We are about to enter the most important time of the year for e-retailers. Many eCommerce stores look to the holidays as a final year-end cap on revenue.
With the vast amount of shoppers, competitors, and traffic in the eCommerce space during the holidays, it’s crucial to provide a superb user experience for shoppers to make it easy for them to successfully checkout of your store.
While it’s cutting it close to making any big changes to your website, below are a few merchandising tricks that are quite simple to incorporate into your store, that can greatly enhance the UX for the holidays.
1. Highlight Time Sensitive & Exclusive Offers
When shopping online, people are presented with thousands of products to choose from. It’s your job to catch their attention so it’s your shopping cart they’re checking out of.
In order to catch their attention, you need to motivate them and give them a compelling reason to pull the trigger on an offer.
Time sensitivity and exclusivity are popular and effective psychological tactics used in sales.
Here are some simple ways to highlight your promotions:
a) Banners
This is a visually appealing way to inform your shoppers about your holiday offers. They’re colourful, they stand out, and they can be added to virtually any area of your website.
Create a banner for your sale and add it throughout your entire site, rather than just on your homepage. This makes the sale page easily accessible, no matter where the consumer is on your website. For maximum visibility, add it to the top or left side of your pages.
Don’t forget to link the banner to its appropriate landing page, or to create a specific landing page for the promotion! This sounds like a no-brainer, but you would be surprised just how many websites fail to do this simple step. Take banners a step further and add them into the search results.
A great example of this is the website below, which includes two banners in the search results. When a visitor types in “Le Creuset” into the search box, they are presented with popular searches, a banner to the “Le Creuset” category page, and a banner to a “Le Creuset” sales page. What a great shopping experience!
b) Badges
Badges are like virtual stickers that can be added to products to bring attention to specific information about a product. They help shoppers make quicker purchasing decisions by efficiently educating customers.
Popular badges are:
- “Best Sellers”
- “New”
- “Staff Pick”
Badge ideas for holiday merchandising:
- “Top Rated Gift for Mom” –dad, brother, sister, etc.
- “Seasons Special Offer”
- “Delivered by Dec 24th”
Test out different styles to see what works best. Be creative by trying variables including colours, the message, and positions.
One piece of advice: don’t overdo badging! Too many badges defeat the purpose of calling attention to certain products and making them stand out.
Both banners and badges can be created on the fly with the help of some eCommerce tools. Nextopia is an ecommerce acceleration platform that makes it super easy to create these banners in search results, as well as badges in their all-in-one search platform.
2. Leverage Your Search Reports
Looking into your online store’s search reports offers a plethora of information that can work wonders if used properly.
Reviewing this data helps e-retailers better understand their site visitors, by determining what kind of language and terminology is used to describe products. Analytics can also assist you in identifying where in the sales process your website is losing shoppers.
Top Searched Products
Use this data to push your top searched products to the top of your category pages and search results. Clearly these products are popular so make it easy to find them!
Another tip is to check your search reports from last year’s holiday season. What were people searching for most? What was the most popular product? Use this info to ensure you have enough stock of these popular holiday products.
Search Terms Presenting Zero Results
Are there terms that shoppers are typing in and not being provided with results? Ensure that synonym rules are created for words that are frequently misspelled. Especially for such a busy time of year, people may not be double checking their grammar.
This website should have created a synonym rule for swaeter=sweater, to enhance the UX.
Ensure that the “popular search terms”, are the exact terms that are used in product descriptions. It would be a shame if people were searching for a certain product (that you carry) but were being directed to a “No Results Found” page just because your store uses a different term that didn’t get picked up.
Synonyms – Powerful and Last Forever
If it’s too tough to tweak the product titles or descriptions, create synonym redirect rules. For example, if you see that people are searching for “hoodie” but your store uses the term “sweater” in the product description/ title, make a synonym redirect rule so that all “hoodie” searches are directed to the “sweater” pages.
Carry Products That People Are Searching For
The top searched data can create opportunities for products you should be carrying. If enough people are searching for a specific product, you should probably look into selling it.
If this is not possible, create a synonym redirect rule to point them to a similar product. This will enhance the user experience rather than sending them to a “No Results Found” page.
The website below is a great example of this. Whenever a visitor searches for “Rolex”, they are taken to a similar product page (Tissot watches) because the website doesn’t carry Rolex watches.
Final Thoughts
The holidays will be here before we know it, but it’s not too late to implement these on-site search and merchandising tactics to enhance the UX and boost conversions on your eCommerce store.
Need help setting up these features on your website? Get one of our eCommerce Experts to show you how to increase conversions on your site today.
The post Nextopia’s Last Minute Ecommerce Searchandising Tips for the Holidays appeared first on Demac Media.