7 tips for increasing your E-Com Conversion Rate overnight: E-Visual Merchandising

After almost 10 years in B2B and B2C E-Commerce and Retail, I've learned one painfully simple and irrefutable truth: a customer is a customer.

If doesn't matter if they are in a shop, an app, or a website. It doesn't even matter if they are a private (B2C) customer or a business (B2B) customer. They are a human being with a problem that needs solved. And you need to solve it.

Once you realise that, and stop over-segmenting, over-analysing, and pretending that websites are anything other than a digital shop, your life will become much much easier. Watch your E-Commerce Conversion Rate increase, your brand grow, and your online and offline experience harmonise!

So what is E-VM? Where does it come from? And why should you care about it? It comes from a very simple idea: E-Commerce is just online retail. That's no surprise to anybody, especially anybody with the word "digital" in their job description, so why do we all pretend that we have to start from scratch when it comes to site design? Why do we panic and try running with A/B testing, complex analytics, and tools like HotJar before we have first taken a deep breath, a step back, and realised that we should first try walking with the benefit of almost 150 years of global retail data at our disposal?

Let's start at the start. For those who don't know, Visual Merchandising is the retail practice of "optimizing the presentation of products and services to better highlight their features and benefits". But how is that relevant for E-Commerce?

Because it's the exact same thing. Your visitor's journey through your website should be a reflection of how people walk through shops. That's it. Everything from brand discovery through to creating repeat customers, the practices are the same. Attract, convince, sell.

Here's a little thought experiment: Think of the last time you went for a walk through a shopping street. What convinced you to enter a shop and buy something?

Maybe you had experience with the brand, maybe you needed something in particular, or maybe an attractive window display caught your eye and you couldn't help yourself... It really doesn't matter, because that's EXACTLY how you shop online.

Now, to get back to the point of this post, what is E-VM and why does it matter? E-VM is the practice of taking 150+ years of shop layout knowledge and applying it to websites. Not just for E-Commerce, but for branding and UX purposes. Look at how closely the flow of a retail customer aligns with an E-Commerce customer:

Bear in mind, this skips the discovery phase, but the site/shop journey is the exact same. The customer goes the direction you send them, i.e. the path of least resistance. Some shops are better at this than others, the same is true for websites. For those of you who have visited Scandinavia, you'll know that S?strene Grene are the gold standard here. Their shops force you to walk past their entire inventory before you can purchase or leave. On top of that, they subconsciously force you to purchase because it feels weird to walk through an entire shop and past the checkout area without purchasing something.

Nothing I've said so far is revolutionary... But why do sites still make things so hard to find? Why do we hide best-sellers and our latest collections behind several clicks, why do we showcase things that don't convert in any sense, and why do we focus on things our customers don't care about? Because of one fundamental mistake: thinking websites are anything new.

There are around 1,000 things that shops do better than 99% of websites, but here are my favourites that can be turned on within 24 hours and will have a positive impact on your main site metrics. Let's compare age-old retail principles and their E-Commerce equivalent:

1. Window shopping vs Home Pages: make your products clear by presenting 1 or 2 messages that demand attention. Be provocative, be engaging, but above all, get the foot/site traffic you deserve. Tip: if it bores you, it bores your customer. Showcase your best sellers, feature your newest collection, and give the customer something to connect to.
2. Shop sectioning vs Website Navigation: let people know where they need to go to get what they want. Focus on 4-6 main sections. Anything more is counterproductive. Tip: Have you ever seen a shopfront list all the products they sell? No. Show - don't tell, and burger menus are your friend. Use them to streamline your primary and secondary navigation.
3. Catalogues vs Product Navigation: Whether you have a promotion or a new collection, make it easy to browse! The front cover of a catalogue tells you everything you need to know in 1-2 seconds, the contents table tells you everything you can buy in another few seconds. Your website should do the same. Tip: do you really need to use new words to describe old products? Is it absolutely 100% critical to your brand's success that you say "manual earth moving implement" vs "spade"? Probably not.
4. Shelf-layout vs PLPs: the most expensive/highest converting shelves are always at eye-level. Apply the same principle to your website. Put goods where they can be seen without expecting your site visitor to spend time or effort digitally bending over or stretching to see what you want them to see. Tip: less is more... Do you really need to show 10 rows of products and 6 products per row as soon as the PLP opens? How many rows/shelves does the typical shop's shelf have? Let the customer click "See More" if they want to... you guessed it...! see more.
5. Product information vs PDPs: how long do you spend reading product packaging? More or less than 5 seconds? So why do you expect people to spend minutes reading a PDP? Tip: Put your USPs at the start, visually show how your product solves the customer's problems (before/after images, videos, etc.), and keep it simple.
6. Check-out vs... well... Checkout: this is your chance to turn a visitor into a customer, don't waste it. Every single shop in the world encourages impulse purchases at checkout. Whether it is on a high-street or in an airport, high-end luxury or day-to-day groceries, the practice is the same. Tip: put cheaper/impulse purchase items at checkout and watch what happens to your AOV and basket-size overnight.
7. Loyalty programmes vs Loyalty programmes: make sure your customer feels like coming back is the smart financial move. Give them a reason to sign-up to a VIP programme or newsletter. Tip: encourage sign-up with a welcome offer that gives the customer a reason to come back (discount/GWP with next purchase, point collection, etc.).

How much of this was new to you? Not a lot, I'll bet. But that's exactly the problem... we pretend it is! If there's one thing I want you, dear reader, to learn from this post, it's this: stop trying to reinvent the wheel. I don't care if you're in Marketing, Branding, E-Commerce, or you're a CEO with input on your site - everybody should walk (through a shop) before they run (a website).

If you're still not convinced, try this the next time you go shopping: find a shop that closely aligns with your brand. Walk around and take mental notes of what grabs your attention. Once you're done, go back to the entrance of the shop and look at what you missed and why you missed it. Then go home, and take a cold, hard look at your website and do the same thing.

The biggest mistake anybody in digital marketing can make is to assume the customer knows or cares as much about the brand as we do. The truth is that they never have and never will, so stop trying to force them. Make the journey easy and enjoyable, and I promise you one thing... you won't regret it.