Selling quality products is of the highest importance on any E-commerce platform. Reaching out to customers and appealing to their browsing tastes are more important for them to start believing in your business. The first point of contact is, of course, your products feature page, but just keeping up with the latest trends like dynamic product search, advanced filtering, latest previewing mechanisms etc won’t suffice. Relevance, appeal, competitiveness, and ease of use should be prioritized to make user experience not just good but great on product page at any of the marketplace sites like eBay or TrueGether.
The five key features shoppers prefer on online shopping platforms are:
- Comprehensive Product Descriptions
- Images and Videos with High-Resolution
- Mobile-Friendly Pages
- Related Product Suggestions
- Easy Return Policy
Let’s try to put more light on each of these key features in order to understand properly.
Comprehensive Product Descriptions
Simplicity is sophistication, and business transparency is always an asset to a seller. Elegance does not have to be compromised on to get a simple and easy-to-use interface. On a product page, the first real information a customer would get about a product is from the product description. Too lengthy, would make it boring since most visitors are time bound and want to make a quick buy, while too short gives a sense of incompleteness and insufficient information about the product to the potential buyer who has all the right to the information about the showcased product.
The main objective should be to instigate the customers to buy your product through comforting words, catchy phrases, useful information, and hitting the bulls-eye with how the product will benefit the customer because of his need to buy it. Other than the pricing of the product, mapping the right context to the features of the product in its description is one of the core functions of high-level advertising. Prompt information and FAQs are the tickets to increased page traffic for a seller on a marketplace.
Images and Videos with High-Resolution
One of the rules of the leading marketplaces is for the sellers to upload useful, clear, high-resolution, complete feature-covering images of the products being featured. The adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” is quite apt in this context since a great quality image upload of the product can appeal to the customers’ eyes and they could even zoom in to meticulously examine the product.
Multiple angle shots and different environment and background photos would enhance the visual experience of the customers while reassuring the fact that they have to purchase the product with every additional image that they view. This is called progressive e-commerce marketing and also ensuring that images or videos do not take too long to load through optimization will have lesser drop-off rate. Compressed images and videos should be the need of the hour for promotional and progressive marketing. Videos have a more lasting impression that images since they show the product live in motion and can determine its actual attributes through real-time streaming.
Mobile-Friendly Pages
Every modern customer likes to shop on the go. It could be at work, at home, during a vacation, anywhere and everywhere. Every marketplace or website needs a mobile app or a mobile-friendly version of the website and its contents to cater to the omnipresence requirement of the customer. A seller on a marketplace has to upload his product details like images, videos, descriptions, specifications, etc. in a mobile-compatible format.
A good responsive page will receive more visits and more purchases consequently because of the visual appeal and operational ease on mobile devices irrespective of the make of the mobile. Browsing on a mobile should be like doing it on a mini laptop, the experience that is. The 1-2-3 of mobile shopping should be look-click-go and sellers who abide by that often benefit from the exercise.
Related Product Suggestions
Many marketplaces have their website templates designed to display suggestive product alternatives, related products or complementing products. Even if the customer does not end up purchasing a particular product, his attention is drawn towards the recommended alternatives and their prices. This is called alternative marketing and chain marketing. This is how it works when a customer selects or tries to check out his/her cart, the product suggestions slide on a window on the panel. The customer can either choose to buy the suggested products or choose to ignore the recommendation.
Through this feature, the customers can get enlightened on the latest products and their prices and offers or they can choose to abandon their current purchase and choose a better option from this list. Curiosity and excitement are triggered with a phrase that says “Complete your look with these recommended products”, or “you might like this”, or “you might be interested in this” etc. Comparative shopping happens when a customer compares what other shoppers have bought or “people who have bought this also searched for” message appears and the customer obliges in checking out the product listing.
Easy Return Policy
Returning a product when not satisfied with it is an inherent part of the buying process. When the transaction is done online, customers are often dubious about the product quality or the satisfaction they would get when they get the product in hand. The images and the descriptions that sellers may illustrate online may not be the case when they arrive at the customer’s location. They might undergo damage, misplacement, attribute change etc. Every online customer expects an easy return policy.
Most marketplaces pick-up the returned item from the customer location when the return has been initiated by them. A good an easy return policy shows the customer that the brand can be trusted and provides them the assurance that they will get their money’s worth. This ensures reorder from the same seller if the returns go smoothly and increase their reliability. More than 70% of shoppers check the returns page as a precursor to making the purchase.
Conclusion
Following trademark norms to add customer-centric and sales intensifying features on your shopping pages that are permitted by the marketplace is a giant leap to e-tailing success. At the end of the day, a smooth sail in terms of customer experience is what truly lets you shine as an online seller anywhere.