Whether you are using a free ecommerce website builder or a site that has huge amounts of cash invested in it, you’ll still need to get product descriptions perfect if your going to get the optimum sales volume possible.

Although the task may seem daunting, ecommerce store owners are lucky. Many stores have 1,000s of products online, with the ability to access and upload 1,000s more, if they ever get the time!

Unlike service businesses, ecommerce store owners have the ability to optimise not 10 pages, not even 50, but thousands. Creating great copy is one of the hardest aspects of this business after you build your own ecommerce website.

Why you aren’t optimising your pages and have poor quality descriptions

• There are too many
• It takes too long
• You don’t know where to start
• The manufacturer knows best

Why you should optimise your pages with quality ecommerce product descriptions:

• Google penalises duplicate content
• Increase SEO
• Allow potential customers to understand the benefits
• Boost conversion rates

How to write ecommerce product descriptions

Ecommerce product descriptions can be tricky. The writer needs to be able to incorporate lots of points, but also be written in a way that persuades the consumer to act.

Features that should be incorporated:

• Function – What does it do?
• Explanation– Function, in more detail
• Features – How is the function created?
• *Comparison – How is it superior to a comparative product?
• Technology – The “wow” factor
• Benefits – What will it allow the customer to achieve?
• Brand, Model, Keyword
• The list goes on!

*Used for new products that the customer might not have heard of. Other cases might be those products that are established in the industry, but utilise new technology.

Regardless of the structure that is used, try and stick to that structure. Once one of the product descriptions has been read by a potential consumer, they will easily be able to find what they need, when they look at other products. The structure can be altered, but try not to change it completely.

An example template can be used as a rough guide. Obviously it will need adapting depending on the niche and product.

The {Brand} {Model} {Keyword} is designed to {Function}. It enables {Function} to {Explanation} much better than similar products such as {Comparison}.

Features include {Feature}, {Feature} and {Feature}. Combined they enable {Brand} {Model} to offer {Benefits}.

Using {Technology}, the {Brand} {Model} {Keyword}.

If you are using free ecommerce software it’s likely they’ll explain some alternative methods to writing these descriptions during your induction

Resource:

If you are still in the developing and planning stage of your store, WordPress allows people to learn how to make your own website for free. Once you’ve setup the site, you can then install eCommerce plug-ins which will make it into a functional store!

Discard that email to a webmaster offering a guest post opportunity and hold off on employing a full time SEO. Your website isn’t ready to be promoted. Learning how to improve a website is certainly not easy. Web page optimisation will help to ensure your sales are at their maximum, at all times.

It’s amazing to see how many websites are still in their development phase, yet business owners decide to go ahead and spend thousands on marketing anyway. Their efforts will yield a low ROI, for obvious reasons. In fact, they may ditch campaigns that would be profitable if they had worked on their website conversion rates first.

Before going any further, consider some of these basic things that could help with conversion rates:

1. Organise categories in a way that makes it easy for customers to find products.
2. Use copywriting experts increase the impulse purchases – a great conversion optimisation technique. Landing pages that convert are essential to get users engaged quickly.
3. Don’t make life hard; reduce the number of clicks it takes to checkout.
4. Offer multiple payment options.
5. Incorporate the right CTA (call to action) in the right place; make it stand out. Read this post on How To Make Call To Actions More Effective

	Before conversion rate work	After conversion rate work
Monthly Visits	50,000	50,000
Conversion rate	1%	2%
Sales (monthly)	500	1000
Sales value	£100	£100
Average profit per sale (25%)	£25	£25
Total profit	£12,500	£25,000

After focusing on increasing conversion rates, it is natural that something else will happen; order value will increase. WHY? Customers will be able to find products easier! There are a couple of ways to help facilitate the increase in order value:

• Offering free delivery for online orders. If the current average online order is £75.00, offer free delivery for orders over £85.00.
• Up-sell relevant products
• Offer bulk discounts

	Before conversion rate work	After conversion rate work
Monthly Visits	50,000	50,000
Conversion rate	1%	2%
Sales (monthly)	500	1000
Sales value	£100	£120
Average profit per sale (25%)	£25.00	£30
Total profit	£12,500	£30,000

There are hundreds of factors that affect website conversion rates and sale value. This has briefly touched on the subject. Now you know the importance, ask yourself questions relating to your site:

• Does the CTA stand off the page?
• Is the site easy to navigate?
• If a customer wanted to find a particular product, do allow them to reach their desired product, within a few clicks?
• How many clicks does it take to purchase a product? Could the checkout process be simplified?
• Do you just offer PayPal? Not everyone is as comfortable with it as business owners are!

