Since the rise of sites like eBay, Amazon Marketplace, and Facebook Marketplace, Etsy the number of independent merchants has exploded.
They’re ideal for first-time and casual sellers since they provide a ready-made market of people looking for things that are hard to come by in stores.
However, consider if selling via your website would be a better fit for you before you get started.
Why sell via your website instead of eBay or Facebook?
Selling on eBay is difficult since there are many hoops to go through, including fees and competition, making it difficult for a small company selling low-value products to stand out.
Similarly, Facebook was excellent, but it required me to connect with each consumer individually for a transaction and provide PayPal bills. While it’s always good to talk to customers, that approach wasn’t scalable, and taking time off was challenging since I was afraid we’d miss messages and, by implication, purchases.
Furthermore, Facebook is undergoing significant changes, making it more difficult for companies to get their material seen by prospective consumers. As a result, establishing our website was a no-brainer. People may see all of our products and purchase with confidence at any time of day or night.
The greatest challenges?
We had no clue what to anticipate when we launched our firm since neither had any prior expertise in the sector. There were simply too many difficulties to get over the hump in the first place. First, we needed a crash education in administering and modifying a website.
I worked for 27 hours straight before our first site went live, simply to load all of the items for the initial launch! Now that we’ve gained more expertise, we ensure that our agency completes this job before the launch. We were completely unprepared when we created our first website, which was much more popular than we could have expected.
The site was often down, and the firm that previously housed us refused to host us since we were also pulling down all of their other websites. It’s a great issue to have!
What you’ll need to take to make the switch?
Finding someone who has dealt with e-commerce before is a huge plus.
The first guy we hired was fantastic, and we paid a minimal amount for his services, which aided the company’s growth. On the other hand, our initial web developer lacked e-commerce skills and was only accessible during normal business hours, not the hours when consumers purchase online. Due to the high level of visitors on Sunday nights, our site would often crash, and there was seldom anybody accessible to assist us.
The true secret is to find a reputable firm or web developer that isn’t too expensive. In addition to ensuring that you have all of the product information and photographs, you must also present a variety of policies and basic information for visitors to be compliant – especially in light of GDPR.
What are the benefits of selling on your website versus eBay or Facebook?
Customers may explore our items 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and we don’t have to be there to answer inquiries or issue bills. All of this is handled automatically by the website. People can see all of our items and pertinent information in one location, and we can also connect sell.
According to the site, customers who purchase dresses will be given suggestions for additional clothing items that go well with them. By adding blog posts, we can utilize our site to communicate with our wonderful fans.
Furthermore, if someone visits our site, they are likely to sign up for our newsletter, making it simpler for us to reach them directly in the future.
Creating a website that encourages customers to return
Humans in western societies have been deceiving themselves for generations. We have perpetuated the notion that we are rational creatures capable of making logical judgments free of emotion.
Recent neuroscience research has disproved this theory. In an interview with Forbes, Janet Crawford, a scientist and business expert, put it this way: ‘The conscious intellectual brain jumps in to create a plausible narrative to explain impulses formed in the murky areas of the unconscious mind.’
Crawford describes how our emotions are effectively built-in shortcuts in our brains that allow us to react to circumstances far faster than we would if we had to think out a reasonable answer.
Web designers and company owners who want to convert more visitors into loyal clients would benefit from this knowledge of emotions. It teaches us that triggering emotional reactions in visitors is a better strategy to convince them to accomplish our objectives than striving for greater intellectual stimulation, even if the emotional subtext is used to drive the visitor toward what they believe is a sensible option.
In UX, emotional emphasis is important.
The concept of user experience (UX) is well-established in web design. It refers to a person’s complete experience with your product (in this example, your website). It considers things like accessibility and the value the site contributes to visitors’ lives.
While the knowledge of emotions that neuroscience has provided us with has surely enhanced UX, emotional experience (EX) has never had the effect that it might.
Some of the terminologies around EX make it seem like it is replacing UX. Still, at its finest, EX is a refinement of the current discipline that builds on what has previously made it successful and maintains it in step with the latest scientific findings from domains such as neuromarketing.
