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Akilapa Precious: Using Content To Improve Sales On Online Stores
Selling online is not easy – you wouldn’t just open a store on Jumia or Konga, post your products online, and suddenly start cashing in hundreds of thousands of naira monthly. It doesn’t work that way.
You probably noticed that already and are looking for a way to better your chances of making sales. Well, I’ve got good news for you; selling online might not be easy, but it is not impossible. And if people can earn good cash from selling on Jumia, Konga, and other online stores, so can you. Yes, it might not be easy, but it can still be done. Let me show you how.
The Number One Mistake to Avoid
When selling on an online store, the first and possibly biggest mistake most sellers make is the content they post. Take your experience as an online shopper for example. When you are buying products online, do you purchase the first product you click on? Most likely not. You read through the content on the product page and decide whether to buy or not based on what you see. This is the same thing with every buyer online. This is why the content on your online store is the single most important thing you have on it.
Content is what shoppers see first. It is what they make decisions on. This is why it is considered the most important part of any online store; even more important than the products themselves. Sure, if your products are bad, a shopper wouldn’t return to get more products from you. But if your content is bad, you wouldn’t even make that sale in the first place.
What Exactly is Content?
In the simplest sense, content is everything contained on the pages of your online store. This includes everything from your product details to the images on each product and anything else on the product page.
Not all the content on your online store is completely under your control, however. Take product prices for example; you have only a bit of liberty when deciding what to enter here. Reviews are another category of content you have little control over. When dealing with content on your online store, these are not the kinds of content you need to worry about.
The Four Kinds of Content You Need to Worry About
Product Names
Product names are not a big deal in physical stores; a shopper can simply tell you what they need and you just help them find it. This is not the case with online stores where shoppers have to find products by searching for them. Without a proper name, your products would not come up each time shoppers search for them.
A proper product name should contain the relevant keywords shoppers use when they are looking for that product. It also needs to be descriptive enough to catch the shopper’s attention right away and provide all the basic information about the product the shopper might want to know.
Remember, your product name is the first thing any user would notice about your product, even before the image. If the product name doesn’t catch their attention, they would most likely scroll past.
Product Images
Every shopper would like to know what they are paying for. This is where your product images come in. However, you don’t want to have just any image on your online store. You don’t want some low-quality photo of the product either. Images like this tend to leave shoppers with doubt. Instead, you want images that are an accurate representation of what the customer would be getting. You also want the image to be of great quality and display the product clearly. This greatly increases shoppers’ confidence in your product.
You should also have more than one image showing the product from different angles and sides. If the product has special features or components that might interest shoppers, make sure to have pictures that display this as well. Things like the different ports on each side of a laptop, the camera setup of a phone, and so on should be displayed. You can follow this guide to learn more.
Product Specs
Sometimes, shoppers are looking for specific properties in products they want to buy. Maybe a laptop with backlit keyboards or a power bank with an LED display for battery percentage. Since shoppers would overlook products that do not have the features they are looking for, you want to make sure you always list your product specs.
You want to keep your product specifications brief and concise – something easy to scan through. This way, shoppers can quickly scan through the content and find whatever they are looking for.
Writing in bullet points is the best choice when creating product specs.
Product Description
Arguably, this is the most important content on any product page. This is because this is the portion of your product page that can set your store apart from competitors who sell the same products you do. It is the part of your online store where you get the chance to convince shoppers that your store is the exact store they want to buy from.
A product description on an online store is like a conversation with a customer in a physical store. Product names help shoppers find your products, images get their attention, and specs tell them whether or not the product is right for them, but it is the product description that convinces them to buy. It is what gets them to choose your products over other similar products on other online stores. This is why it is such a shame that most online stores have terrible product descriptions.
Look at it this way: your product description is the only chance you have to truly leave an impression on your shopper. It is the only chance you have to make the shopper conclude that your product (and not that of the other products they have seen) is what they want to spend money on. And you only get to make this impression once. If you fail, the shopper goes somewhere else, and they get the shopper’s money – one that would have otherwise been yours.
How to Fix the Problem
Improving sales on your online store is a matter of improving the quality of content on your online stores, especially your product description. Your content needs to be attractive and effective. It needs to convey the right message to the shopper and answer whatever questions they might have about your product. If it fails at doing this, shoppers would go somewhere else in search of content that does. That’s a loss for you and a gain for whatever seller they find with good content. If you’re finding it difficult to come up with the best content for your product, then it is time to hire a professional content writer to take charge of that.
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