With the seasonal holidays fast approaching, it won’t be long before highstreets are lined with Christmas-themed shop windows designed to welcome shoppers inside and out of the cold. Whilst in the world of brick-and-mortar retail, the shop front really can work wonders when it comes to prompting purchases, the same cannot be said for the online shopping sphere.
Indeed, many retailers overfocus on optimising their digital shop front, or homepage, particularly in the run up to peak season. Instead, to maximise commercial impact, sellers should turn their attention to perfecting each of their product pages and diversifying their sales channels to amplify the visibility of their products.
Homepage politics
As retailers have progressively transitioned from having a physical presence to online, many have incorporated their brick-and-mortar strategies, such as homepage prioritisation, into their online stores. Brands are also accustomed to attracting customers based on their image; they carefully craft the homepage’s aesthetics to convey the brand’s unique personality, even more so over the seasonal holidays.
By placing such importance on the homepage, determining which products should be showcased on it can become a political matter, with various departments within the business competing for results that favour their respective teams. For example, the buying department may want the homepage to showcase the newest products from key suppliers, while the digital marketing team may wish to highlight the products that receive the highest audience engagement.
However, as a result of the changing consumer landscape, a significant portion of online traffic for retailers does not actually reach the homepage, and so this strategy is not actually benefitting the main goal of the business – driving sales.
A change in purchasing habits
When online shopping first started to rise in popularity, consumers exhibited greater brand loyalty and would often browse their preferred brands’ websites, especially when Christmas shopping – much like they would explore a physical store. For this reason, the homepage would typically serve as the initial page where they arrived in most instances and where products secured maximum visibility.
However, the rise in eCommerce has caused purchasing journeys to evolve. Consumers have grown increasingly indifferent to where they buy from. They now start their shopping by looking for solutions to specific needs via search engines and compare the top listings in the results. From there, buyers are directed straight to category and product pages, completely bypassing the homepage.
In order to deliver high commercial impact, online retailers therefore need to move away from the high-street-style homepage strategy and consider ways to improve the quality of their product pages to drive more traffic to them.
Enhancing the product page
As customers increasingly visit the websites of unfamiliar brands, particularly ahead of the busy festive period, sellers must work harder to attract their attention and gain their trust. The significance of optimising product pages with the correct keywords and visuals cannot be stressed enough. Sellers need their products to feature as high up in the search results as possible, so that buyers can discover them.
To capture the attention of the audience, retailers need to identify the keywords that align most with the product and that consumers are using in their searches. Incorporating these terms in the product title and description will enhance the products’ positions in search results, thereby simplifying their discovery.
To achieve significant commercial effectiveness at such a busy time for shopping, retailers should also add a selection of high-resolution imagery of the product in use. This is because most shoppers who are browsing online will also be influenced by visual appearance. Additionally, retailers must ensure they clearly outline delivery timings and competitive pricing within the product page, as value and availability are two other key priorities for the modern-day consumer.
Maximising sales via cross-border selling
By adopting a strong product page with quality imagery and keyword descriptions, retailers will benefit from increased footfall to their platform as their products will feature higher up in search engine rankings. This work that goes into increasing visibility to a domestic audience will also be powerfully effective in attracting attention from a global audience, if retailers work with partners that can help them with the localisation of their data.
By selling on multiple channels, including cross-border marketplaces, retailers can generate even more traffic and boost the reach and visibility of their products to both international and local audiences.
Marketplaces’ algorithms scan the universe of shoppers for opportunities to match global demand to supply. Once set up, these platforms take on much of the hard work of online selling; retailers just need to ship their products to their customers.
So, for retailers to drive sales and increase brand awareness, they should move their time and resources away from perfecting the homepage, and instead focus on building a goldmine of quality product content that can be displayed across multiple channels as well as their own website.
The festive period is an important time for gift-buying across the globe, so sellers should think beyond their domestic market and allow cross-border marketplaces to find them customers overseas to maximise sales.
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