Episode 006: The 11 Pages Every Ecommerce Website Needs

 

Episode Summary: 

When you’re designing or managing an ecommerce website, it can seem like there are so many pages to keep track of. In this episode, Julie walks you through the 11 pages that every ecommerce site should have and how those pages should be set up to meet their important goals.

 

Episode Links:

  https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod 

 

Episode Transcript:

Announcer

Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? You're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method, with your host, Julie Feickert.

 

Julie Feickert

Hello and welcome to episode six of The Savvy Business Method Podcast, where we talk about how to plan, start and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert, and my goal as always is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. Today's topic is the 11 pages every e-commerce sites should have. Now, whether you're designing a site or you're managing an existing site, there can be a lot of pages to keep track of, but every page on your site should serve a very specific purpose, and sometimes those purposes get overlooked, and so today, I just want to go back to the basics and talk about what purpose each page type serves, and go over some very high-level optimization concepts, so when we think about how we set these pages up, what our goals are and what are the things we really should be thinking about. Alright.

Let's dive in and talk about the home page, because of course, every site has a home page. Home pages are really interesting because on one hand, when you're setting up a website, it kind of seems like the most important thing you could possibly do, right? Like this is the page people are going to land on, and they need to immediately know what it is my website's about, and they need to feel reassured that they've come to the right place. I mean, that's a lot of pressure on one page, right? Now, if you already have a website up and running, and you've looked at your website statistics on Google, Google Analytics, then you've probably seen that in all reality, far fewer people land on the home page as their entry point into the site than maybe you would have imagined.

Also, people don't tend to hang out on the home page, so our beautiful page that we put so much effort into may not be nearly as important as we were thinking. All right. All that being said, where should you put your time and effort when it comes to the home page? I would encourage you to do a couple of things. First and foremost, of course, your home page should communicate the purpose of your site immediately.

It should be very, very clear what you do and why it's important to the average customer, because people will land on the home page, especially if they're coming from like a referral link from another business or something like that, and so it needs to just be terribly clear that they are in the right place, and you can accomplish that through being very careful and concise in your messaging, any texts that you have on that home page, but probably even more important, you need amazing imagery. You need nice pictures. This is not the time to buy the worst-looking stock photos on the planet, right? We need nice pictures, ideally of your products being used in context. That's a perfect situation, but you want to get as close to that as you can. You want your imagery to be inspiring so that people just instantly feel comfortable with where they've landed.

I'll also tell you, you need to have some awesome navigation going on on that home page, because people who do land on the home page, don't tend to sit there and scroll. They are going to immediately go to your navigation, and try to figure out where they need to be, so if they're going to buy something or if they're looking for an article, a recipe or whatever it is, they're not hanging out on the home page. They need to be able to navigate off quickly before they get frustrated. Okay. Next up, let's talk about the page that they're most likely to hit right after the home page, and that is a category page.

Now, unless you're only selling a few products, you really do need category pages to keep your site well-organized and make sure everyone knows where they're at at all times. Category pages are kind of like their own little, mini home pages for that product category, so again, they need to immediately communicate what can be found in that category and why you are going to be the best place to purchase those items. Category pages are awesome because they tend to do really well in organic search algorithms, so if someone searches on camera equipment, they're more likely to land on a category page than a home page. If we stop for a minute and think about Google's perspective on this, Google wants to send searchers to pages that are likely to immediately fulfill their wishes and desires in life, and so it makes way more sense if someone's looking for cameras to send them directly to the category page where they're going to immediately see products than to send them to a home page where they're going to have to navigate. Okay.

This is all the kinds of stuff that's in that very mysterious Google algorithm. Just like your home page, that immediate communication is really important, and you also need to make sure that you are again using beautiful imagery, so you want maybe some beautiful pictures of your products, and very concise text to really communicate what category they're looking at and why they should continue their search on your site here to find the products that are going to meet their needs. Now, if you've done a good job with your category pages, the next page your visitor should flow to is your product page, right? Each product is going to have its own page, and product pages, I got to tell you, I think product pages are some of the more tricky pages to set up on your site, because you have a couple of somewhat competing purposes here. On one hand, your job on the product page is to convince a customer that this item is the right item for their situation, and is of the quality and the value for them, and so to do that, of course, we want to have great imagery, we want to have great product descriptions.

