What is a store without its products? By now, you might be already done setting up your WooCommerce storefront and went to tinker with customizable options to give your store a more personalized feel. But there is something missing to bring out the glory in your brand – your product listings. Lots of store owners, offline and online, have best practices in mind when beginning their own stores, or starting up a new one to add to their brands.
Product listings are one of the most overlooked aspects of online selling, but trust us, it makes all the difference. Clear presentations of the features, benefits and practical usage of the products we sell are the meat of communication, and are the ultimate determinant of whether our views and reach can, in the end, be converted to hard, cold sales and profit. To do that, to boost sales, and to shoot your brand to greater heights, you have to put in some serious effort in evaluating how you present, what you highlight and how your product listing will fare and stand out in the vast ocean of product offerings.
In this article, we will be very generous in sharing these practices and how, in reality, they benefit you to achieve your dream of becoming a trusted, established brand in your niche of selling. We will help you on navigating in the sea of products in the digital age, taking into account the dynamic environment and what it takes to stand out amidst the noise. But before we go on to optimizing your product listings, we’re also going to give you a bit of a step-by-step guide on how to add product listings to your WooCommerce database.
Adding products on WooCommerce
In the Setup Wizard of your WooCommerce account, you can click Add My Products and it will provide you with different options on how to begin listing products. You can select from these options if you either want to manually add or list your products, import a spreadsheet in .csv format, or migrate your product listings from another platform such as Shopify or BigCommerce, of course given that you have a storefront in those platforms.
Here are the steps, though, should you prefer to add your products manually because you want to be more into the details and you want to optimize each and every listing. From your WooCommerce dashboard, you can select Product > Add Product, which will provide you with fields to fill in the information about your specific products. This one is pretty clear and intuitive.
On the product page, which is blank except for the fields, you will have to input information such as a product title, description, and photo to accompany it with visuals. On each product page that you create, you will also be prompted to provide information on pricing and shipping to help guide your customers on how to actually buy the product.
Although WooCommerce is based on the WordPress platform, you might notice a bit of a difference in the layout but you’ll get the hang of it soon, as these are just optimizations according to the nature of the product page, and what bits of information need to be presented therein.
To make sure your product lands on the respective pages on searches, you need to properly and accurately categorize your product. When this is done, there is a greater chance for your listing to reach your target audience, which is more often than less, looking based on keywords they think fit what they’re looking for. Meeting your customers halfway, now made digital.
Moving forward, here are some of the best practices that you have to remember if you want to make sure your listings are at their optimum:
Upload only clear and high-quality images
Images create a first impression, and first impressions last. Once you catch the customers’ attention via an engaging visual, there would be a greater chance that they will check your product description and call for action.
Be very wary that even if you exert so much effort in perfecting your captions, customers might be discouraged to buy if the pictures are in low resolution or pretty dark. The goal of good images is to accurately present the beauty, features, and functionality of your products. When this is overlooked, it is your sales that will suffer ultimately.
Treat upgrading the quality of images as an investment. But even if you don’t have the budget to hire a professional, here are some tips that we can share:
- A plain and consistent background
- Good lighting to highlight all features
- Proper zooming to highlight details (i.e stitching, intricate designs)
- Various angles to capture the entirety of the product
- Uniformity in image size
- Good, sharp and crisp resolution for photos
Photos of product in action, or in actual everyday is a tested practice that can help you increase your view-to-sales conversion rate.
Make product descriptions tight and meaty
Make it short and sweet, but don’t miss out on the details. You might have to go through your product descriptions many times over, to make sure it’s concise and hits right through the heart. In writing product descriptions, you have to consider that you check off the following important details:
- A good product explanation
- Reasons to buy such as advantages over the competition
- Benefits of product usage
- Special offers (if applicable)
- Disclaimers on what the product is not
While we say that you can use bullet points for product details, make sure that these are in accordance with the tone that you think your audience will warm up to. Electronics, for example, necessitates a bit of technical know-how, while fashion will work better on the general feel that customers will get should they wear your products. Be careful though not to make any false claims in your product descriptions.
Use search engine optimization (SEO)
Don’t hide your products, show them off to the world! This is one of the main reasons why we should apply SEO principles to product listings, especially on product titles. The goal is to make them easily searchable, for them to land on search pages. The higher rank on the search page exponentially increases your chances of more customers buying your product.
