Make Your Store Instantly Better

Let me guess you have done a lot of work in your ecommerce business so far? You took the time to find a niche, determine what you want to sell, found trustworthy vendors, got a logo and business name, set up your store and designed it yourself but you haven't been able to make the sales you want or grow your email list? You don't know what you can be doing wrong because it feels like you did everything right, right?

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Wrong. Well possibly. Just hear us out there is a big chance that when you were designing your site you considered what looked nice to your eye but you didn't consider the user experience? If this is you, it's ok! You aren’t a UI/UX designer so how, ever could you have known how to do this? You couldn't have but, you aren't at the stage yet where you can hire a designer so you have to use all the knowledge you gained from Youtube University, Google, Reddit and wherever else to bootstrap this whole ecommerce thing. 

Now let’s do an exercise. Pull up your website while you're reading this post to see if you can apply anything that we are going to talk about in this post. Now when your page pops up, the area that is in your view of the screen is considered “the fold”. Got that? Now that you know what the fold is, do you have a call to action button (CTA) in this area? If not then Move That CTA Button Up! If you don't have a CTA button on your page then you need to get one and fast.

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A website isn’t just a holding place or a digital warehouse for your products. A website is supposed to be doing some of the work for you. You don’t pay all those subscription fees for a warehouse. Your ecommerce website is a powerful tool that when optimized can do a lot of work for you but, you need to have a goal. What is the goal of having people visit your website? To buy products from your long awaited new product collection? To get more email subscribers so you can nurture your relationship and turn them into community? To get more phone numbers to send out SMS messages with discount codes and announcements? Ask yourself these questions to get clear on what you want visitors to do when they visit your website and then make that your call to action. 

You have on average 7 seconds to get visitors attention to what you want them to do when they visit your ecommerce website. This means that your CTA button should stand out. If your brand colors are yellow, blue and red consider making your button red because that gets people to stop and notice. This is what we mean by making sure that it stands out. If your aesthetic is nude tones then consider using a pastel blue or another color that will contrast against the other colors on the page and get people to notice it. If your brand colors are all dark then choose the most vibrant color to make your CTA button. 

Here are a few more rules when considering your CTA. Make sure that the font color you use in the CTA contrasts well against the color of your button. This is important because of accessibility. You want people to be able to read what is on your page and when the color isn't accessible they may have difficulty reading it or may not be able to read it at all. You can check your use of font color and button color here at this contrast checker: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ or you can Google contrast checker and go with one you prefer. 

Once you have moved your button up and made it stand out there are only a few things left to do. The second to last thing I want you to consider is using active language within the button that describes what happens if the visitor selects it. For instance instead of just saying Sign-Up it can say Sign-up for Newsletter or Sign-up for Discounts. This is both for accessibility and user experience. It helps visitors know exactly what happens when they select this button and it helps people who use screen readers to know what you are asking of them. 

And there you have it! No this won't solve all your ecommerce website problems but you are on your way to creating a better shopping experience for visitors and your website is being optimized to work for you. Test out different copy over time to see what language visitors respond to the most. Your website is a living breathing thing, you will never be done with it. And therefore, we will never be done giving you pointers. If this post was helpful and you want to know about when more just like it drop, subscribe to be notified below.

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