As an advertiser for an e-commerce brand, you already know that quality is an essential ingredient in the recipe for success. The best results come from offering high-quality products through a first-rate buying experience, supported by excellent customer service. While these are all factors in your Shopify store’s profit level, there’s another area that will significantly affect your sales: the quality of your Shopify catalog.
With 1.92 billion shoppers expected to make an online purchase this year, you’ll want to ensure that your digital store is designed to bring in as many of those sales as possible. High-level attention to elements such as product images, store organization, and up-selling/cross-selling opportunities can boost your Shopify sales without dramatic changes to your overall marketing and advertising strategy.
Image is everything — and when online photos are the only view a potential customer might get of your products, inaccurate or low-resolution product images are a serious liability. These photos are a replacement of the touch-and-feel experience customers enjoy at a physical store. Therefore, they need to provide the most detailed and most attractive view of your products as possible.
It starts with investing in high-resolution product photography, with a background that highlights and supports your items, rather than distracting from them. High-quality images don’t have to be particularly costly either, inexpensive tools such as a tripod and proper lighting can dramatically improve the appeal of your shots. Creating a gallery of images, rather than featuring a single photo, will also give customers a more complete view of your Shopify store listings.
If you’ve ever been to a brick-and-mortar store with so many options that you didn’t know where to begin, you’ve already experienced the issue of option overload. Digital shops can suffer from the same issue, as your instinct may be to show your Shopify visitors every possible option to ensure they see what they are looking for. In reality, an over-packed catalog can have the opposite effect, as customers leave unsatisfied and you miss out on a sale.
The solution is to apply organization techniques to your Shopify site that will make it easier for visitors to find exactly what they came to buy. The best categories are those that are used consistently to help potential customers navigate directly to the items that interest them most. At the same time, limiting the number of products on each page will go a long way toward eliminating option overload on your site.
Do your product pages feature related or complementary products from your Shopify catalog? If not, you may be missing out on significant revenue opportunities for your brand. Cross-selling is an advertising strategy that encourages customers to add to their purchase by presenting them with additional items that work well with the featured item. This can include products such as accessories specific to that item as well as other products often purchased with that main product.
The key to making your cross-selling approach work is that the additional products need to complement the initial item while adding value to the overall purchase. Featuring random alternate items on a product page will only serve to confuse and dissuade visitors from a purchase, but strategic placement can boost both sales volume and your average order value.
With relatively minor changes to your Shopify catalog — high-resolution images, effective organization, and logical cross-selling — you can radically improve the quality of your store. These are just a few of the ways the design and strategy behind your product listings can increase your revenue as well as improve the shopper experience effectively creating a happy and loyal customer base.