The front page of your dropshipping store could look like this:
But instead, it manages to look like this:
And if you’re wondering what kills your sales, the answer is obvious. The homepage is a dead giveaway to customers about the reliability and ease of your brand. This homepage above screams ‘scam’ or ‘inaccessibility’, both of which are bad news for your brand.
If you think a customer will simply checkout a product right from the product page and never go to your front desk-- let me tell you: 30% of all sessions end up at your landing page. While a product page is extremely important to your online store, DO NOT underestimate your homepage.
A site’s homepage has four major functions:
1. Orient the new visitor.
2. Establish your brand’s identity.
3. Provide easy navigation to all parts of your site.
4. Attract return visitors with new content.
Before you add any element to your front page, ask yourself: Is this consistent with my brand image? Does it help with the purpose of the homepage ie. getting people to move further down the conversion funnel? Does it confuse your visitors?
If you think a customer will simply checkout a product right from the product page and never go to your front desk-- let me tell you: 30% of all sessions end up at your landing page. While a product page is extremely important to your online store, DO NOT underestimate your homepage. "You better use web design tools that help you create the best homepage and user experience."
More likely than not, there are elements on your homepage that do not work in your favour.
Here are 13 reasons why your front page sucks and what you can do to improve it.
It is cluttered with hundreds of products.
Why would you do that? Your online store is not a garage sale or a flea market. Sure you can add a few of your best products a little lower on your front page--but the entire catalogue at display with no mystery?
Nope.
Make it clean--give an overview of your brand. Introduce yourself, engage, and show the visitors what kind of products your site hosts.
Make visual tiles of product categories. Give context.
Sure, you have great products and it may seem like showing those products upfront is the way to sell them.
However, asking visitors to spend their hard-earned money on the front page itself is too big a request.
Margaux, the shoe brand, introduces us to their shoes by first explaining what they stand for, and what makes their products different. I gotta say, it is quite convincing.
And then, they give you the option to take a size quiz and a style quiz. EVERYONE loves quizzes. At the end of the quiz, you are given a personalized set of products that you can buy or save for later.
How cool is that?
Now that is engagement.
While you do not have to go to such lengths to engage your visitors, you can start by saying Hi and showing an overview of what you sell. Do you sell apparel? Go on about the types of apparel you sell, and why your products are special.
Those graphics and colours just burned our eyes.
Why the shocking pink background? Why the red text?
We love colours as much as the next person, but coloured backgrounds make text difficult to read and information more difficult to process.
I am 100% more likely to bounce off a site if it has a horrific background colour.
Would you buy anything from a site that looks like this?
While this may get you on many ‘Worst e-commerce sites’ lists, you will have great trouble generating trust from your visitors. 46% visitors are judging your credibility by looking at your homepage.
If you must use colours other than white or black, go for pastels. Avoid crowding the site with too many elements--use white space well!
Femme & Fierce use the pastel pink/peach colour effectively:
Another thing to note here is the Call to Action: make it stand out! Use a differentiator for it: make sure it contrasts with the rest of the background. Every category tile should be clickable as well.
The bar is set too low.
‘Hunting around for ages for that specific product I found on social media and have now lost should be fun’, said no one ever.
No one has the time to scroll down and check your entire store for that one product they are looking for. If a visitor is searching for black headphones, there should be an easy way for them to find it on your store.
Surprisingly, an invention has been made to make it easy: the search bar.
Although most stores do have search bars to facilitate easy type-in searches, the searches are often inaccurate or ineffective. If you are losing sales just because your search function did not yield flasks just because your visitor typed in bottles, that is somewhat of an issue.
Tag your products well, so that searches slightly out of the box can also show up when visitors are looking for them.
The New Craftsman has a search function that is completely on-point:
The navigation bar is messy (or does not exist).
Online retailers often include a navigation bar, but it is either too cluttered or does not take the visitor to the information they require.
The 6 basic elements of a navigation bar are:
- Shop
- Blog
- About Us
- FAQ
- Search
- Shopping Cart
A drop-down menu for the shop section is an excellent choice.
Let’s go back to The New Craftsmen’s home page, and check out their nav bar and subsequent menu.
This is the perfect combination of informative and clean. Too many menu items, and visitors will be overwhelmed. Too few--they will not have a clear path to follow.
The About Us section is incredibly beneficial to any dropshipping business seeking to build a brand identity, and the blog provides extra value to visitors at no cost, making you seem like a trustworthy helpful friend!
Online shopping does not allow you the freedom to converse with your target audience, and lend them a helping hand when they are confused. Do not let that dampen your sales: simply provide the customers with a navigation bar useful enough to allow self-service.
You do not have categories. Needle in a haystack, much?
This ties in with a previous concern we had: products lying around, uncategorized, unsorted. Paving one’s way through a bunch of products that do not cater to one’s needs is a waste of time and effort. The process of buying and selling online needs to be streamlined if you want to be successful as a retailer.
Create categories for your products: even in a small niche, there are products that are incredibly different from each other and thus, need to be segregated for ease of use.
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