We'll generally want to answer any questions that someone could have about this product. We might want to link to supporting information, so someone feels that this product is coming with the support that they might need to use it. Okay. That all sounds great, right? Like that sounds like an awesome product page. Here's the rub, right?

With the product page, the goal is ultimately for someone to click that Add to Cart button, and yeah, all of that information for certain customers is going to help that process and get them to say, "Oh, yes. This is the product I need. I'll have the support I need. I'm going to click the Add to Cart button", but for a lot of website visitors, we run into the issue of humans being easily distractible people, right? Let me give you a practical example.

One of the websites I used to have had these products that really generated a lot of questions, and so after several years of having this website, we really revamped the product pages and started putting a ton of information on the product pages, and this was really driven by the honest desire to help customers get the information they needed. I didn't want people stopping their product search and adding those items to their cart to contact customer service. Also, if you have a ton of people contacting customer service, asking the same questions over and over, that either takes away your valuable time, or you're paying someone to answer those questions, and so we really started working on making these product pages like the ultimate landing page ever for this type of product. I mean, it sounded so good in theory, and you know what happened? The Add to Cart rate went down.

The conversion rate went down. You know why? Because we were distracting the heck out of people. People would start reading and be like, "Oh, this is really cool. This is really cool. Oh, here's a link to a recipe I could use this in."

Then, they would be off in recipe land, and their kids would distract them or something would happen, and they wouldn't come back and actually buy the item. That's why I think product pages are honestly some of the hardest pages on our websites to set up, because we really do have to balance these competing objectives, this idea of giving lots of information and having customers feel supported with the idea of keeping them on task, and so this is what you got to remember. When you're doing your product page setup, you need to keep your customers on task. Hitting that Add to Cart button is ultimately the most important thing you are accomplishing with that page. Okay.

You got your product pages set up, and you've just pulled off this miraculous balance between helping people feel they have the information they need, and will be supported in their product journey, while not distracting them and they've successfully added the item to their cart. Nice work. Okay. Let's talk about the cart page. When we get to the cart page, there's a couple of things that really matter here.

First and foremost, we need to remember that we are funneling our visitors towards checkout, that Place Order button at the very end, and so we've had a home page that really helped them quickly navigate to the category pages, a category page that reassured them and sent them to the appropriate product page, their product page managed not to distract them too much, and now they are on this cart page, and your e-commerce software likely came with a pretty standard cart page out of the box. Yeah, you might be able to do some tweaking here and customization, but I would encourage you not to go real crazy with this page. This page is really a utility page that needs to slickly funnel them to the checkout. Why do we even have cart pages? I mean, that's a legit question, right?

Like why wouldn't we just send people directly to the checkout? Now, some sites kind of do that now, but I would argue you still need a cart page for a couple of reasons. The first reason you need a cart page is because they are still very much standard, and they're something that customers expect and will find reassuring. Let's think about big websites like Amazon.com and Walmart.com. I mean, these are huge companies.

I can assure you that they do a ridiculously large amount of testing of their site. They hire focus groups. They watch people navigate their site. If they're making changes to their site, then you should probably pay attention because they have the money to figure out whether the changes are [worthwhiled 00:10:04], and these sites still have cart pages. That brings us to the other reason I think you should have a cart page, is because they're useful. They really are.

People use their cart to look at the items that are in there, and make sure the quantities are correct before they slide on to checkout. Really, there's not a lot to mess up here, but I'm going to give you two things you need to be worried about. One is creating distractions. Don't create distractions, okay? You need them to slide to checkout, so this is generally not the best time to give them an article to read about camera bodies.

