Aesthetics and shopping experience are two very different things.
Aesthetics are about beauty and visual perfection while shopping experience is about simplicity and user-friendliness.
People are used to a certain type of website. They expect online gift shop to be a certain kind of a store.
The close button should be on the top right corner. Add to cart button with fast checkout option should be on the top right too.
If people have to wait and figure out how to place an order on your store, something obviously needs to be changed.
In this training, you will learn how to create a stupid-simple shopping experience so that the “flow” of people will not break while purchasing gifts online.
While placing the order online, people are in a certain “flow.”
The whole reason for creating stupid simple shopping experience is not to break that flow.
If we just get give our customers that, they are usually keen on placing orders and coming back to our online gift store.
Want to create an amazing shopping experience for your customers? Want to really boost the number of gifts you sell online? Following 05 topics will help you with that.
Want results like this from your online gift store
month after month? Keep reading!
Minimal Design: Less flashy but elegant.
In the 90s, as the internet was growing and evolving, flashy stuff seems to have an impact.
Nowadays, it is exactly opposite. The simpler and minimal your online gifts store is, the more people will love the shopping experience.
Gifts Store is nothing like other E-Commerce Stores.
It’s not just about purchasing a product.
It’s about the personalisation experience and the shopping experience customers get.
For one of our clients, about 5 out of 10 visitors are personalising the gifts and every 1 out of 10 visitors are placing orders!
This is possible when you really craft your online presence to be minimal, friction-less and memorable.
This form worked okay.
This one worked better!
Stray Text and Misplaced Containers: A big no-no.
Unwanted text and misplaced containers do not exactly improve the impression of your online store.
Online Store should be clean, neat and simple.
It is hard to get it just right. I agree.
Your store designer has to pay attention to every small detail and make your store pixel perfect.
After all, your store is special. Gifts are special. The shopping experience should be special too.
The goal is to get people to personalise gifts and place orders online. Reduce the clutter and see the sales grow.
Message to market mismatch: What is it and how to overcome it?
Imagine you have a festival offer in your offline gifts shop. Signboards are saying, “SALE!” on all the gift items.
A customer comes and says, “Oh! What is the cost of that?”
And you say, “It is sold out.”
Now the customer is confused. Why the sign says “SALE” if the item is sold out?
If that happens a couple of times with a few gift items, I can pretty much guarantee you that, the customer is not going to come back to your store.
This is a classic example of a message to market mismatch.
The similar thing is happening on this online gifts store. Please take a look at the image above.
The button says “buy now” and it is un-clickable.
This creates confusion in the readers’ mind and reduces the number of sales you should be getting.
Speaking of sliders, unless you have a large repository of proven products (thousands of sales and millions of organic visitors), sliders might not be the best way to increase your gift sales.
It slightly slows down your gift store. It is a lazy way of saying a lot on the homepage. Instead, choose and feature one gift item that is proven to work on the homepage. That would probably boost your gift sales by a significant margin.
I would highly recommend you to check out this article about sliders.
Do you run Facebook ads? Here’s another message to market mismatch example that you might find valuable.
Showing images that has a play button on it is another example of a message to market mismatch. People will misunderstand it for a video and click it.
This one is so serious that Facebook has outright banned it. [Remember this when you are creating Facebook ads campaign for your online store]
Writing headlines, paragraphs and content on your online store become simple and effective when you follow this formula.
- Here’s the collection
- Here’s how you can personalise your gift.
- Here’s how to place an order.
Usually, there are two buttons on the products page. “Add to Cart” and “Buy Now.”
Add to cart leads people to the cart page upon clicking and buy now button takes people to thr checkout page.
Check the image above. On this particular page, by mistake, both of the buttons lead to the cart page.
Plus the delivery charge of Rs. 10,000 for Rs. 400 product does not make sense. Shipping settings might have to be re-configured.
Most of the times, a simple quality check iron outs these kinds of the message to market mismatches.
Takeaway:
Go through your website as a customer would. Click everywhere and browse around. Putting on the ‘customer hat’ is one of the best ways to find these message to market mismatches and get rid of them.
Want me to do a thorough audit of your gift store?
Keep on reading. All the gift shop owners who have completed this training are eligible for a complete gift store audit.
Mobile-first approach: There is much more to it.
You must have heard people shouting. The world is going mobile. Optimise your website for mobile devices. People are right. But there is much more to it.
Most, if not all of the people prefer to browse, personalise gifts using their mobile device. So many of them place orders right then and there.
But there is a big number of people, I’ve observed, browse and personalise gifts from a mobile device and places orders from a tablet or desktop device.
It is more important than ever that you optimise your website for mobile devices first and also optimise it for the devices of all sizes and shapes.
You can learn more about the mobile-first approach by checking out this mobile-first design guide and tips for E-Commerce Business Owners.
Want to know a secret of success when it comes to online gifts store? I will share it with you.
It’s the ability to resume the personalisation on different devices. Get it? Let me explain more.
So many people are leaving the personalisation of their gifts half-way. They add their name to the photo-frame or key-chain and they leave without adding their photo.
They then resume the personalisation later in the day from a different device.
People should be able to resume their personalisation right where they left it.
This one little feature might increase your sales by one and a half times. Don’t believe me? Try it yourself and let me know.
When photo-frames are in demand we put that on shelves, right?
We adapt as per the customer’s demand.
Why not build a mobile-friendly website if that’s what the customer wants?
That makes sense, doesn’t it?
Takeaway:
Use Chrome’s developer tools or browse your gift store from a mobile device. Make sure that your store is optimised for all mobile devices.
One of the things Amazon and Zappos have in common…
One of the things Amazon and Zappos have in common is their passion and love for absolute best customer experience.
They will go above and beyond to give the best customer experience. (Remember that pizza story of Zappos?)
All the strategies discussed above (and all the strategies I am going to share with you in the next article and private strategy session) are all about this.
Making it simple for people to purchase gifts on our website.
That’s it.
Speaking of which, check out this article on Amazon and Zappos’s Success. I think you will love it.
All the strategies we discussed (and will discuss further) are just about this. Making the online shopping experience really simple, intuitive, personal and amazing.
Selling more gifts and repeat purchases will be the unavoidable outcome of that.
Take a look at your online store with fresh eyes and I bet you will also start seeing improvements.
Click the button below to continue.
