There are a lot of great things about shopping online, ranging from its sheer convenience to the deals frequently available on ecommerce sites that might not be within your easy reach if you were to depend on the high street alone.
Online retail isn’t without its drawbacks, though, with surely the biggest being the fact that the customer cannot reach out, touch and inspect a given product prior to purchasing it.
This factor alone may deter some of your prospective customers from using your site, when there is a rival seller of a given required item within travelling distance of their house. So, what are some of the best potential ways of overcoming such a clear disadvantage as an ecommerce site owner?
Show plenty of captivating photos
Anyone working in retail knows how powerful product imagery is. However, for too many of the items on sale in your online store, you may presently be dependent on whatever standard images the manufacturer has provided, perhaps simply depicting the product on a blank background.
Why should you settle for that, when there’s such an obvious opportunity to incorporate context-of-use images into your product pages? These are photos that show how the particular item is actually used, thereby enabling the shopper to easily imagine how they might do the same.
Explainer graphics can also be helpful, as can images that depict the product at unusual angles or in close-up to draw attention to distinctive and useful features. The more your on-site images can tell your customers about an item’s design, dimensions and functionality, the less they will feel the need to seek out an example of the product to scrutinise ‘in real life’ before ordering it.
Include videos of the product
While images can be taken of a product that include a person using it for demonstration purposes, video can be even more powerful in this regard. After all, there may be certain more technical products – or those requiring assembly – that require slightly more elaborate explanation as to how they are to be used, which can be done especially memorably in a video or two.
Allow customers to post product reviews
Providing a means by which customers can submit their own content in relation to the product can be similarly invaluable for reducing those urges that other shoppers may have to head to a brick-and-mortar store to examine and touch the item for themselves.
It’s the case with photos and videos, and it can be the case with user-submitted reviews, too. Such reviews will help to answer the most pressing questions that customers are likely to have about what the product is actually like in real-life circumstances, further ‘humanising’ your site in the process.
Are you looking for a website design service that also gives you full control over your site for updating its content when required? If so, you may be pleased to learn about our expertise in ecommerce web design, this being just one of the key services that Piranha Designs can provide to assist your retail brand in establishing the strongest possible online presence.
