Online Shop Dos & Don'ts

Thanks for attending my website audit talk! We’d love to help you one-on-one, or provide resources so you can make improvements yourself.

⭐️ Get Aeolidia’s help

We work closely with shop owners to improve sales KPIs, focusing on increasing conversion rates, average order values, and customer engagement to maximize return on investment. Your new site will represent your brand in a way you can feel proud of: sharing your story, values, and quality.

Improve your online shop in a variety of flexible ways, including Simple Shopify Design and Website Optimization.

⭐️ Improve your site yourself

Here are some ideas and resources to help you implement my team’s best practices for creating a well-performing e-commerce website.

What is your shop all about?

I’d recommend using your home page to first answer these questions:

What is this business about?
Who is it for?
Why should I care?

Once they know that, you can guide customers through your shop. I’m expecting a lifestyle photo of your products at the top, followed by a few sentences below about what your business is about and what makes it special. What sets your company apart from even your closest competitor?

Optimizing your header navigation

If your header navigation gives customers a lot to do, it’s usually smart to simplify it. What do you most want someone new to your business to do when visiting your site? Make sure your site steers them in that direction.

Your job is to guide people through your site from the first step through checkout, and one way to do that is to help them get oriented. You don’t need a Home link in your navigation. Your logo will take people back; anyway, you don’t want them going backward.

Your shop categories should be the first thing people see, and it’s best to have them visible without hovering or clicking rather than hiding behind a shop link. So, show your top categories across the top, and then follow up with your About and Contact pages. Anything else can be categorized nicely in the footer of your site.

Use your best judgment with things like a podcast or blog link, but generally, these can be used to attract visitors to your site and may not need to be at the top (if shopping is the main focus).

Social media links don’t need to be in the header of your site. They’re used to bring people to your site; you don’t want to use your site to send people away to the most distracting websites! Instead, you can discreetly tuck these into your website’s footer.

No slideshows

Home page slideshows, which cycle through multiple images, are generally not recommended. When they rotate automatically, they can be distracting, confusing, and annoying. When they have buttons or arrows to scroll through, studies show that very few visitors bother with this. If it’s worth putting in your slideshow, display it on the homepage instead. People don’t mind scrolling down to learn about your business or see more products.

Web accessibility

We began looking more deeply into web accessibility in 2020. Designing and building a more accessible site is simply the right thing to do and makes your site more usable for everyone. At a high level, we aim to design and build your site so that it can be perceived, operated, navigated, and understood by users with a wide range of abilities. This includes specific tactics such as: providing alternative text for non-text content, ensuring your site is navigable without a mouse, using markup to communicate your site’s structure, not relying on color alone to convey important information, and ensuring that text-to-background contrast is sufficient.

For additional info:

The WAVE Evaluation tool is a Chrome extension that we use regularly for accessibility checks – it’s free and easy to use since it’s an extension. It doesn’t do super in-depth reporting but will catch a lot of the top-level issues (contrast errors, missing alt text, missing form labels/aria references). Here is a different web-based tool if you want a quick look without installing an extension. It only checks 10 pages of your site and is more complicated to understand.

If you would like more information about web accessibility lawsuits and how to protect yourself, please email Arianne (or reply to any of her newsletters!).

Your mailing list

Make sure you have a mailing list. These are so important. I outline why and what to do here.

I’d recommend creating a newsletter subscription offer that is truly irresistible to your target customers. It can be a discount, but we love to get more creative than that. You can take a look at some ideas here.

Establishing trust

The homepage of your site is a great place to show some product reviews, awards, certifications, or any great publicity you’ve gotten (logos of magazines, etc.). What makes you an expert, an established business, or a trusted voice in your community?

I need to know about returns, exchanges, and shipping in the footer (and not have these hidden in a FAQ). I also need to see your terms and conditions and privacy policy (required by law, and by the way, Shopify has some great tools to help you generate this content easily). It’s hard for me to trust your business without these things.

Your brand

It’s important to have a strong brand. I’m expecting a unique logo that matches your style, a selection of fonts and colors that are “yours,” and maybe some icons, illustrations, or other graphics to tie it all together. Let me know if you’d like a branding designer from our team to help you with any of this!

Ecommerce software

If you’re selling online, we almost always recommend setting your site up on Shopify. A few big reasons I prefer Shopify for just about every business that’s come my way are listed here: Why Shopify Is the Best Ecommerce Platform for Small Businesses.

Apps to try

Please don’t try all of them! Using many apps can slow your site down. But some of these may fit the bill for your specific situation.

Shopify
Klaviyo for email marketing & SMS
Gorgias for customer service. Email Arianne to ask for an introduction and free demo of the software
JSON-LD for SEO is a great app for rich Google listings. Email Arianne to ask for an introduction and help getting set up
Judge.me for product reviews
Rebuy for upsells, cross-sells, and other tools to increase AOV
Searchanise or Search & Discovery for improved search features
Rewind for site & email backups
Wholesale Gorilla for B2B sales

Getting more traffic

For newer businesses, in many cases, the problem is less about how well the website works and more about how to get traffic to your website. We have two articles on our website that may be a good start to getting more traffic:

If you’re new to driving traffic to your site, I recommend downloading our Get More Traffic, Make More Sales document. We can also help you with SEO and email marketing, and we have a partner agency that does paid ads.

More detail

I’ve put together a list of the most common problems I see on ecommerce sites, which you can read here:

8 Common Website Mistakes Small Businesses Make

⭐️ Next steps

If you’d like our entire team to make a plan to improve your site, we would love to help out! Please take a look at our services and rates here.

Our most affordable website service, Simple Shopify Design ($12,000), would be a great way to resolve any of the issues described above (and more). You’ll end up with a well-designed website using Aeolidia’s UX best practices, which have been developed over years of experience. You’ll bypass the common mistakes we see on websites over and over.

We would also be glad to work on your branding, which we’ve found to have a great return on investment (read more about that here).

Please let me know if we can help with your site! If you’d like to learn more, start by downloading our rate sheet. You’ll get an automatic email with that info and a link to schedule a call if we look like a fit.

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Online Shop Dos & Don’ts

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