Everything in the cart page should help focus their attention on this idea of checking out. For example, link to a recipe, bad idea. A place for them to check the shipping charges, excellent idea, okay, unless it's really clear on your site what shipping's going to be. Maybe you have free shipping or flat rate shipping. If you don't have some exceptionally clear thing saying what shipping's going to be, then you sure as heck better have a way for them to check their shipping cost. You're going to hear people out there argue that you shouldn't, and their argument's going to be, "Oh, once they're already checking out, then they'll just accept whatever shipping cost that you're going to charge them", and you know what?

That is so not true, and it's rude, and it's a total turnoff to people on your website, so let's go back to the rule, right? We treat other people the way we want to be treated, which means being transparent with your shipping costs. If your shipping costs are going to be a problem for your customers, then honestly, you're doing something wrong right now as a business owner. You need to figure something out. You need to figure out how to work shipping into the product charges, or you need to figure out some creative solution, because not being willing to tell your customers what their products are going to cost to ship is just kind of dishonest, okay? Just being honest there.

Just a little dishonest. Okay. In terms of the cart page, the other thing that you need to be really careful of, is that the cart page is really easy to use. Remember, one of the big purposes this page serves is it allows people to see what is in their cart, so what items and what quantities. You want to make this really easy to edit, and I'm going to tell you why. After years and years of experience, if people have trouble changing what is in their cart, they are going to do one of two things.

They're either going to walk away because they're frustrated, so that's bad, or they're just going to place the order anyway, and then freak out later. They're going to call customer service and say, "Oh, I know I placed that order three days ago, but I just realized I ordered too many of something or wanted something else", and you know what? That's now your problem to deal with, and this is going to cost you money, so make that cart work really well. Make that page so easy to navigate, so easy to change quantities so that you can keep customers happy, and keep the cost of having to resolve issues down as far as possible. All right. If your cart page worked well and you funneled your customers properly, they're going to land on the checkout page, and you're almost home free.

The checkout page only has a couple of priorities. One, you're of course going to need to gather the information that you need from the customer in order to ship them their products. I'm going to tell you right now, you should not be gathering one iota of more information than you absolutely have to in order to successfully ship that order and follow up with the customer as needed. Okay. This is not a time to ask them for a bunch of extra information like their birthday, or their dog's name, or anything like that. This is not that time, so you want to get minimal amount of information, and again, we're just getting them to click the Complete Order button or Place Order button, right?

Okay. No distractions at all on the checkout page. This is the wrong time to make product suggestions, okay? You might be able to do an upsell on like a pop-up maybe in the cart, but you're not doing it at checkout. We just want them to click the button, okay? The flow of your checkout page should also be very intuitive.

This needs to be professionally laid out. You should have standard payment options. Do you have questions about that? Go back to episode two, and we'll talk about, where I talked about how to optimize your payment options. You got to have a credit card option. You got to have an alternative option like PayPal, Amazon, Google Pay, Apple Pay, something, and if you have your checkout nice and slick, then with any luck, you will have very few people abandoning that checkout page, right?

We just got to get them through to that Place Order button. All right. Hopefully you have lots of people placing orders, so let's pause now and talk about the rest of the pages for today's discussion, and these are all going to be support pages. These pages are not necessarily directly involved in the standard sales funnel, but they are the pages where your customers are going to find important information about your company, and hopefully cut down on the amount of people emailing you, or leaving the site because they can't find the information that they need. Okay.

Number one, you need a frequently asked questions page, and there's a bunch of ways to do this. You can have one, sitewide if you have a very tight product selection. If you have a number of different categories, you might want to have a general frequently asked questions page, linking to maybe some category-specific frequently asked questions page, but frequently asked questions pages are awesome because they tend to rank decently in the search engines, and they tend to cut down on the number of people contacting you to ask questions. Okay. Next, you're going to need an order info or a shipping info page.

