Ecommerce website content

The old adage ‘Content is King’ certainly holds true in ecommerce.

Engaging content helps to grab and hold the attention of website visitors and encourage customers and prospects to keep coming back for more.

• 1.1 Editorial content

To succeed, an ecommerce site cannot simply provide product details and a purchase channel.

The content of the site needs to provide ‘added value’ and contribute to the user experience.

Including engaging content such as editorial features or video will encourage visitors to stay longer and can introduce them to new products that they hadn’t previously considered.

Additional keyword-rich content can also help push a site up those all important search engine rankings.

Average score: 12 out of 25 = 48%

High flyers: Marks and Spencer, John Lewis, LoveFilm.com, Vie at home, Maplin.

Overall performance in this category was poor.

Over half the retailers we assessed failed to include editorial material or video content in their ecommerce site. 30% didn’t include any added value subject matter at all.

Of those that did, buyer guides were by far the most common content of this kind provided.

Some of the retailers were more creative with their content.

For example, Marks and Spencer included a wallpaper calculator to help customers work out the amount of paper they would need to fi t a certain sized room.

The inclusion of video was mainly focused on adding an extra dimension to product descriptions.

Maplin however included its own branded YouTube channel featuring product demonstrations and ‘How to’ guides and Virgin Vie included YouTube videos of clients’ home parties.

Best practice guidelines

1. * Where possible use video to provide an extra dimension to product pages and to editorial content
2. * Include SEO keywords in editorial content to improve search engine rankings
3. * If optimising content for key search terms, aim for a keyword density of around 1 keyword per 100 words.
4. * Keyword saturation can cause Google to penalise your site
5. * Use editorial ‘human interest’ content to build a customer community around your site – include features and profi les on customers, suppliers, branches or members of your staff
6. * Include ‘How to’ guides on areas of related interest to customers
7. * Test using microsites to focus on added value content, but ensure there are always prominent and relevant links back to your online shopping site, on every microsite page

Top Tip

Think about grouping products into themes and devising some additional content that would be useful to customers shopping in that particular area.

1.2 Important information is easily accessible

There are few things more frustrating for online shoppers than trying to locate information when it’s buried and hidden in the depths of the website.

In fact, a recent survey found that 46% of UK consumers felt that the inability to find information was the most significant cause of frustration when shopping online*.

We studied our 20 leading online retail websites to see how easy it was to find important information regarding their returns policy, delivery costs and options, and an ‘About Us’ page.

Average score: 46 out of 60 = 77%

High flyers: Currys, The Fragrance Shop ,Vie at home, Boots, Amazon.co.uk,John Lewis, Marks and Spencer, Argos.

The retailers we assessed included most of the key information on their websites, but the links were often hidden and hard to fi nd. However, an FAQ or help section was easily identifiable on every website.

Best practice guidelines

* About us – this page should include relevant information about the company including its contact details, history and how long it has been trading.

* Customers like to know that a company is reputable, especially in the current climate

* Delivery pricing – savvy website shoppers know that, more often than not, a delivery price will be added to baskets during checkout.

Providing this information when the goods are added to the basket will prevent any shocks – and abandoned baskets – in the checkout funnel

* Delivery terms – if you need something for a certain date – a present, for example – it’s crucial to know how long delivery will take

* Returns information – for many products, customers will be more willing to buy if they are assured that they can return the item if it is not required

* FAQ – a help or FAQ page online will encourage visitors to find the answers to common queries themselves and can help reduce the number of calls into your customer service team

Ensuring all this information is easily accessible to customers will make them less likely to abandon their visit

Top Tip

Whilst is is the product that will eventually draw the customer to the checkout, making sure that all the details they need to inform a purchase are readily available will significantly improve the customer experience, and their confidence to purchase.

*SciVisum, September 2006

1.3 User generated content

In today’s web 2.0 world, user generated content is becoming a must-have rather than a nice-to-have for an effective ecommerce site.

It’s a no-brainer – encouraging visitors to contribute to a site increases brand affi nity and makes them feel valued and included.

It’s also a great way to get additional (often very high quality) content for a site, inspire customer confidence and increase conversion to sale rates – research shows that 87% of people trust a peer recommendation over a critic’s review*.

Average score: 19 out of 40 = 48%

High flyers: LoveFilm.com, Vie at home, Play.com, Amazon.co.uk

Only 5 of the retailers we surveyed scored more than 50% in this section.

Whilst user product reviews featured across many of the sites, wider use of user generated content was lacking, with few of the ecommerce solutions taking advantage of blogs, forums or polls for example.

These retailers are missing the opportunity to have their site loaded with up-to-date, ‘SEO friendly’ and customer confidence-inspiring content – free of charge, courtesy of their site users.

What’s more, they are missing an opportunity to build an engaged community of visitors to their site who will spend more and refer more.

Best practice guidelines

* Make sure your ecommerce solutions allows you to include a blog on your ecommerce site.

It helps add personality and currency to the site, and can assist SEO – blogs are indexed by search engines faster than standard content pages

* Give customers the opportunity to leave reviews and ratings for your products in order to add credibility to the online shop and inspire users to buy with confidence

* Make sure you have editorial approval over user generated content before it is published on your site

* Include user forums to help reduce demand on your customer care team by enabling users to share questions and answers around your products and services, on the forum itself

* Monitor your user forum carefully for surfacing issues – either positive or negative – that you need to act on or address

* Use polls to encourage users to interact with your site and help build an online community spirit as well as encouraging return visits

Top Tip

* Incentivise customers to write reviews in post-sale email marketing campaigns. 

These could include money off vouchers or exclusive access to new products.

1.4 Customer service and contact information

No matter how comprehensive the FAQ section, customers will inevitably have questions that can’t be answered on the website alone.

In these circumstances, visitors have two main options: either try and get help, or switch to a competitor.

Making the first option as easy as possible will help retain a potential buyer and increase conversions.

Perhaps unfortunately for retailers, in today’s multi-channel world, customers expect a multitude of different contact options to be available to them.

Creating a good customer experience will depend on being able to provide as many contact options as required and making sure these are easy to find on the site.

Average score: 13 out of 25 = 52%

High flyers: Comet

Almost every retailer included phone (95%) and email (95%) contact details with 75% also providing a postal address.
 
But live chat options were far less common with only Comet providing this facility.

Not one of the retailers assessed included a ‘Call Me Back’ button that allows customers to proactively request a call from the customer services team.

Whilst the cost of customer service can put a strain on business resources, technologies like live chat can help by enabling agents to handle multiple chat sessions.

Best practice guidelines

* Offer as many different contact methods as possible, including:

Phone
Email
Live chat
Call me back
Post

* Highlight contact options clearly and obviously on the website, especially on product pages

* Flag up self-help options like FAQ and searchable knowledge base sections, but don’t force customers to use these if all they really want is to speak directly to customer services

* Build in user generated content to enable users to share questions and answers amongst themselves on your site, e.g. in an online forum.

Top Tip

* Use live chat and FAQ sections to minimise the number of incoming calls and emails, ensuring customers can receive help directly on the website at their time of need, rather than forcing them to use slower, offline channels.

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