Published on September 20, 2012 Ways to showcase your online store’s products
Your online shop is all about attracting visitors, keeping them on the site when they arrive, enticing and appealing to their interest to get them to read about your products and then add them to the cart.
What ways can you can showcase your products to the world?
Featured products
If you have particular products that you want to showcase, you can set them up as featured products scroller on the home page or any other page of your website. You could also show the products in a grid, or as a list if you prefer. It doesn’t have to be a in any particular format.
How do you choose what products to feature? Think of these like a headline in a newspaper – you’re looking for products that are likely to be popular, competitively priced, with some strong benefits.
Best sellers
Customers love to have products that other people have, so best sellers are a way to drive up store sales of your most popular products.
Cross-selling
When customers go to product, you can set up the cart to show other related products. For example, if you are selling shirts, you can show specified ties or if you are selling arts and crafts you could cross sell an art canvas with water colour paints. Cross selling is a powerful way of encouraging customers to add more products to their cart and for you to boost your margins (by cross selling high margin and low margin products together).
Cross selling may be presented to customers at the bottom of a product, with words to the effect of “You might also like”, “We also recommend”, “Also bought”, “Frequently bought together”, “Complete the look”, etc.
Up-selling
Up-selling is closely related to cross-selling but slightly different. Up-selling is about getting someone to buy a better/more expensive model of a particular item (e.g. 32″ TV instead of a 30″ TV, Premium edition instead of standard/economy, laser printer instead of an inkjet), whereas cross-selling is about offering complimentary products together (e.g. printers an toner cartridges).
When upselling products, try to select products to upsell for well-known and sought-after brands, with similar features and options, but remember to keep the difference in price between the original item and the upsell item reasonably small, or else you may encourage outright dismissal of the offer by the customer.
New-arrivals
For industries like fashion, customers want to get the latest hot item, so showing what you have recently had arrive in your store is a great way to keep customers coming back to your store to see what’s new, and moving your newest stock off the shelves and through the checkout.
Display sales in a block
What customer doesn’t appreciate a bargain? Showing your products that are discounted is a way to encourage customers to put sale items into the cart – like a clearance rack in a department store.
Sales or Clearance category
Some shoppers only buy discounted or bargain items like discontinued lines or run-out models. Who doesn’t want a bargain? Having a sale category in your store and putting your on-sale items into it or clearance products can encourage customers to take action, especially if stocks of these are limited – and stock levels published in your store.
Individual free shipping products
Free shipping has been proven to be a way to grow store sales and besides store wide promotions like “free shipping for items over $100”, you can choose to make just certain items have free shipping. This allows you to offer free shipping but not put the shipping promotion on all of your products as some might not be economical to offer free shipping for. (if you wished, you could offer free shipping store wide (e.g. on orders over $100) and exclude certain products and categories from that promotion).
Promotional landing pages
If you are using Google Adwords, you might wish to send customers in to a specific landing page of content to highlight a promotion. You could write up about a particular product, showing a product video for example or offering additional information specific to your promotion, for the duration of the promotion.
Off-site marketing promotions
You don’t stop selling on your site. A great way to showcase your store’s products is outside of your site in social media sites like Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook. Ozcart has tools to allow customers to like and bookmark particular products so they can be found on these sites, and you can encourage customers after they buy to review or write up about your products on their social media pages ( you might want to offer them a coupon on their next purchase if they send you a link to their review for example).
These are just some of the ways you can showcase products in your store using Ozcart. If you’re a wholesaler you might also turn off prices for unregistered customers to use your site as a product showcase and if you’re a retailer, you might choose to use other built in features like gift registries, gift certificates valid for particular products (printable gift certificates that can be sent out in the mail or in a mailout as well as electronic ones that can be puchased in-store), and new product/on sale product sticker overlays and promotional banner advertising are other important tools you can use to highlight products and encourage customers to buy them.
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