People understand and trust the simple things. Aesthetics is all about making things simple, understandable and beautiful.
Your online gift store should be all about evoking the emotional response. Which usually means more sales for you and a memorable experience for your customers.
A gift store should evoke an emotional response. That usually means more sales and memorable experience for customers.
Want to evoke an emotional response from your customers? Want to really boost the number of gifts you sell online? Following 03 topics will help you with that.
Want results like this from your online gift store
month after month? Keep reading!
Say more than words using Colour Palettes
A colour palette is, in simple terms, a colour scheme of selected colours. Usually only two to three colours.
These are your brand colours. They evoke a certain emotional response from website visitor and reminds them of their previous experience of your brand.
Most of the brands have mottoes.
Amazon’s is “work hard. Have fun. Make history.”
Zappos has “To Live and Deliver WOW!”
It evokes a certain emotional response from the reader. Think of the colour palette as a non-verbal and visual motto of your brand.
In online gift stores, it was observed that colour palettes with yellow as a prominent colour have a great effect on evoking an emotional response. This does have an effect on sales.
Of course, when presented with the right gift to the right audience, even a simple website works well.
But if implementing a colour palette is going to further improve the “wow” factor of the website and reward a couple of more sales, why not?
Want to learn more about colour palettes? Here’s an in-depth guide on choosing colour palettes.
Takeaway:
Ask your designer and developer to implement a colour theme on your store.
Animations: Dos and Don’ts
Animations, when used right, can transform your gift store from nobody to a professional brand.
The key to transitions and animations is not to overdo it.
The visitors are visiting your store to personalise and order gifts. The purpose of animations and transitions is to grab the attention of people in a subtle manner.
Usually, motion like that distracts people from the one thing they are supposed to do. Place an order.
Keep the animations light and simple.
(Did you notice the animation of the title of this paragraph? Check it out if you haven’t.)
Takeaway:
Check if you are using animations on your gift store. Make sure that you are using them the right way.
The key here is not to overdo it. Remember, the goal of animation is to stand out just enough to grab the attention but not distract people.
Pop-Ups: It can add the beauty factor and reward you more sales!
Take the example of the above pop-up.
A pop-up that says, “welcome” doesn’t serve a tangible purpose. I suspect it has little to no positive impact on Increasing the visitors to sales ratio.
It loads every time page is reloaded. That might irritate some people. It should load only once!
Plus, it is not presenting any offers or asking for a specific action.
It can be re-designed to be more in-theme with the colour of the website. The message can be tweaked to direct people to the most selling item.
As an owner of an online gifts store, you are probably no stranger to pop-ups. Pop-ups are, usually, tend to be annoying. They interrupt the flow.
Well, No more!
Pop-ups are actually one of the best ways to grab the attention of the viewer. Present the discount offer or simply ask them to subscribe if they are leaving.
(Exit-Intent Pop-Up)
Want to learn more about pop-ups? Here’s an in-depth guide on Creating Pop-Ups with WordPress.
I cannot imagine a world without pop-ups.
That’s how much they have contributed to my growth and the growth of my clients’ businesses.
Takeaway:
I highly recommend you to use pop-ups on your gift store. Welcome pop-up (with a tangible offer, of course.) and exit intent pop-up.
Make sure the pop-up is in-grained with the theme of your gift store. It should stand out but still feel a part of the website.
Most importantly, it should have a tangible call-to-action.
- Ask people to check out the best selling product of the month.
- Ask them to fill out a survey. Engage people.
Let your creativity flow. The more you experiment, the more information you will have about what works and what doesn’t.
Pop it up!
Want to see an example of a good-looking pop-up that gets a customer to stick around and click? Browse around this blog. You will surely find pop-up examples!
You need to craft your store best on all fronts to get a gradual increase in sales and friction-less shopping experience.
Here’s an important thing. Website aesthetics, design, the core offer and overall ambiance… It’s all inter-connected. Click on the button below to continue to part 02.
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.
We are on the journey of discovering how we can sell more gifts online in 2020.
