Have you been in my shop lately? Last week I finally added a new bit of code I’ve been fiddling with for a while – a fancy new product info box on the product pages. With a few clicks, you can view the product details and related products, the shipping and returns info and customer reviews, all in the same page!
I went to a very interesting seminar at Pulse about ecommerce. I admit I didn’t expect to learn much, having been building the things for many years, and the seminar was a thinly veiled ad for their ecommerce service, but I did pick up some good points, most of which I’ve now added to my own shop. Here’s some of the points I took note of and worked on:
- Most people don’t read product descriptions so make it easy for them to see the bits they need to know – eg. a one line summary of the product, it’s size or materials.
- Dimensions! Make these clear and available in metric and imperial. If possible, add a product shot with the dimensions marked.
- Provide detailed information on everything they need to know but move them into tabs or clearly linked pages so they don’t clutter up the page.
It’s been a lot of work (clearly, since Pulse was at the beginning of June!) but I think I’m pretty happy now. All my descriptions have been rewritten into clearly marked sections of subtitle, description, dimensions, care instructions, offers etc. The second tab provides a summary of my shipping and returns pages, plus it’s now specific to the type of product (eg. my Spoonflower fabrics have a different return policy).
My final brainwave was to use all the customer feedback I’ve received over the last few years. I don’t expect many people read my Customer Feedback page before ordering. It’s more likely they do on Etsy, Folksy etc. but even then, they might read pages before seeing a comment about the actual product they want to buy. So I gathered all my feedback from various sites I sell on, organised them by product and now each product has its own tab with reviews about that product! I’m pretty pleased about this.
However, the one thing I discovered while doing this is that a lot of people just leave a blank positive (which is totally fine, I still really appreciate it!) and that many of my most popular products have no reviews at all. Usually around 50% of customers don’t leave feedback because they don’t know how, or don’t have time.
So, check out my site tomorrow when I’m having a Feedback Amnesty! There will be prizes…
PS. As always, this was a breeze to code because of how awesome Shopify is. It never ceases to amaze me how I can have an idea, do a little bit of research and have it all work as expected. I love Shopify.
