Spelling Mistakes Harm Conversion Rates
As we’ve written before, good spelling and grammar are essential to product merchandising and to selling products online. But don’t take our word for it. Charles Nicholls at Practical eCommerce recently caught up with Charles Duncombe, CEO of JustSayPlease, a U.K.-based e-commerce company with annual revenues of $20 million across multiple websites.
Duncombe reports that just one misspelled word (in the case of their hosiery Web site, the all-important term “tights”) had an 80 percent impact on conversion rates. It’s not a surprising number. Who wants to buy tights from a website that can’t spell the product name correctly? Not only did sloppy grammar cause potential buyers to click away, but Duncombe also found that out-of-date product references also hurt sales. In the fashion world, no one wants to be reminded that the semi-opaque tights they’re about to buy were extremely popular on the runway back in 2008.
The post concludes by reminding content merchandisers of the importance of regular page performance reviews and testing. We would like to add to that the importance of having a well-planned and well-executed content merchandising strategy.
Read more at Practical eCommerce.
The Importance of Customer Reviews
While customer reviews can be scary for anyone selling products online (why, oh why, does everyone hate the Scooba?), Linda Bustos of Get Elastic encourages product merchandisers to take the plunge. People who have used your product are in a great position to act as your online salespeople:
Customer reviews reveal insights about the product that do not appear in the manufacturer’s description or even your own copywriting. This is very important in online shopping, as there is not a salesperson on hand to discuss the product. This allows customers to research their purchase more thoroughly, with honest opinions. The more review content you have, the less likely the visitor will turn elsewhere (like Amazon or a competitor) to find this information.
Bustos also has plenty of good advice for product merchandisers on ways to make it easy for customers to write reviews. For example, you can remind customers of various product attributes (such as packaging, flavor, freshness, and value) and ask them to rank each one. Or, you can create an interface that lets customers choose between a quick star-rating review and leaving a longer, detailed review.
Read more at Get Elastic.
