With the holidays now upon us, more and more people are asking how they can achieve success with their e-commerce websites. Some people operate simple, niche-based e-commerce sites, while others aim to target a variety of shoppers from across multiple shopping categories and continents. Whatever your focus, the reality is that your e-commerce site could probably be producing better results than it is currently. With so many schools of thought out there on what works and what doesn’t, it is important to consider only the aspects that apply to online stores from all walks of life. Because of this, we will be outlining below some good habits that all highly successful e-commerce sites employ to boost sales and conversions.

Simple Home Pages

The first way in which to capture the attention of shoppers who visit your page is to make sure that everyone is easily found. Some e-commerce sites fail when they start pinging URLs to all sorts of products immediately, and showing off flashy images that fill the screen. While aesthetics are certainly important and help convince shoppers to make the purchase, your home page should be easy to navigate while providing shoppers with access to everything you offer. We recommend that for maximum conversions, you list each major product category in a drop-down menu (so that it is easily found but not cluttering the home screen by default). This will leave your home page with more room to promote limited-time offers and other benefits of shopping with you.

Provide Contextual Product Images

Another way in which to boost shoppers’ likelihoods of purchasing your products is to showcase it in a realistic fashion. While stock photos should be included and help to provide a retail-level image of professionalism, images that show the product in context can also be quite useful. Selling a brand-name fashion item? Showing the item in question “in the real world” can subconsciously connect shoppers with the product and increase conversions. We also recommend that any products that come in multiple colors or variations be shown as such; by having as many photos as possible of the product, you increase your chances to make a sale.

Showcase Calls to Action

Any website that deals with conversions certainly should understand the power that calls to action can have on visitors and shoppers alike. During the holiday season in particular, people are looking for great deals. You can provide these deals and alert shoppers via email and notifications on each page, but some people will obviously miss this. What they cannot miss is an in-page pop-up that alerts them to special discounts or offers now available. You can easily add this type of call to action to your website when using a fully customizable CMS like WordPress. Even when you have no coupons or special discounts to offer, this can still be a prime way to be pinging URLs of various products to users in which they might find interesting.

Conclusion

By streamlining the simplicity of your home page, showcasing calls to actions that promote various products and providing real context for each product in the form of images, you can dramatically boost sales and embrace some of the good habits of highly successful e-commerce sites.