When opening an online store in 2023, it’s essential to take the right steps to get your store up and running quickly and correctly. After you research and select the right ecommerce platform for your store, you then need to focus on the essence of your store – your products.
There are numerous dos and don’ts when listing products.
What To Do When Listing Products in an Online Store
To maximize traffic and sales on your product listings, follow these tips:
- Let customers see your products: When selling items online, customers cannot physically touch or examine the products. To overcome this, provide quality, high-resolution photos of your items so customers can zoom in on the products. Use a neutral, solid background, and take photos from multiple angles. You should also provide videos of products when possible.
- Use keywords to improve SEO: Your product listings should include relevant keywords. The keywords should be what customers are most likely to use in a search engine.
- Write compelling product descriptions: It’s essential to create quality product descriptions. To make them effective, they should be focused on solving customers’ pain points and frustrations and should highlight the benefits of the product.
- Use a strategic layout for product pages: When creating product pages, keep the design clean and purposeful to help customers get to where you need them to go. You should place the critical information (like the price, product title, and CTA) higher on the page, above the fold. You also want to make sure the calls to action stand out and draw the attention of the customer. You should also hide additional information in dropdowns to keep the focus on the products themselves.
- Use tactics to spur sales: There are strategies you can use to encourage customers to complete their purchase. One method is to display low-stock alerts. If you display that you only have a few products left, it can entice customers to buy now.
- Get product reviews: Customers value other customers’ reviews and opinions. Showing a rating and the number of customers who reviewed the product can encourage customers to trust the item. Encourage customers to provide reviews, testimonials, and photos of themselves using your products.
What Not To Do When Listing Products in an Online Store
It’s easy to make mistakes when creating an online store. Avoid these common missteps:
- Use manufacturer descriptions: It can be tempting – and easy – to use descriptions that come from the manufacturer. However, this will hurt your SEO efforts on the pages, as any other store using the same products can have the same descriptions and it will register as duplicated content on search engines.
- Make errors in the content: If product descriptions have spelling, grammar, or other errors, it can turn customers away if they think you’re unprofessional or lack attention to detail.
- List features, not benefits: Focusing content on the product features instead of the benefits is forfeiting the chance to tell the customers why they need the product and how it will help them.
- Inconsistent pricing: It’s essential to keep pricing the same and consistent – even when using multiple channels to promote products. Having inconsistent pricing on products can cause customers to lose trust.
- Inaccurate inventories: If you list a product for sale in your store, customers expect it to be available. If you have inaccurate reporting and sell products you don’t have, or that will be delayed, it will cause customers to take their business elsewhere.
- Outdated product information: Failing to update product information regularly can result in outdated versions of the product. This can be misleading for customers and can result in frustration and complaints.
In Conclusion
The goal of your online store is to get potential customers to your product pages. These pages need to include optimized product descriptions, clean layouts, easy-to-see Buy buttons, and customer reviews and testimonials.