Hi and welcome to Internet Business Path. I'm your host today, Tyrone Shum. Firstly,
thank you very much for coming to visit and also check out this post today. What I wanted
to talk to you about today is how to actually optimize your Category pages on your e-commerce
website. Now, there's a lot of things that a lot of people probably don't realize or
a lot of business owners that don't realize is that a lot of consumers come onto your
Category page which is just a list of products that are displayed there. It can be displayed
on a table format, it can be displayed in a list format or it depends on how you want
to setup the structure on your website but those are really the main ways that are displayed
and shows consumers, customers what your products are within the store. And, you may think ah
it's just the list of products but there is actually a few little tips I want to share
with you to actually make it a lot better for your customers so that it helps you convert
from browsing all the way to making sales. It's quite simple but a lot of people don't
do it as well. So, as with everything in mind we'll take a little bit of what I'll teach
you and show you and apply or if it doesn't apply then move on and also take on other
things I'll also teach you as well.
So what I want to explain to you firstly is if you don't understand exactly what a category
page is, let me just talk a little bit more about it. Firstly, what is a category page.
Okay, well this is really the first process that a consumer or customer comes through.
Usually when they come and click onto your website or onto your e-commerce business,
they usually want to find out okay, I'm looking for a camera for example and I want to go
and click on the camera categories for example. And, as soon as I click on the cameras category,
it should display a whole list of cameras and it could be Canon, Sony, any of those
kind of brands and it's all listed down in one page. Now, there's a few little things
I want to share with you with regards to that and I'll talk a little bit more about it but
first thing you get to understand is that is your categories page and we can actually
optimize that to make it a lot better for the customers out there. The other thing is
that every single customer will actually see these categories first. Usually from there,
they'll be able to decide okay, this is what I want to buy and if they can't find the product
from there then they'll skip it and then you'll lose them in a few seconds as I actually mentioned
in the few other posts. That's why it's crucial to actually make your categories page easy
to ready and user-friendly for them. So let me give you 8 tips on how to actually optimize
your categories page.
A very common one that people don't actually look at doing is actually once they finish
going through the shopping cart, we can actually get them to return back to the categories
page which helps you to sell you categories page a lot more. So this first tip that I'm
going to be giving you is called "Autoreturn after adding to a cart". What it does is basically
once a customer actually added the products into the shopping cart, and they've completed
that adding of their products they've chosen what you want to do is return them back to
your categories page so that they can select more products to buy. That way, it will actually
encourage a lot more sales and also a lot more browsing for them. That's the first tip.
The second thing is to display your out-of-stock items separately. What I mean by that is I've
seen a lot of stores out there whether they have all the current items that are available
displayed with all the items that are currently not available within the whole categories
page. What might be a good tip for you is to actually keep only all available items
inside one category. For example Canon, it could be all available and it could be with
all the cameras. You want to keep all those ones that are available there. For the ones
that are out-of-stock or not available, probably create a new category called Cameras Unavailable
or Cameras need special order or something like that and some people will actually click
on that and go oh, there's the old model that I'm interested in buying so they can click
on it and go and have a look. That way, they can actually put pre-order in or they can
actually inquire more about it. That way, it keeps things separate and also too, it
helps with consumer only looking for products that are available now and also helps you
with conversion of your sales straightaway.
The third tip is to actually add a cart button to your listing page or categories page. Very,
very simple and very easy to do. Let's say for example, you're in the categories page
and you have the whole list of cameras there, no harm just put "Add to cart" button right
next to each one of those products. I can assure you that if you actually add that on,
it will actually encourage them to add the products to their shopping carts if they're
interested in buying and that really helps with your sales conversion as well.
The fourth tip that I want to share with you is actually add a "Sort by option" there and
this sort by option usually go at the top of the page, the categories page. By having
that there, it allows the customer to sort by price, sort by name, sort by category or
subcategory I should say, all those things and it allows them to browse a lot faster
and a lot easier. And that's something that a lot of websites do currently have but if
you don't currently have it, I recommend adding it on.
The fifth one that I want to share with you is make sure you do highlight your new and
sale merchandise. So if on the categories page, you actually have a lot of numerous
stuffs that's come on, just a little "New" symbol right next to it so that it actually
stands out. A lot of source do that by having either a splash kind of symbol with "new"
in the middle and by doing that, it encourages customers to have a look at a new product
and usually a lot of people or customers like new things. So encourage them to check it
out and that makes it a lot more obvious for them. The other thing is Sale. Do the same
thing there, instead of new there, have Sale and make sure that prices there showing the
orignal price with it slashed through. That encourages them to go okay, wow I'm actually
looking at particular product that say $199 and it's on sale for $120. That really, really
can boost the psychology of consumers and help you actually get better sales conversion
if you're actually having sale particular for that.
Okay, number six. This is very common sense but this is very, very powerful: show real
life photos of people actually using the product. A lot of people out there or a lot of e-commerce
store think that it's great to just show the camera, which is good in many ways but also
too, you want to add some real life photos to it. Say for example, you're holding a camera,
get a person to be taken photo of the camera and then zoom it out from there. It gives
that extra impression that it's got personal touch. Yes, also include the photos that don't
have the persons next to it but also shows some real life photos. Let's say for example
you're looking at shirts, you might want to get a model to actually wear the shirts and
take the photos with them. That encourages and also makes it more personal and gives
it a nice professional touch as well. What I'm also saying to you too is also don't take
photos on any background. Make sure that you've got clean, white background and you may mostly
have the image of the products focused on and also too make sure that when you're taking
the photos, you also have the model showing as well, too. It doesn't necessarily show
the face of the person, but there is a person in nice white background or something that's
clean.
The seventh thing that I want to give you, yeah another tip is have a prominent search
function. Now, Google being the dominant search engine provider around the market today, has
actually got a lot of extra features that you can use the search engine to put into
your e-commerce website. A lot of say for example e-commerce websites that have currently
their own built-in search functions which are good but not as powerful. So if you can
either use the Google search engine function which you can integrate into your e-commerce
website and Google is away for free. You just go to Google search and see, find the search
toolbar that you can actually add to your website, it's very easy to install. You can
do that or alternatively as I said use what the e-commerce search option has been provided
for you within your e-commerce software.
Last, but not the list, make sure your links are clickable. A lot of people actually see
the image and just don't really read the description and they'll think okay I'll click on it and
it'll take me to the add to cart or products description page. Yes, that normally does
happen but a lot of times, when you click on an image it usually shows increase size
which is great but also I would recommend to make these images clickable so it directs
you to another page that will give more details such as product description details and also
the image descriptions details so make sure you make all your images clickable.
Now, I've given you 8 good tips there and hopefully these 8 tips will be able to help
you increase your sales conversions on your categories product page. And, at your categories
products page as I mentioned in the beginning is actually just the list of items or products
that you have and you want to make sure that this is optimized for you.
Okay, I just want to let you know that there's these 8 tips that you can take away and use
these tips for your own e-commerce websites. I'll also display it on the post and hopefully
you can take them away. If you have any comments and feedback, just feel free to leave it and
ask any questions as you want. So that's it for today, my name is Tyrone Shum from Internet
Business Path and I want to thank you very much for listening.