Incorporating EX into your UX and user interface (UI – the aesthetic side of web design) means being more deliberate in considering the emotional implications of various features on your website and accepting that visitors will attach emotional significance to elements of your design whether you want them to or not. A dedication to gaining control of the emotional ramifications of your site design decisions and employing them to your benefit involves focusing on EX.
With that in mind, I’d want to discuss three design elements that, in my 20 years of retail expertise, are some of the most effective methods to begin shaping your visitors’ emotional reactions.
EX’s foundation is color.
In marketing, color psychology is well-trodden ground, and its relevance supports much of EX. Colors are some of the most basic visual cues accessible to humans, and they elicit a wide range of emotional responses.
Warm colors like red and orange, on the surface, increase our emotional arousal, making us more aroused and passionate. Cooler colors, such as blue and purple, help to calm us down and lessen our emotional outbursts (though this, in itself, is an emotional response).
Aside from those fundamental links, civilization has produced additional associations, sometimes based on basic physiological inclinations. Yellow, for example, has a cautionary connotation in societies where color is used in warning signs.
Because I work in retail and manage a firm that sells lingerie especially, I can draw on certain connections. Red is a great color for me since it evokes enthusiasm and encourages people to make sudden purchases (which is why it’s often used on sale signs). Still, it also has cultural links with love, as do comparable colors like pink. I may profit from these connections by introducing red into my site, in features such as sale symbols and the logo, so visitors are more likely to make a rapid choice to buy my items.
In contrast, a service business such as a legal practice, such as the one in this example, may use blue across their website to encourage visitors to feel calm and assess their services objectively. Before choosing colors, consider your brand and items to ensure that your selection supports the activities you want your visitors to do.
Photographs have the power to say a thousand words or feelings
Images may elicit immediate emotional reactions that are impossible to duplicate with words. Your photos’ subject matter, size, and perceived closeness will all have an emotional impact.
According to experts, human brains react when they see an image of someone executing an activity that they are also capable of completing, thanks to sympathetic responses now thought to originate in specialized areas of the brain called mirror neurons.
Let me explain what I mean. When you see someone wearing a specific type of clothing, and they seem to be having a good time, it’s simple to envision yourself doing the same. It’s simple to envision oneself typing on a new keyboard if you witness someone else doing so. ‘It seems we’re designed to regard other individuals as similar to ourselves, rather than different,’ says Dr. Vittorio Gallese, a scientist at the institution that first found mirror neurons in apes. As humans, we connect with the individual we’re dealing with as someone similar to ourselves.” If you’re attempting to market a product, showcasing photographs of people using it is a good place to start.
Photos may be used similarly as colors by selecting images with subject matter and themes that elicit feelings of excitement, joy, or tranquility. It’s called ‘priming’ when you use pictures in this manner, and it works. According to research, visitors to a vehicle website would look at more costly models if the backdrop color was green (like American money) and pictures of pennies were shown.
Arrange the layout of your website for maximum impact.
We know that organizing displays in the store makes clients more inclined to purchase particular items, and the same theory applies to your online shops and websites.
You may direct your visitors’ attention to the correct spots and elicit the emotional reactions you want by making some parts more visible than others. Many websites already do this, with giant banners promoting prominent items at the top of the page or pop-ups displaying your most significant call to action (CTAs) in bright colors in the middle of the screen.
Emotional content should be a primary consideration when using any of these tactics. Is your call to action encouraging people to browse your deal in cool, relaxing colors rather than the more popular hot colors? Is your highlighted product banner devoid of visuals that would allow visitors to identify with individuals who have previously used the product?
Humans are naturally drawn to particular features of a scene. They pay more attention to them than to others, a phenomenon known as ‘prominence’ in cognitive psychology, and you can influence what seems to be prominent. If you don’t, your visitors’ attention will be drawn to other parts of the website where they won’t become consumers.
The EX aspects I’ve discussed are easy to include into your design with a little consideration, and the ideas can be applied to a lot more than just these fundamentals. Consider how you want your consumers to react and what you can do to get them to do so in everything you do. You have nothing to lose by paying greater attention to EX and everything to gain by doing so.