You might want to do a bit of keyword research on your industry of operation, and look for how competitors name their product titles. But for the rule of thumb on this, tell your customer what the product is, what variant is in the specific product page, its other specs such as size or material. You also have to optimize image sizes for faster loading speed, which makes them land on search pages better. Adding alt attributes, a good way also to engage those who have disabilities, will add to the SEO improvement of your product listings.
Maximize the use of videos
Snappy, short videos which show your product in action can also boost your conversion rate. Videos of real people benefitting from the use of your product will give that feeling of how your customers themselves can benefit from it. It should also be clear, in good quality and optimized for search engines, though.
Through videos, you can also create how-tos, tutorials, and even recipes (when you sell ingredients or cookware) to illustrate how your products address the daily and other more specific needs of your target audience.
Promos, promos, promos
Of course, everybody loves a treat from time to time. You can feature prominently your best-selling products, or even the products that you might think need a boost. You can strategically put together a set of your products (might be best-selling, in need of boost, or a combination of both) and offer them in a special bundle price to increase your overall sales.
In creating promos, though, make sure that all terms and conditions are detailed thoroughly to avoid confusion and false claims.
Social proof and trust-building
Aside from visuals, satisfied customers putting out their testimonials are a valuable method of boosting sales. Make it a point that when you hand out promos or when a customer reaches out feeling satisfied with your product that they also reflect it on product reviews, in the comments section.
It would also be better if they can provide videos or photos of the product while they use them. Social proof in the digital age is the new word of mouth, and quite frankly, we have never seen a more effective way of marketing a product than the kind of words of a customer who got what they want with value for their money.
Other ways of trust-building include adding to your page the awards that the product already received (this sets them apart!), a recent purchases pop-up to recommend the most recent products that your customers have bought, and offering warranty and other guarantees. In social proof and trust-building, you can create branded content but it is best to rely on user-generated content to create a more authentic way of marketing your product based on quality and overall satisfaction.
Cross-selling
Cross-selling is a nifty way of adding more product sales than expected. With every checkout of your best-selling products, you can include product listings of products that you think can complement or supplement them and put out an option to include those before checkout.
For example, if you sell phones, you might want to cross-sell phone cases, chargers, and other accessories. If you sell a knife, you can cross-sell other knife types, chopping boards etc. You may also include other variants, materials and colors of the same product. Who knows, your customer might want to buy two, but just want it a bit different?
Moment marketing
As sellers, we must always be attuned to the environment and the times. Moment marketing, which is paired with promotional offers during specific seasons such as Valentine’s Day, Christmas, New Year, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Thanksgiving and other occasions, will help you make the most out of the increased spending and also, purchasing capacity of customers.
When you do seasonal promotional offers and moment marketing, make sure that it goes through three phases, like in exercising. Before the occasion proper, you launch with a warm-up, it can include some products with more minimal discounts. Then you go off to your main promotional dates – this is where you expect higher traffic and sales so make sure your fulfillment machinery is well-oiled. Afterward, you can cool down with a more muted campaign but also increasingly valuable, as this will let the rest of your customers who have missed the main promo to get a bit of a treat also.
Nice and neat layout
Your product page must be well-organized. Overly cluttered pages might throw off a big chunk of your viewers. Make it also a point that your user interface and experience are intuitive, neat and does not include any unnecessary objects or details that are not pertinent to your products or the selling process.
Make sure that you do proper planning on what to put above-the-fold (the part that automatically shows on the landing page) and below-the-fold (less pertinent details that are only shown once the user scrolls down).
Product images, titles, available colors, sizes, quantity, material, are some of the details that you have to make sure are above-the-fold. And of course, do not ever forget putting a call to action button, which in the case of sellers is Buy or Add to Cart.
Sellers must study the hierarchy of information, and then tweak it based on their current phase in their marketing strategy. Aside from those mentioned above, you can also throw in your best social proof comments for maximum effect.
Address questions, provide answers
In selling, customers ask questions. And we, sellers, must always be on the look out for them, and earnestly and promptly address these questions. If a question is frequently asked, we might also want to put out a dedicated frequently-asked questions (FAQ) page for users to check out before they ask you directly.
Otherwise, our Contact Us or Chat button must be inconspicuously placed in the interface in such a way that customers can easily establish contact with us regarding their queries.
We hope that we have given you many valuable nuggets of knowledge as we went through this article. Here’s to hoping that you get to apply them creatively, according to your needs and goals, and that you hit that sales target you’ve been dreaming of!