I like to separate this from the frequently asked questions page, because that way, I am able to clearly call this out, because this page, at least in my experience, tends to get more traffic than a general frequently asked questions page, because people who are asking questions, if your site's well-laid out, if your product pages are well-laid out, the main questions people should have are probably going to be around how to place orders, what the shipping situation is, taxes, that sort of thing, and so I like to have the separate ordering info page where I can list how quickly items ship, at which states we charge sales tax in, and any considerations. Also, on this page, this is where your return policy goes, and you want to be really clear on that. You do not ... Even if you're a tiny business getting started, don't skip this. You do actually need a return policy, one, because it's reassuring to customers, and two, because when you go to apply for some of the better payment accounts or you go to get some of the security badges through some of the major providers, I think Google, if I remember correctly, when they do like their Google verified site or something like that, they want to see a return policy clearly on the site, so stick that in your order info or shipping info page.

Okay. Next step, you're going to need a contact page. Now, I want to state upfront that a contact page is less about people actually contacting you, and more about the reassurance that they can if they need to, and this is what helps people have confidence in buying from us. Now, that being said, a good contact page is going to have multiple ways for people to get a hold of you. For example, it could be your 800 number that he could give you a call, especially if you are marketing to a little bit older clientele, which could be a great market because remember, people who are a little bit older tend to have more disposable income, so something to think about.

You want to of course make sure there's a way for them to email you, and you want to use a Contact Form, and not your email address, okay? If you don't know why that is, then we need to cover that at some point. You don't want a bunch of spam in your email box, so use that Contact Form and make sure it's working before you launch your site. I'd also suggest putting a link on your contact page to your live chat feature. Even if in all reality, you don't have live chat constantly turned on, this can still again be a reassuring thing.

It's about giving customers that feedback that you are going to be easily reachable. I also recommend having an About Us page or some sort of page that is going to reinforce your story, your branding, and why someone should do business with you. Not all of your customers are going to look at this page, but the ones that do are likely to be inspired to buy from you if this is set up well. This is where you're going to put things like how you got started, why you're passionate about what you do, what sort of priority you place on your product quality or your customer service, maybe a little bit of personal information too. If you're a family-run business, that could be a compelling idea for people.

This is where we just reinforce our brand, and reinforce that we are a trustworthy company to do business with, and it's just kind of that bow on the package for those customers who need that additional reassurance. Alright. Let's do the last two pages, and I will tell you upfront, these are not the most exciting parts of your website, but they're really important from a legal perspective. Number one, you need to have a terms and conditions page. Don't forget to do this. Your terms and conditions really should be crafted by a small business attorney who is familiar with e-commerce, ideally familiar with your industry, and is operating or practicing law in your particular state, because this is going to be a little bit different for every company in terms of industry norms, and state laws, and that sort of thing, so don't really skimp on this, right?

You really do need to have a terms and conditions that will be upheld if you ever do have an issue with a customer. All right. Page number 11, the last one is your privacy policy. Privacy policies have been around for a long time, but they are becoming increasingly important as we're seeing more and more law is passed around how we as website owners can gather and use information. This has gone from something that's been just fair to say not very well regulated to, in some parts of the world being highly regulated, and because most of us do business across a country or often across national borders and do international business, we have to be very aware of the laws in different areas.

This is again a place where you really want to consult a small business attorney, but keep in mind the types of things on a privacy policy are really about what sort of data you're collecting, how you're using it, and what systems are integrated with, which also maybe collecting and using data from your users, okay? Alright. That was 11 core pages for your website and the general purposes they serve. If you have feedback or ideas for future shows, you can find me at Savvybusinessmethod.com, as well as on Facebook and YouTube. Now, be sure to hit that little subscribe button in iTunes and Stitcher, right?

I say this every time, but definitely subscribe, because you don't want to miss a single episode, and of course, I would greatly appreciate if you could rate and review this podcast in iTunes. It really does help other people find it. It helps the rankings, and then people can find it in the big, long list of podcasts. I also promise to read every review. I really enjoy reading your feedback about the show. We'll see you next time.

 

Announcer

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe, and for more great content and to stay up-to-date, visit Savvybusinessmethod.com, and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.

 

Episode 006: The 11 Pages Every Ecommerce Website Needs