Revenue Journal®

The most important function of your website is the effective presentation of your products - whether you sell online or through a distribution network. Having just gone through a bunch of sites in the analysis of a buying process, and after doing a lot of research for clients on this subject in the course of website redesigns, I've come to some conclusions.

1) First, answer their questions. Buyers come to your website looking for answers to their questions. The more complex the buying process (the more scrutiny they apply to the purchase), the more questions they have. You must know what their questions are, and your answers must satisfy their concerns in the order that those concerns arise in the customer's mind. If your website fails to do this, your website is a failure. Period.

Most sellers guess which questions are important and assume they know which answers will satisfy. I guarantee that this method will keep you from making sales. If you want to zoom ahead of your competition, you will interview your current customers - people who have already bought from you. They will have shifted from the skeptical buyer playing their cards close to their chest to someone who has a vested interest in your continued success. They will answer all of your questions. They will tell you what they were thinking during their buying process, what really mattered to them, what their issues were, and even how well or poorly you addressed those issues. They won't mind giving you this information. They will even be flattered that you cared enough to ask.

2) Save the fancy stuff for later in their buying process. Those PTNR (pony-tail, nose-ring) designers can easily get you all excited about beautiful flash animations at the entrance to your site. You will be convinced that it will make you look sophisticated and sexy. Meanwhile, your prospective buyers will be seriously irritated that they are being accosted by clowns as they try to enter your store. They have already seen, - and been irritated by - plenty of equally flashy landing screens.

It's not a question of whether you should do something fancy. It's a question of when you should do something fancy. Save your fancy graphics for the "experience" part (see #6) which comes after you've given the buyer immediate access to product information and answered the questions they had in mind when they came to your site.

First you give them basic information, then you can let them choose to be entertained as they drill down. Don't force-feed entertainment on them at the beginning of their session on your site. People love to shop online because they can find exactly what they want in a matter of seconds. They are determined to spend the right amount of money on the best product choice. Don't let your ego stand in their way.

3) Use thumbnails for product pictures. For fairly simple products, each product page should include a couple of thumbnails. The buyer should be able to click on and enlarge each one. For more complex products, you should have a photo gallery, which displays many thumbnails, each about an inch square. Again, they should be able to click on a thumbnail to see a larger image in a new window.

When they click on a different thumbnail, that new image should appear in the same popup window. In other words, don't clutter their desktop with a stack of popups.

So they can easily get back to the page with thumbnails, they should be able to click on a "return to thumbnails" button on the popup window, which will take them back to the thumbnail page.

The larger images should include a caption. No one does this, and they should. The caption should relate to what is being shown in the image and point out important features that the customer would find particularly valuable.

Virtual tours are useful, but not necessarily worth the expense. A series of good photos is just as good. And do yourself a favor: Hire a professional photographer. Yes, you understand all of the buttons on your digital camera, but it is lighting that makes the difference between a photo that answers questions and one that does not. Photos play a significant role in the question-answering process. Plus, if the photo is substandard, your buyer will assume that your product is, also.

4) The more pictures, the better. You can never have enough pictures of your product. Think about your own experience as a buyer of online products. How often have you gone to a site, and clicked on the two or three pictures available, and thought, "Darn, this still doesn't answer my question." Maybe you want to see inside of that computer case. Maybe you want to understand how big something is, but the picture offers no frame of reference. Maybe you want to see what the item is made out of, and would have made the purchase if you could have seen a close-up of the product components. Maybe you wanted to see the end of the item, the bottom of the item, the handles on the item, the closure on the item, and on and on. Your buyers want to know. If you don't provide this information, they'll simply go back to Google and go to the next site in the search results. In a matter of seconds, you will have lost another sale.

5) Include photos, short and long descriptions, specs, and the price on the same page. Your interviews with customers will tell you which questions they want you to answer. But there is also basic information that should be on every product page. I'm shocked, frankly, at the number of companies that fail to include these basics, even though we've all had more than ten years to get this web stuff right.

Your product page should include at least one photo, at the top, with links to other photos via thumbnails (or a link to a gallery, for more complex products). Next, your product page should display a short, bulleted list of essential features and functions, and then a longer description. The description should be factual, personal and verb-heavy rather than adjective-heavy. "You can store up to 50 soda cans in this thermo-electric cooler" will lead to more sales than "This convenient thermo-electric cooler provides optimum carrying capacity."

The price should be prominently displayed on the page. Price is one of the biggest questions - and often one of the first questions. Don't be coy. The price is the price. Answer the question, right up front. If you hide the price, they will assume it's too high, and they will also wonder what else you're hiding from them.

6) Do everything you can to help the customer "experience" your product. After you have created product pages that answer the basic questions with your copy and your images, and you still have the budget and the desire to get fancy, go ahead. This is the right time in the buying process continuum to help your buyer "experience" the product. Your buyer has gotten her basic questions answered, and is still there, interested. The buyer is now more than happy to mentally "try on" the item. This is when the buyer will click on the item to change its color, or watch a video of the sailboat in action, or take a virtual tour of that house for sale.

7) Put the buyer in the driver's seat. You can't make a sale if your buyer can't make a purchase. In other words, your buyer's purchasing process is more important than your selling process. If you don't support their buying process, you won't make the sale.

What do they want to know? How do they want that information presented? What matters to them most? How do they want the site to be organized? Where would they expect to find certain types of information, and how would they like that information to be presented?

Don't guess. Don't depend on website designers to tell you. Trust me, they don't know. Most website designers have only worked on the web, and have very little personal experience in other aspects of business. So their idea of what a customer would want, or what one of your selling partners would need, could easily be wrong.

All of this matters - a lot. The web is not like a static brochure. It's a place where people interact with your information. If your information isn't holding up its end of the interaction, you will lose sales. And if you try to get fancy before you get the basics right, your website will be like a salesperson who only speaks jibberish whenever a customer asks a question.