ALEXA rankings suggest that 26% of the world’s top 1mn websites use Magento. The problem of attracting customers has been an age old problem, but what do you do once the consumer walks into your online Magento store? There’s no salesperson to offer them products, press upon them the importance of the “latest range” or make a compelling sale. There are a couple of tips and tricks to the job, however, which can guarantee a successful turnover for just about any business! Read on to find out exactly what you have to do to generate a booming business!
STOP the Customer From Exiting the Cart!
Once you get a customer to your website, it is crucial that you prevent them from leaving a product in their cart and just exiting when they wish to. Often, people just exit the website when they discover that there is no secure payment method. Adding a secure gateway should be the first step in building a website; if you haven’t yet looked into it, then you should do that pronto! A second, even cleverer approach is to offer the customer absolutely no chance to second guess. If your site offers coupons, ensure that customers know how to use them (and for what) rather than having them visiting their cart, enter the code, and then exit.
DO Make Use of an Online WISHLIST
A wish-list, in being completely different from a Cart, is the place where customers spend a considerable amount of time. Wish-lists are great because they allow customers to shortlist items and return to them at a future point of time: but they are also crucial for preventing shopping cart abandonment and improving sales, as shown by Big Commerce. Not only does it alert the store to what kind of products are popular, there’s another way to boost sales: by offering a “Share to Social Media” button that shares the wish-list with the customer’s friends and family. Beneficial for holiday seasons, anniversaries and birthdays, they’re exactly like your age-old registry: only online!
FIX the Nitty Gritty of Your MINICART
Once you’ve fixed the cart and wish-list issues, it’s time to head over to the mini-cart. Nowadays, most people spend a considerable amount of time selecting the products of their choice – enter, the minicart! There are versions of Magento which are still far from perfect when it comes to the mini-cart; often, it’s not your product or the customer’s fault, but the platform itself which prevents customers from proceeding to checkout. If your theme is any variation of the default one, there might be problems with Out of Stock items on the website: in most cases, the mini-cart provides no support for such occurrences. A theme like Fortis might just do the trick!
CREATE Opportunities for Comparisons Within Your Website
The better the user interface on a website, the better your chances of making a sale. With the help of certain additional features, business owners can now easily improve their website to serve the customer better. One of the features that people look forward to is the “Compare” option that helps them decide between two different products. Considering that there are no hands-on examples available, statistics and figures are all that the customer has to rely on. Moreover, proactive chat support on the comparison page is shown to improve sales by a whopping 211%!
IMPROVE Discoverability
This is a no-brainer option for most ecommerce websites, particularly ones on platforms such as Magento which can offer easy upgrades for their website content. There are several ways to master the art of detection: and we’ll show you how. First, there’s the method of using some incredible (free or paid) themes that more often than not come optimized with the keywords necessary to your business. The more ingenious, even if slightly more expensive and time consuming method, is by obtaining individualized, genuine, fresh content for your website. With the insertion of just the right SEO content that avoids pitfalls, you can easily put your page on the retail map and ensure a lot more traffic to your site! Consider implementing SOLR, or 3rd party solutions such as Google Custom Search to make Magento's default search all the more powerful.
WRITE What the Customer is Looking For
This point may be partially extended from the previous one, namely the content offered on your Magento store. But that is not the only place where one can channel the power of words. Nowadays, PR is an influential tool in shaping how customers perceive a particular brand or product. Is it any surprise, then, that more and more web retailers – whether on Drupal, WordPress or Magento – have been diverting their attention towards avenues such as these? Stores can reap immense benefits just by releasing press releases and offering reviews of products, or perhaps even maintaining blogs that update the customer on new products, etc. Remember, a compelling copy is half the battle won in attracting and enticing the customer!
GET in the Professionals
If everything else fails, though, remember that there’s always a fall back option. Particularly for small businesses or businesses running out of homes (including cottage industries and the like), it may be difficult to maintain a huge task force to effectively tackle all the problems associated with selling your product online. There’s only one solution to these, and it comes in the form of so-called “Ecommerce Management Companies”. Companies such as Finest Shops come with great credentials and can help retailers and manufacturers alike. Not only that, they can even provide you with “managed hosting” services to put you on a broader network. Delivering the performance, the hosting and the uptime that you need is crucial.
KEEP it Simple
Studies have shown exactly how important it is to maintain simplicity when offering any form of information to the consumer. A Columbia report shows how people only have the ability to make a limited number of choices. While it is tempting to bring up every kind of product available from your impressive portfolio, you might reconsider and keep things simple instead. By limiting the number of choices, you’re able to ascertain that the customer has a better chance of being sure of their choice. By using redirects available within Magento, you can even go so far as to throw back designated URLs instead of just search results. Simple and efficient, now that’s the best way to go about it.