Before beginning your ecommerce UX journey, it's worth doing a few things: understanding the benefits of good UX, clarifying your target audience, recognizing that mobile UX is its own topic, and knowing how to conduct user research. Read more
Chapters
Best Practices for a Great Online Shop Homepage
Your online shop homepage is your storefront window, and the cover of that proverbial book. Prospects will determine whether they're interested in your offering in a matter of milliseconds... so you've got to make that initial impression count. Read more
Best Design Practices for Your Product Pages
With individual product pages, you have the opportunity to display every product you offer—in all its glory. This is your chance to prove that each of your products is worthy of your business's name. Here are best practices for doing so. Read more
Best UX Practices for Your Ecommerce Shopping Cart
Average shopping cart abandonment rates have exceeded 68% every year since 2011—a surprising fact given the remarkable advancements made in ecommerce sophistication in that time. Learn best practices for better conversions in your online shop. Read more
Improving Conversions on Your Checkout Page through Great UX
Most of the reasons consumers give for checkout page abandonment—long processes, concerns about security, bad site navigation—can be rectified through better UX. Learn the traps, and how to avoid them. Read more
Best Practices for Live Chat
When your website visitors have a question, 73% of them want to answer it on their own... and they want to do so while they're still on your website. Live chat will give them the opportunity to do so. Learn best practices to give them a great chat experience. Read more
Writing Killer Product Copy: An Introduction
Any product will only be as good as the information presented with it: Product descriptions are the #1 element contributing to customers' decision to purchase. Learn the benefits of good copy, and consider whether you'll DIY or hire a copywriter. Read more
SEO 101 for Ecommerce: Finding the Best Keywords for Your Online Store
Good ecommerce SEO means discovering what your market is searching for; and optimizing your page titles, meta descriptions, tags, and product descriptions with the strongest keywords. Use Amazon, your competitors, and more for keyword research. Read more
What Makes a Good Keyword for Ecommerce?
There are four characteristics of great ecommerce keywords: They have decent search volume, low competition, high buyer intent, and high relevance. Learn what each of these elements means... and what tools to use to measure it. Read more
Best Practices for Ecommerce Keyword Placement
You've done your research and narrowed down your keywords: Now it's time to place them strategically on product and category pages without cannibalizing. Learn how to assign keywords to pages to help Google understand what you want to rank for. Read more
Writing Killer Product Descriptions that Convince and Convert
A good product description does more than "describe" the product at hand. It sells your product by educating consumers on its benefits, its USP, the pain points it solves, and why it's the best possible solution for them. Make the most of this ecommerce element. Read more
Using Psychology on Product Pages to Increase Sales
The best product pages leverage psychology to influence prospect behavior and boost online sales—by invoking feelings of urgency, desire, excitement, trust, and/or the fear of missing out. Incorporate these strategies where it most counts. Read more
The Best Ecommerce Product Copy We’ve Seen
There's nothing like seeing great ecommerce copy elements come together at once. Take a look at four of our favorite online shops, and follow along as we point out the elements that make those pages so good. Read more
Introduction to Product Photography
It takes mere milliseconds for a prospect who's landed on your website to process your imagery and come to a conclusion about your brand. To say that images are powerful is an understatement. Learn the benefits of great product photography, along with the pros and cons of DIY and outsourcing. Read more
DIY Product Photography: Getting Your Equipment Together
It's absolutely possible to create stellar product images without breaking the bank on expensive equipment... but you'll need more than a camera for this undertaking. Here's a catalogue of items to gather for your "photographer's toolbox"—including a comparison of DSLR and smartphone cameras. Read more
How to Take Product Photographs that Score Conversions
Once you've got your equipment—and have given yourself time to practice with your camera—it's time to shoot. Learn how to plan and set up your shoot. Know what best practices to follow as you click the shutter. Understand the pros and cons of natural and artificial light. And consider the range of in-studio product images to capture. Read more
Editing Product Images for Your Ecommerce Site
