Common shopping cart mistakes to avoid

Common shopping cart mistakes to avoid

When you’re developing the content for your website, having powerful shopping cart software like Ozcart is just part of the battle.  The cart is a business tool – just like advertising, your products and services, your telephone and your people are all tools to help you sell online. Whatever your approach to growing your business, you need solid planning and strong implementation to succeed.

This article focuses on just one of the business tools at your disposal – the content that you add to your Ozcart shopping cart website. Here are some common mistakes that many customers make, and how you can avoid them in your business.

1. Writing content using images

If you want to rank well on particular search terms, the search engines need to know that those words are a prominent part of your website.  When a human visits your website, they can see the page as you intended it, but the search engine will only see the base design of your Ozcart site because it can’t translate your image into text. Write your product descriptions using text and use images in your product description only if it is absolutely necessary.

2. Excessive Flash or video

Flash animations look beautiful and can be used to do some really powerful things. But the search engines can’t read any content that you embed into them. Use Flash for an introduction or an interactive tool you want to add to a website’s content page for an extra effect. In some cases it might be useful in a product description page, but generally should be avoided.  Appropriate Flash or video might be an animation provided to you by a product’s manufacturer for example. Video and Flash are great web tools, but should not be the main point of your website unless ranking on search terms isn’t an important part of your strategy.

3. Using fonts that nobody has on their computer

When you use a font in a content page, you will be able to see it because your browser will download the font from your local computer. But if someone who does not have that font installed on their computer tries to look at that page, their browser will substitute something else and the page may not look as intended.  They might not be able to read your content at all – which could affect their chances of buying from you.

4. Too many shipping options or payment gateways selected

People get confused if your shipping and postage options are too hard to understand.  There are a lot of possible shipping options in Ozcart but we don’t recommend you turn all of them on. Think about your business strategy and implement the ones that work best for them. Common Shipping options used are Australia Post’s delivery rate calculator and prepaid satchels, Fastway couriers and manual table-rates er post-code zone.

5. Not defining meta tags

Ozcart gives you the tools to tell search engines what each individual product and category page is about. If you don’t define these yourself, Ozcart will fill them in using the information your provide in your product name and product descriptions. But this is not foolproof and similar products or ones that do not have unique descriptions could not be indexed by Google as it will see the page as duplicate content.

6. Non-unique descriptions

If you use a description from the manufacturuer, chances are that many others selling that same product will have the same description. How are the search engines meant to know that this is a product description? They may see the page as duplicate content which affects the chances of it getting indexed. If you can, write a unique, search engine friendly description for every product in your store. If you have 10,000 products in your store this can take some time, but it’s worth the time and effort!

7. Keyword spam

People new to keywords and meta tags often assume that the more keywords they stuff into their product and home page meta descriptions the better they will rank. Gone are the days where keywords are the defining factor in a search engine deciding on what’s important on a page. In fact, search engines now expect you to use the words that you have in your keywords on the page itself. Instead of stuffing a huge number of keywords into your keywords meta tags, use them sparingly. What are the main words and phrases that are important to you?

8. Content that never changes

Even if your products don’t change, don’t just set up your website and never change it. Google could think it’s an antique and in the long run you could suffer. Write new content and add to your website as often as you can.  If your products and prices are fairly stable, create new content through establishing a blog for example that you can update weekly or daily with links to various products, trends and information that updates and refresh your website. Also, if you can, update your product descriptions periodically, run promotions and add new content pages. You don’t have to change everything all the time, just keep making minor changes and tweaks.

Content that never changes is usually a victim of the fire and forget strategy, where business owners put up a website and then expect it to both start ranking on Google and for flocks of buyers to come to the site. You can never rest on your laurels online. Your competitors are working hard to outrank you and may be selling the same products as you.

9. Poor policies

Privacy policies that are out of touch with those of your competitors can cost you sales. People shop around when shopping online, and can leave in an instant if they don’t find what they want. This doesn’t mean that you have to match all of your competitor’s policies, but you need to understand your customers and think about what your competitors are offering. What are your shipping times and policies relative to your competitors? What are your returns and exchanges policies relative to your competitors? What is your privacy policy? What payment methods do you accept and why? How much help do you provide your customers?

10. Untested

Test test test your website before you start accepting orders. Even if you have everything set up the way you want, there are a lot of settings in a shopping cart and some settings may conflict with other settings or your business objectives. We always recommend you do a test order before promoting your website so you can put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Take advantage of your cart’s support team. Ozcart’s shopping cart support staff are available 7 days a week, 365 days a year so if you can’t find the answer to what you want in the cart’s knowledgebase, just submit a support ticket to the team and they will be happy to help you.

Ozcart Ecommerce

Ozcart has been in business since 2006 and is an online, hosted shopping cart that you can use for your current or new online store. We offer so many features for the same low price. In fact, we are addicted to adding new ones to ensure that we remain one of the best choices for a shopping cart. https://ozcart.com

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