Let’s face it, if there is no traffic, there are no sales.
It’s simple. The more people visit our website, the more sales we will get.
What is the first name comes to your mind when we say “traffic”?
That’s right. Google.
Platforms like Google, Facebook, YouTube has always been some of the biggest sources of traffic for Gifts Stores.
Follow this guide to learn how to do Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for your gifts store.
Google wants what the visitor wants. A clean, secure and amazing shopping experience.
Do that and Google will gradually reward you with more visitors.
Here are simple steps of ranking your gifts store on Google.
Want results like this from your online gift store
month after month? Keep reading!
On-Page SEO: You can finish this in the next 30 minutes!
If you think “SEO” is a heavy word, don’t worry. On-Page SEO is one of the easiest and most important types of SEO.
Here’s what it means.
The Optimisation you do on your website is on-page SEO.
The optimisation you do on everywhere else (other blogs, social media) is off-page SEO.
Simple right?
Some of the oldest SEO tricks in the book that are still working in 2020:
- Keyword Optimisation
Have you ever wondered how Google/YouTube/Facebook know what is on a particular page? It’s because of the text on that page! Means keywords.Google’s intention is simple. Find out what is the best match for the search queries of people and show it to them.
When it comes to gifts, here’s an example of what people are searching.
You see? Google notes all the keywords people are typing and suggests back to you.
Now imagine that there is a blog article on your store that explains how personalised mugs are made, what is the general price and how the shipping happens…
If the article includes the keywords we want to rank for, the chances of people finding that article upon search will increase.
(of course, the keywords will be there where it makes sense. Keyword stuffing is against the guidelines of Google.)
It doesn’t have to be articles. If you optimise the “description section” on the product page to include all the keywords Google is suggesting, the chances of you getting the first-page rank will increase tenfolds!
You see? Google notes all the keywords people are typing and suggests back to you.
Now imagine that there is a blog article on your store that explains how personalised mugs are made, what is the general price and how the shipping happens…
If the article includes the keywords we want to rank for, the chances of people finding that article upon search will increase.
(of course, the keywords will be there where it makes sense. Keyword stuffing is against the guidelines of Google.)
It doesn’t have to be articles. If you optimise the “description section” on the product page to include all the keywords Google is suggesting, the chances of you getting the first-page rank will increase tenfolds!
Just try different phrases and keywords. You will find a lot of ideas.
Check out the image above. The above phrases suits perfectly for Gifts Categories, don’t they?
Now you know what to name the categories of gifts on your online gifts store.
Keywords are the way search engines “see” your content.
Just note down what people are searching by doing a simple Google search.
Naturally use those keywords while editing the description of your product or writing a blog article.
- Linking (Internal and External)
Think of the spider’s web. Every point is linking to another point and allowing the spider to move.
Internet is like this. There are millions, if not billions of webpages. They connect with each other in a specific manner.
There is a structure to this.
If we link to relevant sources from our web-page, Google will recognise that and reward us with improved ranking.
When you link to the (relevant) pages on your website, that’s internal linking.
When you link to the (relevant) pages on other people’s websites and stores, that’s external linking.
Both are very important for SEO.
If we link to the pages that are not related to the topic of that page, then it’s spam. Gift Store’s ranking will decrease if that happens.
Internet is like a spider’s web. Links are important for SEO.
If a page is linking to different pages on your website, then it is internal linking.
If the page is linking to pages on a different website, then it is external linking.
Both are important for SEO.
- Internal Linking
To sell more gifts online in 2020, you don’t just need more traffic on your site. You also need to KEEP people on your site as much time as possible.
In the technical terms, it’s called on-site time.
The more time people spend on your site, the better the ranking Google will give you.
Plus, think about this. If people are spending an additional 2 minutes on your site, clicking around, the chances of making another sale increases!
- This is why it’s important and how to do it.
Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal and every single major e-commerce brand has this thing figured out.
Did you notice, every page will have a section of “related products”?
That section increases the chances of your online gift store getting another sale.
So many times it triggers the impulse purchase. It all happens in that split second.!
