Makings of a Product Page that Sells
Think about your website as a brick-and-mortar store. The homepage is the shop window, and you need to dress it up to showcase your products and attract customers. But a beautiful window means nothing if what’s inside doesn’t match up. Even the best-looking shop window cannot cover up the fact that your goods are thrown around the store with no sense, order, or style. On your website, the goods are the product pages. They have to be just as appealing as the homepage if you’d like them to work to your advantage and sell your products for you.
Things that Every Product Page Needs
So the very basic thing every product page needs are the product description. The product image, and a call to action. Product description plays a vital role in providing information to potential customers about your product. The information they will use to decide whether your products is worthy of their attention or not. The product image serves to illustrate your product. If you’re selling services, images are there to be eye candy and create an effect you desire. A call to action can be just some text which tells the viewers to contact you if they’re interested in your product. Or it can be a call to action button which leads the visitor to the ordering page. Whichever of the two you choose, you should make sure that the call to action is clearly visible. In fact, if it’s a little bit attention-grabbing, that will work even better.
Ordering and How to Make it Painless
If the very basic things every product page needs did their job well. The website visitors would want to order your products. Now, ordering is usually done on a page that’s not the product page. But it won’t hurt to set out a couple of fundamental principles for the ordering process. Chief of them is that you have to be very careful about what you ask from your buyers. You’re asking them for their money – that’s a given. Anything beyond that has the potential to irritate your customers to the point where they drop the purchase only because you’ve asked them for information they weren’t prepared to give. So keep it streamlined and straightforward. You want as few steps as possible between the customers’ decision to buy something and them doing it.
The Very Welcome Additions
Let’s be perfectly honest – the very basic things will only get you so far. You’re not the only person using a web page to sell products or services. You always need to think about how you could one-up your competition. For example, you can offer shipping information, fees primarily, right there on the product page. Give your customers a chance to calculate the expenses of the purchase before they go to the checkout, and you’ll have fewer abandoned purchases. If the products you’re selling come in different sizes, like clothes or shoes, put a size chart on every product page, and your customers will love it. If you want your visitors to spread the word about your products on their social networking profiles, add social buttons that will allow them to do so with no more than a couple of clicks. You should also consider allowing customers to review the products right there on their page because there’s nothing better for your bottom line than online reviews.
A Few Parting Thoughts
With all of these lovely little things you can include into your website’s product page, you might think that product pages that sell look very cluttered. But they don’t – they are incredibly streamline, and the wealth of information and options they provide balance with some smart web design choices that make the page look very easy to read and look at. Simplicity is always good, as it asking your customers to sign up for your mailing list, as long as you do that before they go to the checkout. Treat your customers fair and respect their time, and they’ll like you more for it. Waste their time, or make it hard for them to find the information they need, and they’ll turn to other web stores which offer them more.
