Shopping malls and supermarkets employ all sorts of special floor plans that encourage you to browse from one aisle of products to the other. You can do the same thing for your eCommerce company if you want to help ensure that customers buy, and buy a lot. There are certain strategies to doing your eCommerce website design such that your visitors will be compelled to browse through your wares and buy your items.
Make Generous Use of Images
Anchor text as simple as 'Click Me!' will suffice to link your home page to the different departments of your site. With such a bare minimum of eCommerce web development, though, do not expect customers to be clicking like crazy.
Photos and images of sample items are a much more effective way to drive your visitors' attention to what you're selling. It's a very simple matter during the initial eCommerce web development phases to set images for each of your departments' links. Think of it as putting up a window display for each part of your site. Just a little bit of extra effort is needed, but people have a greater tendency to come in and look around.
Recommend, Recommend, Recommend
Customers who are really out to do some browsing tend to click on the first links that present themselves. That's why it's a good idea for you to place suggestions for other items – preferably ones from other departments – that customers might want on the product page of each item.
Are you selling laptops? Suggest a nice laptop bag to go along with each unit. Do you sell to the apparel niche? Give a suggestion for a whole outfit, even when the customer's just looking at a pair of jeans. It'll take a bit of scripting and a fancier eCommerce website design, but you'll soon see customers with burgeoning shopping carts, thanks to all your product suggestions.
Make a Last Ditch Offer
Once a customer is finalizing an order on your shopping cart software's interface, most eCommerce companies just leave the buyer to arrange payment and shipping. Industrious entrepreneurs, meanwhile, will take the chance to sell one or two more items to people once they've made up their minds that they're going to buy.
Taking the previous idea of item recommendations just a step further, use the blank space on the shopping cart software interface to advertise last-minute deals that the customer might like. In the customer's mind, he or she has already decided to purchase from you; many will bite the last-minute offer, thinking that the extra items will not make much of a difference in the total amount.
Accessories, add-ons and sub- $ 10 are the best ones to use for this area. You have to make the customer feel that the extra item is either a crucial companion to the items that are in the cart, or cheap enough not to add too much to the amount due. Again, it'll take some fancy eCommerce website design on your part, but the added sales will be worth the effort.
Increasing profits does not just mean attracting more customers to buy from you. If you're able to attract the same number of customers to buy more, you can achieve the same effect without paying as much for traffic or optimizations.