Make a list of closely related gifts for every gift in your online store.
Add a section of similar products on your store.
Make sure you test which combination of gifts is getting more clicks and sales.
- External Linking
External links will tell Google that which type of store you have.
Here’s what I mean.
If there are 5 blog articles on your website linking to different gifts and novelty blogs, then Google will say,
“All right, this store links to gifts related articles. This store must belong to the gifts category”
Imaging your gift store links to several dog-training videos on YouTube and a couple of golf training articles on the golf-related website.
That wouldn’t work, now would it?
Make sure to link at reputable and relevant sources wherever it makes sense.
You can learn more about On-Page SEO by checking out this On-Page SEO guide by Brian Dean from Backlinko.
Did you observe the internal and external links in this article till now?
That’s because I am letting Google know what category this website belongs to.
Hope that makes sense.
Off-Page SEO: What it is and how to do it to get better Ranking
The optimisation you do on everywhere else (other blogs, social media) is off-page SEO.
Here’s how to do off-page SEO for your gifts store.
- Guest Posts
- Press Releases
- Influencer Marketing
Like all the worthwhile things in the world, SEO takes time to kick-in.
Google recognises and ranks pages in about 8 to 12 months.
Just keep optimising your pages and getting backlinks.
Gradually, you will be one of the most dominant players in the gifts industry.
You can contact the blog owners and ask to write a blog post on their blog. In return, they will give a link to your store in the author-section.
There are thousands and thousands of bloggers writing about gifts every month and millions of people are searching for gifts.
Gifts industry is BIG!
There will always be more bloggers wanting to get more content on their blogs and willing to trade a link for it.
There will always be more topics for you to write about.
Here’s a guide about how to come up with new ideas to write about.
Write an article on other people’s blog. (or outsource the writing part to good writers who knows the gifts industry.)
Get a link to your gifts store in return.
Optimising your gift store for search engines is a simple but slow process. But doing this will surely get you on the first page of Google.
- Press Releases
As a business owner, you probably already know about press releases.
Get ready to take branding this to a whole new level!
While working on SEO and getting more traffic to your gift store, understand this.
Your job is to increase the percentage of chances of people finding your mention online.
If you have one out of a billion pages with your mention on it, your job is to take that to 10 out of a billion.
That’s still less but it is at least something.
The beauty of a press release is you can submit one press release to multiple distribution sites and they will distribute it for you to different bloggers and sources.
Which means you will get a link back to your site, the mentions of your brand will increase and all of that for a very affordable investment or free!
Want to learn more about press releases? Check out the ultimate guide to press releases by HubSpot.
Press releases were always in fashion. Because they work amazingly in the long term.
Even Bollywood and Hollywood movie promotions are using press releases. When done right, they will, of course, work well for your online gift shop.
Have you tried HARO to increase your press-release distribution this month?
- Influencer Marketing
On every platform (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TickTock) there are influencers.
One of the major sources of earning for them, apart from ads, is influencer marketing!
People like you and me pay these influencers to feature our products in their videos, posts and stories.
SkillShare and Curiosity Stream examples.
Before you go paying people up for a mention, remember that the content of these influencers should be close to the kind of gifts we are selling.
For example, I will not ask a Tomato Gardening YouTube channel to feature the personalised photo frames or a hexagonal explosion box.
Because it’s not related.
I will try to find channels, pages and profiles that belong to lifestyle and luxury category.
Does that make sense?
Plus guess what? A mention on a reputable and trustworthy channel or page means more SEO Juice for your gift store!
Subscribe to, follow and engage the influencer channels, pages and brands in gifts industry.
A simple search on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and TickTock will give you a lot of material to work with.
Contact them asking for promotion on their channel. Repeat the process as many times as possible.
Want to learn more about Off-Page SEO? Check out the Off-Page SEO Ultimate Guide by Neil Patel.
Remember to track the conversions from each marketing campaign separately.
This will allow you to see which campaigns are profitable for you and which are not.
You can ask your developer to build the tracking functionality on your online gifts store.
