimization. Because your focus is quite different from the focus of your customers. They want to buy the products, so they would want to visit the product page, but you are distracting them with your homepage. I do not say that home page is not important, but is it important for the time when it does not distract your customers from making a purchase. The required level of focus on each part of your website is different from one another, and each part should be focused on with their harmless extent only. Knowing what your users are searching for would help a lotWhat they are searching for?
Products! It's obvious! But which product is there on their radar? Let's say if someone can show you a marking on your computer screen that these are the products that have been searched by your visitors on the site. Who is this someone? The heat map tool is the answer to all the above-raised questions. A heat map is a graphical representation of the user's activity on different pages on your site. These heat maps are varied in nature as some might want to tell you about the clicking patterns of the visitors while some might show you the extent visitors' reach to different folds in terms of scroll heat maps. Some might even show you a recording session of the visitor's activity on the site. Click heat map, scroll heat map, mouse hover heat map etc are example of such heat map tools that graphically represent different your visitors' on the site. How they search it ? By using the search box on top of your site. So, instead of shifting the focus on homepage only, if we also spread it to the searching then it would be a positive approach. You can utilize the heat map tools to prove that customers are more inclined to the search box instead of the homepage. So, granting some concentration to this most used element on your site would be a great idea in your eCommerce conversion optimization strategy. You have to optimize your search box before you proceed with any conversion optimization plan. It is very crucial to make sure that your products are being found on the flash-point when some put a related search string in the search box. You can use the search auto-suggest feature and inclusion of Enterprise search feature
is a great idea in this concern. You can optimize your searching by using relevant keywords in the page title, product title, description, short description, headers, and in the alt tags. But, never mistake it with the keyword stuffing. It is recommended to use relevant keywords only.
Better the product description, better is your conversion No talk about eCommerce conversion optimization is complete without mentioning the importance of product description.
A conversion optimization is just a name given to
user experience optimization. Create compelling product description with detail, alluring, and unambiguous content. A 2 or three lines product description would not hit the bull's eye. A technical content with specifications is a serious matter to include in the product description, but do not just limit your product description here. Tell your users a story about the product. Let them discover the needs and benefits of the product for them. Users can buy the same product from anywhere they want. It is your task to allure them to purchase it from you. The story telling would definitely let them think about the usability of the product. Compelling images in the product description with a detailed and deep information would let them stick to your product pages. For example, this product description on a popular site is a good example for the above explanation:
My view of eCommerce conversion optimization is a simple one. Instead of wasting so much of effort and time on focusing your website as a whole, it is better to concentrate on the product pages. There are many challenges to this approach, but using a heat map tool might help you focus on the most desired products. It would be a great bonus if you can also utilize an A/B testing tool to experiment and decide the best-suited product pages. Mocking Fish is a tool that comes to my mind at the moment as it is a free tool and provides both the A/B testing and heat map tool in the same package.