From: Andrew Minalto
 eBay PowerSeller
 Registered TWF Seller
 CEO of SpicyAuctionTemplates.com
 Contact Me | FAQ

Featured Products – whatever you do, make sure to showcase at least a few featured products on the home page of your shop. Depending on the niche and your particular website, anything between 3 to 20 products should be just fine for an average shop. By displaying featured products on the first page, you achieve 2 things:

* You make it pretty clear what’s for sale on this website! This may seem a bit stupid but I have seen so many websites that doesn’t do this and when you land on the home page you think – hmm, what are you selling exactly? You definitely want to avoid situations like this!

* Secondly and most importantly – product pictures will act like a “Call To Action” trigger, especially if they’re high quality. Pictures sell! Don’t forget about this! Make sure the products you feature on the home page are most popular items in your shop and the pictures are of superb quality!

Best Sellers – another great way to increase the average order amount and improve conversion rates in general is to have a “Best Sellers” or “Top Sellers” category and banner on the website advertising it. In some cases you may want to include a link to it in Main Menu, along About Us and other pages. Why “Best Sellers” work so well? Because people tend to follow the choices made by other buyers, in a similar way they trust in testimonials and product reviews. If it’s on a “Best Sellers” list, it’s a must have item!

New Products – another important category is “New Items” where you include recently added products. A small banner or link on a home page or even header section will do the trick! New products category is very important for repeat customers as they tend to check the latest additions every time they come back for the next purchase.

Special Offers – these are great & people love them! If you have special offers, like Deal Of The Week, or Deal Of the Day – let your visitors know about it! A static banner placed on the home page is a perfect way to do this.

Sale – yes, yes, yes – SALES still work and people get crazy about almost anything if the Sale tag is attached to it! You definitely want to have an On Sale page in your shop to attract more customers as well as to get rid of left-over stock items.

Product Title – obviously, you want to clearly display the title of product for sale. Do not leave any room for errors here, create your product titles precisely so that customers can be 100% sure what they’re buying.

Pictures (Video) – I’ll repeat myself one more time – Pictures Sell! Period. The better pictures you can get the higher conversion rates you’ll see! Surely, depending on your niche, the picture role in your overall sales process will differ but in general, everyone wants to see large, clean & clear product pictures before making any buying decisions! If your niche and items are suitable, try creating product videos or slide shows – video is the future of e-commerce so the sooner you’ll start implementing it into your business, the better for you!

Description – whatever you sell, make sure to include at least 250 words long, unique product description for each item you sell. This will give additional information about the product and also help you with SE rankings.

Features – creating a features list in a form of bullet points can greatly help buyers to determine whether the product they’re looking at is the product they’re looking for. A list of 3 to 5 features next to the main product picture is a good way to make this work.

Price – make sure that the product’s price is displayed in a good place, clearly and noticeably! Yes, you can use the old RRP and Your Price trick as it works! Same applies for items on Sale – make sure to have previous price and new price next to each other. It’s stupid, I know but that’s how psychology works and if it makes you more money, you shouldn’t really care!

Add To Cart – each page on your e-commerce shop has a purpose. Product page showcases an item and asks for the next step - “Add To Cart”! Make this button as big as necessary and display it in a very visible place. After all that’s what you want your visitors to do – add the item to the cart!

Reviews, Feedback, Testimonials – this may not be suitable for everyone but if it fits your business model, make sure to include product reviews or testimonials below the product description’s block. Again, this will improve your SEO rankings as well as increase sales if the feedback is positive.

Background – by changing the background colour or pattern of the website, totally different results can be achieved so make sure your designer works on a number of different background versions.

Font style & size – the most common mistake is to use several different font styles and too large font size for EVERYTHING! Many people think that if they’ll write something in a bigger font size, people will definitely notice it and read. Wrong! Badly formatted titles and product descriptions will only scare off potential customers and won’t help you in any way. Besides, your shop will look really ugly.

Picture size – when I say you need large product images, I really mean “Large” and not “Gigantic”. Product images, when zoomed in shouldn’t take the whole screen, not talking about going beyond that. I would say 600 by 400 pixels is max you need! Product thumbnails shouldn’t be too small and too large, again – around 200 x 150 pixels is all you need.

Width – when the coder turns the design into an actual shop, don’t forget to mention that you want it with a fixed width. It will look so much better on various screen sizes plus you’ll be able to create perfect layout for the product, home and other pages of your site (as the website’s width will be fixed throughout the site).

FAQ Page – one of the most important “system” pages on your site will be FAQ or Frequently Asked Questions. Make sure it’s helpful, full of information and divided by blocks: Shipping, Payment, Returns and so on. From what I have seen on my websites, almost 80% of all visitors take a look at About Us and FAQ pages so they’re really important for your business.