If you don’t have a developer yet, you can use CartFlows to create a different marketing campaign for every promotion.
This will bring ease in tracking the sales and revenue came from each promotion.
Want my guidance with it? Feel free to book a consulting session with me.
SSL: It’s not optional anymore!
About three to four years ago, SSL was only “recommended” but not essential.
But nowadays, if you don’t have an SSL certificate on your online gifts store, then your ranking suffers.
Please ask your developer to install an SSL certificate on your website. It will make all the traffic flow from HTTPS instead of HTTP.
That https and secure-lock sign fills your customer with trust and assurance of safety.
Plus it is risky to operate an e-commerce site without an SSL.
Especially when customers are purchasing and filling out their info on our online stores.
Get a FREE SSL for your online gifts store by following this guide.
If you don’t have a web developer, no worries! You don’t need a web-developer for this. You can install SSL on your website all by yourself.
All you have to do is, follow this tutorial and install Cloudflare on your website. IT’S FREE!
Want me to do an SEO Audit of your gift store?
If you want my help pinpointing the issues with the SEO of your gift store and ironing them out, book a consulting session with me. I will throw in a free SEO Audit.
The consulting session with Kaivalya includes a lot more than an SEO Audit.
We discuss and strategise how you can sell more gifts online in 2020 by transforming your current gift store into a smart store.
Takeaway:
SEO is a huge topic. There are a lot of things you can do to optimise your gift store.
But the benefits are tremendous. I mean, nowadays, the ad-costs are touching the moon and Google is providing you, free customers, when we optimise our gift store for it.
It is worth taking efforts on SEO.
The best way to do this is to hire a competent SEO specialist for your gift store.
For affordable investment, you can optimise your gift store and get the rewards.
If you are a solopreneur, you can optimise all the things we discussed so far.
Try out RankMath for your gift store.
Security is a huge topic for every online gift store owner.
It has been observed that about 60% to 65% of all e-commerce platforms use obsolete technologies and are prone to hacks.
If you are serious about providing a secure shopping experience, keep reading this article.
Here are simple steps of securing your gift store.
Want results like this from your online gift store
month after month? Keep reading!
Brute Force Attacks: How to protect your online store against them.
Brute force attack means trying out a whole bunch of combinations to get the right ID and PWD of your website.
Setting passwords with your favourite subject from school days or the name of your partner or parents seems tempting.
But it is a no-go if you want to protect your site against brute force attacks.
This also means not setting up user IDs like, admin that can be guessed easily.
As you can see, on one of the stores I’ve developed for the client, more than 250 (failed) brute-force attempts have been done in the last seven days alone!
The truth is that, when your gift store starts to really grow, more and more hackers will try to break in.
I mean, hundreds if not thousands of people try to break-in Facebook’s and Google’s systems daily.
We cannot really stop people from trying to break in. But we can damn well make sure that they don’t succeed.
No system is hack-proof a hundred percent. But we can make it really hard for people to get control of our online store.
In the last three to four years, I’ve had a fortune to closely work with Ex-Googlers, discuss data science and machine learning with Amazon’s Data Scientists.
The successful e-commerce businesses take every measure necessary to protect their e-commerce store.
Keep reading and you will know exactly what to do and how to do it.
Did you know that you can even change the login page URL of the website by using simple WordPress plugins like iThemes Security?
If the hackers do not have a login page URL, it becomes harder for them to force their way in!
Takeaway:
Protect your store against brute-force attacks by using WordFence or iThemes Security.
Ask your developer to configure these firewalls on your gift store.
Updates: Your protection against most of the tech vulnerabilities.
This is a big one!
The technology is constantly improving. It is not perfect and it never will be.
Hackers will find new ways to break-in and put the malicious code on your gift shop’s website.
The developers and tech enthusiasts like us will constantly try to patch those loopholes and improve the systems.
It is the game that never ends.
The latest versions of the plugins, themes and technologies usually have all the security measures developers have issued.
