Many eCommerce store owners spend a lot of time perfecting their homepage, optimizing the different sections, and ensuring their storefront design is pleasing to look at. Often times, these merchants end up forgetting to optimize the one aspect of their store that is sure to convert their shoppers— the product page.
Product pages are the best place to convert your shoppers and with so much potential, you must pull out all the stops to set up product pages that nudge the shopper to hit checkout. As eCommerce experts innovate and test new strategies to build compelling product pages, they’ve found some high-converting eCommerce trends to help merchants like you to turn the shopper into a customer.
Let’s dive into the trending (and upcoming) eCommerce trends every merchant needs to consider when optimizing their product pages.
eCommerce Trends to Optimize Your Product Pages
1. Optimize for mobile
Most shoppers online are usually browsing products on their mobile. According to Statista, 70% of eCommerce sales will be done by mobile in 2020. To ensure that you convert your mobile visitors, it’s crucial to optimize your product pages and ensure it is easy to browse on mobile devices. This includes ensuring the images are easy to expand, slide through, and minimize, reviews are easy to access, sizing charts and descriptions are close to the top, and the checkout button is above the page fold.
You can ensure your store is mobile-friendly by connecting it to your Google Search Console. The console sends you alerts when it detects issues with the site.
2. Video product descriptions
Sometimes, written descriptions don’t do the product justice. Many shoppers don’t even look at the description and some only skim through to pick up important details— like what fabric the product is made out of or whether it has pockets. But, the rise of video content is making many eCommerce stores consider embedding video within their product pages.
With a video description, customers can get more context to the product, understand the size, and the different features it has. Almost 80% of people state that product videos give them more confidence when purchasing a product.
Creating videos for your products may sound expensive but with video making tools like Typito, it’s easy for you to create product videos with text, sound, and mixed media formats that are enticing for your customers.
3. Add user-generated content
Reviews give interested buyers a credible reason to buy the product they have their eye on. One research found that 92% of buyers are more likely to purchase after reading a trusted review. Clothing stores even encourage their customers to post pictures of the product to let new shoppers understand the fit of the outfit.
Setting up reviews on your Shopify store is easy with apps like Loox. Loox nudges shoppers to post a review with pictures and creates a gallery of photo reviews under each product, giving shoppers an eye-catchy grid of realistic images of your products.
Many stores find it difficult to gather reviews from their customers. You can easily get customers to review bought items by offering a reward for their contribution. This can be unlocking a discount code or earning loyalty points which they can redeem on their order.
Stores like SweetLegs reward customers with points for adding photo reviews.
4. Add chatbots for customers to get instant help
Brick-and-mortar stores provide hands-on assistance to the shopper and help them find the right product for them. This positive experience is something that eCommerce stores struggled to provide until live chat apps came into existence.
Apps like Tidio allow customers to chat with the customer support executive and get help for the product they are interested in. 63% of consumers who used live chat on a website are likely to return to that site.
But scaling customer support isn’t always easy. The influx of site visitors online may cause you to require more customer support executives to handle the queries. Instead of opting for this expensive option, merchants can set up chatbots that automatically answer customer questions.
A chatbot is an AI software that learns to communicate in a human-like manner and can be set up to interact with customers and solve their queries. It is instant so customers don't have to wait for the reply. Chatbots cost little for the merchant to set up but with its instant replies and low error rates, they deliver high customer satisfaction.
5. Add back in stock alert options to avoid losing interested buyers
Your inventory can’t always be well-stocked. Products going out of stock are inevitable but this doesn’t mean store owners need to lose out on interested shoppers because of this. You can allow your shoppers to subscribe to be notified when the product is back in stock. With apps like Back in Stock, shoppers can choose from 3 different communication channels— email, SMS, and Facebook Messenger— through which they will receive stock updates.
Such an app automatically sends an in-stock message to the channel of your shopper’s choice as soon as the product is stocked up in your backend. This way, you don’t lose out on interested shoppers and have within your communication lists for future promotional messages.
6. Use 3D modeling for product images
One limitation of product images is that shoppers get a little perspective about the product they are interested in. A brick-and-mortar store, on the other hand, allows shoppers to feel and look at the product from different angles. While eCommerce stores may not be able to give shoppers such an enhanced experience of their products, there is one new feature that will allow you to provide shoppers more context to your product.
