Who are you? What do you do? What makes you different?

It’s the information age, so why try and sell your services and products if you won’t tell your customers everything they need to know?

Every day, merchants come to us asking a very common question, “How can I draw in and convert more sales?” We take a look at their site quickly and there’s almost always one obvious problem, No ‘About Us’ page or descriptive and unique product descriptions. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes for a moment. Even if you sell common and well understood products, customers want to feel comfortable in their purchase. All the features, specs, reviews, questions and answers should all be right there in front of them for every product. If you have a very short description and expect customers to guess the rest, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Short descriptions make your site look like it’s been set up overnight, managed by an amateur and won’t rank well in search engines. Take the time to write your own content including detailed descriptions and opinions about each product. Add some features that other sites haven’t thought of and of course, enable reviews which are a great way to essentially display testimonials for each individual product.

Customer decisions can be made or broken in an instant. Whilst they may not read all the content on your site, it’s important to have it there. People are different, they look for different info, so what you may think covers what the majority are looking for, it’s important to expand your mind and think across all types of personalities and needs. E.g. If you’re selling health supplements, then you’ll typically have product information from your suppliers, why not expand your site to an FAQ’s page all about how the product can be used, how often, expected results, what each ingredient does and how the body processes it. This might be an interesting read and draw hundreds of new visitors to your site each day.

Additionally, why not make a few pages all about you and your company. E.g. how did you start, when, who are your staff members and what experience do they offer? Providing these details gives your site a human aspect and often is received in a very positive light by new visitors. There’s a level of interest and connection achieved which may lead to very loyal, long term customers, even if you’re prices are a little higher than your competitors.

By educating your customers rather than forcing products in their face and nothing else (Hard Sell), you’re actually able to lead them and gain trust in your services. The sale will more often than not, come at a later stage when trust is earned.

After reading our article on Design aspects of a store, you may recall that placement of common pages such as Terms, Privacy and Contact Us links are usually in the footer and top menu bar. These are pretty standard in their location. For interesting articles I would recommend using Ashop’s category structure to build main groups on subjects and then the subcategories for all articles relating to the main subject. You can then get the link for each main subject and place it anywhere you like; however I recommend a side column so it appears on every page.

Normal custom pages can be used for general pages like “About Us” and “Testimonials” Again they would be better placed in a side column near the product categories.

Building an informational online store or website with unique and helpful content about not only your actual products on offer, but about your entire industry, is an important process for building respect, authority in your industry and customer confidence when it comes time to purchase. So do yourself a favour and spend the time now, it will pay off later.