When the plugins and themes on your store are purchased from the original source and are up-to-date, you literally reduce the chance of getting hacked by 90% to 95%! Here’s an article on How to secure an E-Commerce Store.
90% to 95%! hacks and malicious redirects happen because of plugins and themes from untrusted sources. Obsolete versions of technologies on your website.
Update all the technologies and systems on your website to reduce the chance of getting hacked by 90% to 95%
This is a big one!
The technology is constantly improving. It is not perfect and it never will be.
Hackers will find new ways to break-in and put the malicious code on your gift shop’s website.
The developers and tech enthusiasts like us will constantly try to patch those loopholes and improve the systems.
It is the game that never ends.
The latest versions of the plugins, themes and technologies usually have all the security measures developers have issued.
When the plugins and themes on your store are purchased from the original source and are up-to-date, you literally reduce the chance of getting hacked by 90% to 95%! Here’s an article on How to secure an E-Commerce Store.
Takeaway:
Make sure the technologies used to develop your gift store are up-to-date. Technologies like, PHP, WordPress and the added plugins and themes.
Also, make sure that you use the plugins and themes downloaded from the original source.
Backups: They are a must and easier to implement than you think!
About five years ago, I lost a website that was making me $1349+ every month because I did not take the backup.
Lost all the data… 🙁
I have learned from that mistake. Never again did I take the backups less seriously.
You are investing a lot of money and your developers are investing their time to build this asset.
You hope to make tenfolds of money back from your online gifts store.
Don’t lose this by not taking backups.
Because get this.
In the development process, something always goes wrong.
I have been fortunate enough to work closely with Ex-Googlers.
I had interesting conversations with people from Amazon in the past.
I have had the pleasure to work with amazing, amazing Gift Store Owners and all that experience shouts one thing.
While working on a website, someday, something goes wrong. It happens with every project. Take backups obsessively.
There are 3 types of backups I recommend.
- On-Site Backups.
- Off-Site Backups.
- Local Backups.
On-Site Backups:
The backups that are taken on your server itself are called on-site backups.
You can use plugins like All in One WP Migration, UpdraftPlus or Duplicator Pro to take on-site backups.
Off-Site Backups:
Off-site backups mean the backups that are saved on a different server.
If anything happens to your server, then we can just restore this backup and everything will be okay. Previously suggested plugins also offer off-site backups options. You can also use ManageWP for this purpose.
Local Backups:
When you create a backup file, you can download it to keep it safe locally.
Please contact your developer to provide you with this functionality. You can also use CodeGuard to take backups of your server.
I personally recommend you (strongly) to have the functionality of daily automated backups.
The above-mentioned plugins offer this functionality for an affordable price.
I provide daily automated backups to every gift shop owner I develop an online store for. It’s a free add-on.
Need my help building your own Online Gift Store? Feel free to reach out here.
Takeaway:
Take obsessive backups. At least once a day.
You can never be too careful when it comes to protecting your online gift store.
Ask your developer to configure daily on-site and off-site backups of your complete system.
All the gift store owners who I help build their gift store, get free lifetime of daily automated backups.
Many times, to some of the bigger gift stores, I have also provided an automated backup cycle of six hours!
Unless a meteor hits and destroys the land of the living, you will probably never lose the orders of your customers!
If the lifetime backups sound interesting, keep reading. At the end of this training, you will have an option to opt-in.
Off-Site Payments
They say, Paypal solved the problem of online payments. They are right. But nowadays, there are a lot of different and better options.
Want to make the process of ‘making payments’ really easy for your customers? This section is for you!
Here’s a marketing principle that most of the brand name commerce-stores follow.
Yes! Walmart, Big Bazaar, Patanjali and all the big names.
The more choices you will give, the fewer purchases will happen.
More choices will only confuse your customers.
You will see that when there are three flavours of Jams, more people can choose what do they want to buy. When there are a hundred flavours, it is kind of a hassle to choose!
Same thing with the payment methods.
Keep only two to three payment options that you KNOW people use.
