eCommerce News
What’s the first eCommerce transaction?
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Branded product lines are a graveyard fixture for eCommerce
Your Product Lines Might Be Driving Customers Away—Here’s How ‘By Application’ Navigation Can Increase Conversions and Improve SEO
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As we zoom toward Black Friday, wouldn’t it be nice to ensure your customers can find the products they want, quickly? We discussed this in the last episode and today’s conversation continues this point. Don’t play Code Names with your customers—and I show you how to avoid this.
The FTC’s new #clicktocancel rule—and what it means for you.
Nothing… if you don’t have subscriptions. And, even then, I’d be surprised if you use the scummy tactics that many other companies use. Make your subscriptions as easy to cancel as it was to sign back up. They are enforcing the Golden Rule for subscriptions. More information here.
Free returns are going the way of the dodo
Processing a return can cost retailers 39% of the original price. Dillards, DSW, H&M, T.J. Maxx, Zara, and many more have dropped free returns. It was fashionable to offer this in the ecom explosion phase, but it doesn’t make sense as things settle in. Even Amazon is charging $1 for some returns through UPS Stores.
You vs them: don’t play Code Names with your customers.
Your marketing department is here to spread awareness of your products. But they aren’t your customers. They are responsible for the sexy product names, building marketing hype around new product releases, and staying in front of customers on social media (among many other things).
You may be missing a critical piece to connect with your customers.
When your customers visit your website, they intend to find a product that matches their need. You may provide them with several options, so they must locate the best match (we discussed this in the last episode).
Code Names is a game of fake names—you have to guess to find out who is who. It’s tricky with each turn having a potential game-ending answer. When your customers have to sort through your product lines to figure out which is the right one for them, you’re more likely to have unhappy customers, thus bad reviews, because they didn’t get the right product for their application.
Do they see a name-centric view, like this screenshot from our demo kayak company, Otter Splash?
You will provide a massive service to your customers (and search engines) by providing them alternate routes to end up at the product. “By Application” or “By Use Case” is one of the most valuable avenues. You can even create landing pages with explanatory information for each. This is also helpful for search engines:
Even better, you can crosslink these landing pages to help provide even more context:
How I implement this
- Determine how customers categorize your products: by application, subject (photography), or type/material. Try to keep this to less than five options, opting to provide additional layers.
- Create new categories/collections for each. Add helpful content to allow search engines to engage.
- Add these pages to the navigation menu.
- Add links on branded product line pages to direct users to where they will better relate.