On the previous post I looked at generating traffic to a wine eCommerce website. This post will look at converting that traffic. Following posts will look at Repeat Business and Order/Product Administration.
The Landing Page
As mentioned in the last post you should build your SEO and PPC campaigns so that people land on an individual page, the “landing page”, rather than just a general home page. There are a number of reasons for this but the key one is that your customer is hot on the trail of an attractive wine – and we don’t want to throw any obstacles in the way of that purchase – such as having to search the site.
That page should have a photo, description of the wine and any ratings or reviews.
Such a short sentence but such an important and significant job. In effect it’s you selling the wine in front of the customer. I’ve not mentioned vintage. I’ll leave that to its own post as its quite a difficult issue to do with individual SKUs, and and SEO issue to do with changing URLs every 12 months. I will say you should tell the customer what vintage you’re stocking and leave it at that.
Note also there are some legal issues to do with copyright, as I’m not a lawyer I’ll not pretend I can give legal advice.
General Pages and Navigation
If your customer is not landing on a page specific to their keyword search then you’ll need to be especially careful that your website has good internal search and navigation.
Indeed something called “filterable navigation” is most preferable. This is where people can click a menu item which then collapses to filter out the non relevant items (sometimes expands and highlights). So they may click on US>California>Napa Valley>Chardonay>$20 to $30>Silverado.
Other attributes or search items might include for example Gold Medal, 90-93 points, 5 stars, plum, full body etc etc.
Back to the product page. The customer clicks on the Buy Now button and goes to their shopping cart. They may continue shopping or go straight to checkout. Onto checkout…
One Page
There is a strong body of thought that you want the customer to have full visibility of how long the checkout process will take, and shorten it if need be. One page checkouts ensure that the customer can see it won’t take long to type in their details. Similarly you want to reduce the obstacles to purchase by ensuring,
- they can checkout as a Guest rather than having to create a permanent account (privacy reasons)
- shipping costs are upfront, perhaps even right up front in their cart as an estimate only.
Specific to the liqor retail industry you need a statement and tick box for them to legally confirm they are of legal age to purchase liqour (and perhaps other legal issues depending on your country and state).
I’ll cover more mundane administration issues in another post Administration…
Conversion is the “hard yards” of selling wine online, what experiences have you had? Please comment below