For Ex, In India, we’ve observed across more than 20,000 gift purchases, people really prefer UPI, Wallets like Google Pay and PayTM and they love COD!
So many people also choose to pay via NetBanking and card.
When you have that data, it becomes easy to choose which payment methods to integrate on your website.
Keep payments simple. That would boost the sales of your gifts store.
We would suggest you choose one between
1. PayTM
2. RazorPay
3. Instamojo
Click above to go the in-depth guide of how to integrate these payment methods on your gifts store.
These payment solutions offer off-site payments. For example, the pop-up of RazorPay.
It gives the illusion to your customers that the payments are happening on your site only. But the transactions take place on the secure server of RazorPay.
This means a secure, safe and beautiful shopping experience for people. This is the next best thing to investing millions on developing a secure platform like Amazon and Flipkart.
Click the button below to continue to the next section. We are going to discuss how you can make your gift store load blazing fast!
The speed of internet connection is increasing all over the globe and the patience of visitors is decreasing.
When was the last time you waited 60 seconds for a website to load?
If you are anything like me, probably never!
People just go back and click on another Google result which might belong to your competition.
Optimising your online gift store for speed is very important if you want to sell more gifts in 2020.
According to a study, 47% of visitors expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds.
40% of visitors will leave the website if the loading process takes more than 3 seconds.
Here are simple steps of speeding up your gift store.
Want results like this from your online gift store
month after month? Keep reading!
Gift Store’s Speed: The big Ouch!
This is where most of us are losing the game. All of us know that the faster the website loads, the better the customer experience will be.
The faster the website loads, the better Google rankings you will get. The faster website loads, more sales you will get.
But very few of us actually take extra efforts to optimise the website for speed. When we actually do it, we feel that ‘surge’ by witnessing extra sales in our bank account just from this little tweak. Then we never go back!
The problem is, very few online store owners actually go above and beyond to optimise their store for speed.
Some of the simple things you can do to improve the speed of your website are:
- Choose a good hosting server.
Think of the hosting as online space. Just like the offline shop, the online shop should be at the “prime location.”Means, if your customers are, mostly, from India, then choose a hosting provider from Mumbai.
(Did you know that I offer exclusive e-commerce hosting to all of my clients? It’s not some reseller hosting. We have our own servers in Pune. We also offer a handsome deal on AWS and Linode hosting packages.
- Optimising images and hosting videos on YouTube.
You will observe that images and videos make up most of the size of your web-page.
Try Optimole to optimise your images and serve videos from YouTube. This will greatly reduce the load on your hosting and improve the speed of your store.
- Using a CDN like Cloudflare
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. It does what it says. It delivers a copy of your online store from the server that is physically closer to their location.
Isn’t this great!
- Optimising the code for faster transfer.
This part might sound a bit techy. Hang on. Don’t run away! You can do this without touching a line of code.
(Alternatively, you can also share this article with your web-developers so that they can help you with this.)
Some of the basic things we can do to optimise the code of your online store are,
- Combining JavaScript and CSS for a coherent transfer.
- Enabling G-Zip and Brotli compression.
- Enabling browser caching.
- Optimising the database of the website.
- Free store speed audit
Do you want to audit the speed of your website? I will show you how to do it. Reputable brands like Google, GTMetrix and Pingdom offers free page-speed audit tools.
Here’s an example of what you can learn by the speed audit. You can click on the images below to zoom in.
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Speed is important. People want instant results. No one likes a slow website.
We have two choices right now. Optimise our online stores for speed or watch customers buy from competitor gift stores.
The choice is ours.
Sounds techy to resolve? Hang on. There is a simple solution to this.
One of the easy ways to implement most of the tweaks on your store is by installing WP-Rocket plugin and by enabling Cloudflare on your site. Also, for more detailed insight, you can check out this WordPress Speed-Up Guide.
That’s it! Everything in the list above is now taken care of.
If you don’t know how to do it and want some help with it, please feel free to schedule a strategy session with me by clicking here. Remember, every day slower version of your website is online, you are losing sales. Don’t lose sales. Book a strategy session NOW.