As a Registered Shopify Partner, I am constantly asked to review stores and give feedback to help increase conversion rates (sales).
To become a more valuable consultant I conducted this informal study and offer my results to you for free. The more complex issues hindering profitability of your store is what you should retain me for not these easily fixed issues.
The most common issues were:
- Store Contact Information (or Lack Thereof)
- Non-Existent or Broken Social Media Links
- Basic Presentation Issues
- Shipping Costs
Here are my observations to the general online store owners out there:
Store Contact Information (or Lack Thereof)
How come there is no “contact us” page on your store?
How come there is no business address or phone number? Would you operate a brick and mortar store in the same fashion? Is this a real business? How come you won’t give directions on how to get to your business?
How come on the “contact us” page there is no contact form? This form is automated by Shopify and so easy to set up (Select page.contact when setting up the page). Or, on the “contact us” page, there’s a contact form but there’s no text that states “we want to hear your thoughts” spiel, no email address, no phone number, nothing…. it’s just a contact form. That’s so not professional or even polite.
Why is your email contact address a Gmail or Yahoo account? Seems fishy that your official business contact email is not the same as your domain.
It would seem that a lot of store owners don’t run their online enterprise the same as they would run a brick-and-mortar store. If you ran a brick-and-mortar store would you hide the mailing address to that store? If you ran a brick-and-mortar store would you hide the phone number to the store or the directions to the store location?
Non-Existent or Broken Social Media Links
Why are the social media links are broken or do not exist at all? Why would I buy from an e-commerce site that doesn’t work? It's like going to a restaurant where the chef can’t cook or the auto mechanic can’t fix cars.
Why on the Facebook page don't you have an email contact address?
Presentation
Why is the text font is either too lite or too small or of some weird shape? This makes it hard for the potential customer to read.
Why are so many stores going with a grey colored text on a white or black background? Are these stores owners purposefully making the customer strain to read about goods or services offered?
Why is there pop up after pop up on the landing page? It’s annoying. One pop up is fine but multiple pop-ups on the landing page truly distract the customer from actually making a purchase. How do you know these pop-ups are doing something positive in terms of making an actual sale?
Why are so many online store menus confusing? Menus should be as simple and of few words as possible.
Make collections of your products so it's easy to find what the customer is searching for such as price ranges, colors, sizes, etc.. Collections work great on landing pages. Use them. Don’t show 500 products… Customers don’t have the patience.
The online store’s presentation should not be an art project. If you want to know what I mean just look at Amazon‘s page. Or Nordstrom’s. Or REI’s. It needs to be simple, easy and quick-to-checkout-to-use, with quality images and error-free text.
Apparently proofreading is not a high priority for a lot of store owners.
How is it possible in this day and age that you could have a website that is not responsive to different size screens or devices? Again, this is an automated function on Shopify. Why are so many stores stuck in the 1990’s?
Shipping Costs
Online retailing reality is that free shipping has become the norm in the US. US Consumers now see shipping charges as a slap in the face. Not having free shipping (at the very least at some dollar value) is a disadvantage for an online store.
Now every business has different economics but there has to be a way to (1) absorb the shipping costs to get the sale, or (2) adjust the item price to account for the shipping costs. It's my experience that most store owners failing to address this issue simply do not understand the economics of their business. There are always exceptions to the rule but for the majority of consumer products free shipping of some form is a must.
Finally,
All of the above issues lead to a break in trust from a potential customer. That’s why the customer will leave your site and go to a more trustworthy site, probably Amazon or the like, and ultimately not make a purchase from you. Are you aware that 84% of all US online consumers check Amazon before making a purchase?
Hopefully, the above observations may help you fine tune your online store.
We can help fix all of these issues. And if you're starting from scratch we can help you with that too.
Contact us for marketing solutions to bring traffic to your store.