Your goal is to create images that represent your product as accurately as possible... so by "editing," we mean "polishing." Background removal, color correction, and shadow manipulation are processes you should consider for your photography workflow. We also offer a list of tools, along with tips for finding a professional image editor. Read more
Best Practices for Optimizing Your Product Images
From a product photography perspective, "optimization" means ensuring your images load quickly and the keywords associated with them align with prospects' search queries. Both concern user experience and mean traffic for your website. Learn about file types, reducing file sizes, and coming up with keyword-rich file names and alt text. Read more
Examples of Great Ecommerce Product Photography
By now, you've got the knowledge and the tools to begin your product photography journey. It's time to see these best practices in action, and to get inspired by the stellar product photography that's already out there. Here, we look at four ecommerce businesses that are winning the product photography game. Read more
Introduction to Ecommerce
Chances are that you've purchased something (or hundreds of things!) online at some point in your life. But now it's time to think about ecommerce from a retailer's perspective. What is ecommerce; what does it entail; where does it happen; and why should you sell online? Read more
Choosing the Best Payment Gateway for Your Ecommerce Business
A payment gateway supports the series of back-end communications that must occur for a consumer to make a purchase on your ecommerce site. You'll have a lot of options to choose from. Learn the difference between modern and classic, hosted and integrated gateways... and know what to look for in a gateway provider. Read more
Deciding What to Charge Your Customers for Shipping
Shipping is the biggest expense an ecommerce business has to contend with—and shipping costs are the #1 reason for cart abandonment—so it's crucial to get this right. You'll have some factors to consider to find the "sweet spot" of shipping—prices consumers are willing to pay AND that cover your costs. Read more
Estimating Shipping Costs and Choosing a Carrier
Once you have a sense of the pricing strategies available to you for shipping, it's time to choose the best carrier for your business. Learn what factors carriers use to calculate shipping fees, and how to estimate costs on your own so you can make an intelligent (read: data-based) decision about getting products into customers' hands. Read more
Writing Your Best Ecommerce Shipping Policy
Once your shipping costs and carriers are determined, it's time to be transparent with consumers about what (and who) they are. After all, prospects will want to know how soon, how safely, and how cheaply their items will arrive before they hit that "Purchase" CTA. Learn what strong policies include... and read some examples. Read more
Writing a Returns & Refunds Policy that Gets You Conversions and Customer Loyalty
Your shipping policy and your returns policy will probably be the two most-read documents on your ecommerce website. It's worth remembering that around 30% of products ordered online are returned... but a good Returns & Refunds policy can offset that loss by generating more sales and bringing satisfied customers back. Read more
Setting up Ecommerce Analytics and Knowing what Metrics to Track
Visitors' behavior on your website will give you insights into your site and offering: what products they look at but don't buy, what content keeps them on the page the longest, where they drop off in the buyer's journey. Making business decisions based on this data can do wonders for your bottom line. Know what metrics to track. Read more
Writing Your Ecommerce Privacy Policy
As an ecommerce business, you can't escape collecting data about consumers—to complete transactions, to subscribe users to your email list, or to improve user experience and conversion rates on your site. But you've got to let consumers know you're collecting it—and what you're doing with it. Here's how. Read more
Creating the Terms & Conditions for Your Ecommerce Site
A Terms & Conditions is the set of rules that governs your relationship with your site visitors and customers from beginning to end. Think of it as a code of conduct that lays out the roles and responsibilities of all parties. Learn why you need one, what topics it should cover, and what best practices are for writing and disseminating it. Read more
Essential Integrations for Your Ecommerce Site
So far, we've discussed payments, shipping, and analytics in setting up your shop. But there are many more back-end processes that need to happen to keep your business running: order management, inventory, accounting, email marketing, and more. Don't approach these as separate events, but as a single, seamless event: Your relationship with customers. Integrations and automations will allow for this. Read more
3 Examples of Effective Ecommerce Websites
Your ecommerce store faces obstacles to conversion that brick-and-mortar stores don't face. The best ecommerce businesses succeed through remarkable imagery and multimedia, copy that details all product specs and policies, and UX elements that move users through the funnel. Read more