Shopify recently announced its 3D product image to allow merchants to add depth to their product pages. With Shopify's new 3D imaging feature, you can allow your shoppers to get an in-depth understanding of your product. They can zoom in and out, spin the product around, and look at every little detail. This feature will even be supported on mobile devices.
This futuristic feature can help you build a positive store experience for your customers and can even be a great way to make them interact with your store and its products, creating opportunities to increase your revenue. Read more about this feature and if it's feasible, we insist you set up 3D product images on your Shopify store.
7. Add bundles and recommendation tabs for higher-order values
Your product page shouldn’t be just about the product. Give your shoppers more options to engage with when they are browsing products.
You can add a bundling app like Product Bundles to offer shoppers a discounted bundle of the product they are interested in and a complementing product that would work well with the product. This works similar to how McDonald’s offers their ‘Happy Meal’ where buyers get 3 for the price of 1. It is a better deal than getting all 3 items separately and also helps the business earn more effortlessly.
For an eCommerce store, for instance, if the shopper is looking at a coffee maker, offer a bundle with that product and a pack of premium coffee beans. Bundles entice the shopper to purchase more than they set out to and ensures they leave the store with higher-order value.
8. Enable social shopping
As more brands are embracing the ‘Shop’ feature on Instagram, it’s gotten easier for shoppers to immediately buy a product that catches their eye. Such new social shopping features make impulse buying simpler.
As a merchant, you must keep track of new social media features that help you sell more. You’ll want to pin and tag your products on Pinterest, set up a Shop section on Facebook, and set up Instagram shopping. These will help you reach new audiences and quickly turn them into customers, no 5-step conversion plan required!
When enabling social shopping for your products, you can even dive into different marketplaces you can list yourself on. Selling platforms like eBay, Google Shopping, Etsy, and Amazon are great places to diversify your reach. Think out of the box and interact with shoppers on Facebook Marketplace and communities on Reddit to broaden the reach for your products. You can reply to questions about new deals for specific product types, queries for a specific product type, and plug your store and your products where relevant.
9. Enable visual search
Describing a product you saw at an event within your Google search usually comes back with inaccurate results. Visual search is a powerful search feature that can help shoppers buy the exact item they want without too much searching. Visual search uses AI and machine learning to identify different parts of the image and come back with highly relevant results from the web. This feature is powerful for eCommerce stores. Shoppers might be searching for a specific product that you sell and if you have optimized your store for visual search, this shopper is likely to end up purchasing from you.
36% of people have already used visual search and as this eCommerce trend grows and as tech companies come up with apps that make visual search more accessible, merchants can easily enable visual search within their site.
Want to optimize your Shopify store to be more visual search friendly? Get started with this guide to visual search. You can even look through Shopify’s app directory to enable this on your store like Shopix’s Visual Search.
10. Make pricing transparent
Product pricing is definitely a make-or-break for shoppers. Many shoppers cite shipping fees as the reason for not shopping from a store, despite the shipping fee being a minimal cost. Baymard found that 53% of people abandon their carts because the extra costs for shipping, taxes, or other fees were too high. Another 20% abandoned their carts because they weren't sure of the total cost of their order upfront.
To ensure your products get past the cart, it’s important to make a few tweaks to your pricing. Many eCommerce stores show taxes upfront so that when the shopper gets to the payment page, they aren’t bombarded with extra charges out of anywhere. Some merchants add the shipping fees within their products and cite free local shipping. This makes shoppers feel less hesitant seeing as they aren’t charged extra for shipping. You can even add a pricing calculator to let shoppers see how much their order will cost when shipping is included.
Ensure your pricing isn’t complicated and shoppers don’t leave their cart without purchasing because of your taxes or shipping fees.
11. Voice search
Another upcoming trend we're seeing in eCommerce is voice search. With the rise of products like Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri and others, SalesForce points out that about 4 in 10 consumers search online through their voice assistants before buying a product.
But that's not all. Nielsen also predicts that 2% of all purchases made online will be through voice search. So you're basically letting consumers discover and make purchases from your store without having to interact with a screen. That's why this eCommerce trend is on our watch list for 2020.
While it may sound like an overwhelming tactic to implement, apps like Emitrr are making it easy to bring voice shopping to your store.
We hope these eCommerce trends have helped you set up product pages that make shoppers stay longer on your store and turn them into loyal customers. What eCommerce trends are you setting up on your Shopify store in 2020?
