Modernizing Your Online Shop – 3 Tips for Optimizing Your Website into the 21st Century

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Optimizing Your Homepage
Describe Your Products
Demonstrate the Items
Conclusion

When your customers visit your website to purchase goods, they put a great deal of trust in you and your services. If you think about it, you would never really buy anything in the real world without seeing or touching it first; however, precisely this happens when shopping online.

For many, the experience of shopping online can be anxiety-inducing, so you must take steps to reassure consumers of the reliability of your business. In many cases, customers will be much more likely to trust a well-made and optimized website with modern embedded features. Ultimately, enhancing trust is critical for improving conversion rates for your business, and one slip-up can cost you a sale. Here are some ways that you can improve confidence and sales by modernizing your online shop.

Optimizing Your Homepage

First impressions matter. Your homepage will likely be the first thing that a prospective customer will see of your business. They will begin to form an opinion of your company immediately from this.

In reality, customers will make a snap judgment about the reliability of a website based on their first impression. Therefore, you must capture their attention within a couple of seconds if you want them to stick about and shop.

When optimizing your landing page, you should avoid showing any outdated content. For example, showing off your Halloween-related products in the build-up to Christmas will undoubtedly decrease the trust that prospective customers have in your brand. Therefore, whenever you run a seasonal promotion, you should ensure that your homepage displays content about this front and center.

Describe Your Products

As alluded to above, one of the biggest challenges online retailers face is the conversion from page visits to sales. This is largely down to the ethereal nature of products online. Generally, customers will only see a few pictures of a product alongside a brief description. This can make it challenging for people to get a sense of the scale of an item or to visualize how it will look in the real world.

As a result, it is essential to include detailed descriptions with all the information a prospective customer might look for. Take care to include dimensional information about the product, materials used in its fabrication, and shipping details in the description. This will allow customers to make a more informed decision when purchasing online, improving your chances of making a sale.

When producing descriptions, you must not simply take the copy provided by the manufacturer and dump it on the webpage. This is often generic and lacking in character, so it will harm your brand’s image. Additionally, this is bad practice for SEO (search engine optimization), which will hinder your attempts to generate organic traffic to your site. Instead, you should aim to write custom copy for each product in your online shop. Use short paragraphs and bullet points and keep a consistent tone across your website to reinforce your brand’s image.

Demonstrate the Items

When shopping online, it is standard practice to include various images of products to give customers a sense of what they are buying. While this is certainly better than nothing, it can still be difficult for consumers to accurately visualize the item and how it will appear in 3D space.

Many retailers now include technical drawings of products on their websites to give a sense of items’ three-dimensional size and dimensions. However, these are still relatively difficult to interpret, so they can still hinder your chances of converting views to sales.

A more modern solution is to use 3D renders of products to maximize sales. Using solutions like Apviz’s digital sales tool, you can embed realistic 3D models of your items on your product pages, which can massively improve how customers perceive them.

Additionally, innovations in augmented reality (AR) technology have significantly enhanced the efficacy of 3D modeling as a digital sales tool. Using AR, customers can visualize products in the 3D space surrounding them, giving them an impression of how the product will look in real life, rather than just in a photo shoot.

Integrating 3D models of products into your online shop and capitalizing on the growth of AR technology is one of the latest innovations in online retail. Using this, customers will be more likely to buy from you, as they can understand and see products better. Additionally, using modern solutions like this will also improve trust in your brand, and you can expect to see an uptick in sales as a result.

Conclusion

In summary, by modernizing your website, you can drastically increase your sales conversion rates. Overall, many customers find purchasing online stressful, especially when there isn’t adequate information about the products. Therefore, you should make an effort to include detailed and custom descriptions of products on your website. Additionally, if you can, make use of the latest developments in 3D modeling, which can significantly boost sales.