Wednesday, 24 October 2012

Ecommerce success starts with the basics

As we always say here at eSellution, helping yourself stand out form the crowd is the most crucial factor in terms of making your ecommerce store a success. In the past few weeks we have looked at ways you can stand out from your rivals through your website design, using free ebay templates, marketing yourself correctly and through the use of social media. However, if you have covered all of these bases, what things can you do to your products themselves in order to give your store that boost it possibly needs?

Basic Information

When you add a product through your ecommerce software, you sometimes overlook giving the basic information the attention it desires in an attempt to get the product listed on your store as soon as possible. Particular emphasis should be placed on the product title and the product description. When inserting a title for the product, it's often tempting to add some descriptive words that you believe make the product sound more appealing to customers. However, this really should be avoided at all costs. You need to think about your title as the phrase someone would type in to a search engine if they were looking to purchase that particular product. Having descriptive words in your title means that although you are sell the product they are looking for, as you title will be different from their search phrase, your product will appear further down search engine results. Your title should be clear, concise and directly to the point. No waffle or other special characters such as stars.

As you can see in the example, taken from one of our client stores, Krystellie Fashion, the title just has to say exactly what the product is and nothing more. Not only will this make your store seem much more professional, it will give you the best chance of achieving as much traffic as possible through search engine queries.

Now the description of your product will be a different length and style depending on the product you are selling. As a rule of thumb, the description should be at least a paragraph, providing the customer with as much information as possible. If you are selling more specialist products such as vehicle parts or industrial equipment, you will need to put more information on as the people who are buying these products from you will be knowledgeable in this field and will want specific information such as dimensions and other specifications. 

Meta Data

Just like your product title, your meta data for your product is the information which is going to help drastically improve your products exposure by having it appear higher in search queries related to your business. Your meta data generally falls within three different sections; meta title, meta description and meta keywords. At a starting point, both your meta title and meta description can just be the same as the basic information you entered for your product as long as the title is concise and to the point. The meta keywords for your product will require more effort on your part. These are keywords and phrases that relate to that product, For example, if the product is a womens summer dress, you may choose to enter "womens dress, summer dress, womens clothing, womens dresses" as your keywords. 

When deciding on which keywords you want to use for your products, you should use a keyword tool to determine how many searches those keywords have recently had. You want to use the keywords with the most searches as these are the ones that will provide you with the most traffic.

Alternate Images

As the old saying goes "a picture paints a thousand words" and your product images are no different. Although you may have included all the information a customer could ever need within the description, a good or a bad image is going to play a much bigger role in whether they decide to buy that product or not. Not only should your images be off a high standard, they should also show the product from different sides. If you have variations of the product, such as colour, you may want to also have images of the different colour variations. The more information you can provide a customer with, the happier they are going to be. 

Once you have got all the basics right for each of the products in your store, you can then look to market these products to customers through your various marketing channels. However, no matter how big your business gets, you need to remember that doing the simple things correctly right from the start is what's going to allow you to keep on having that success. 

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