Start your web page optimisation sooner rather than later!

It’s tempting. Your business is struggling to meet a sales quota and marketing efforts don’t seem to be making a difference. Alternative market places allow most businesses not just the UK, but globally, to make instant sales.

This is particularly true of those that are in the early stages of learning how to start their an online shop, but actually turn their small business idea into a long term profit generator. Once you realise starting a shop is not easy, you’ll start to hone in on what really makes your business work.

No expensive marketing campaigns to deal with and the seller doesn’t even need a website!  It’s a no brainer, right? Wrong!

There is always a catch!

Fees! More and more businesses are spending time and money listing items and managing their inventory on alternative market places, such as eBay and Amazon.

The fruits of their labour may seem worth the effort now, but in the mean time, their neglected website, remains stagnant. They are relying on a source of income that is unstable and doesn’t brand their business. Their business is being controlled by alternative market places that are ripping them off!

Get banned (it happens) or stop listing items; the income disappears. What’s left of the business? A useless website, thanks to efforts being allocated elsewhere.

Here is a quick break down of fees on Amazon UK and eBay UK. As you will see, it leaves the seller with very little after they have paid all costs. Lots of effort; minimal gains!

Amazon UK

Pro-merchant monthly fee: £28.75

Sale fee (average, excluding Kindle accessories): 12.65%

Cost of £50.00 sale: £6.33

Cost of 30 sales including monthly fee: £7.28 per sale

eBay UK:

Buy-it-now insertion fee: £0.99

Buy-it-now sale fee: 10%

Cost of a £50.00 sale: £5.99

If you’re starting a shop, you’ll already have lots of fees to content with, don’t add to them!

The price war

Blog posts throughout the net will reveal price wars that are currently happening; they are on-going! The reality is; alternative market places have no barriers to entry. For this reason, they are the worst place to sell items, for those trying to demand a premium price. Prices from sellers are continuously driven down.

Hocus-focus

As if by magic, many businesses are snowballing their way to success with their e-commerce stores. They focus on email marketing, blog posting; anything to keep their consumers engaged.

Focusing on a website as a prime income generator is certainly the key. These alternative market places are great to increase revenue slightly, or even awareness, but they are not income streams that should be focused on, or relied on.

Don’t bomb out! Learning how to start a retail business online is not easy, but it’s worth the time and effort that you’ll have to put in, in order to be successful.

 

Now I’m sure everyone reading this has already read 100s of posts with the same name, but this is worth reading. Always remember that learning how to SEO your site really should not revolve around link building, but rather, link earning. Create high quality content regularly and the links will flow naturally.

This is what I’ve been doing…

Find webmasters

The list is never ending, but my favourites right now are:

• Direct via Google searching
• Forum networking
• Email proposals
• Business contacts

I thought I’d skip the usual useless lists that include: article directories, links directories and so on…out of the thousands, only a handful would be considered to be quality, so I tend not to bother with them unless they are niche specific.

What can you offer?

This question and the process of link building for my sites helped me consider what I really have to offer; how can I get a link deal to work consistently?

Think about the skills you have and how this could be of benefit to others. It might be that webmasters would be willing to publish a link in return for some help elsewhere with their websites. For instance, my experience online allows me to offer:

• Content writing (you can use an SEO company if necessary)
• A back link from one of my older blogs that are not really doing anything, but have good link juice
• Advice relating to running an e-commerce store
• And so on…

Techniques that yield a response

The main thing to consider is logging results. I always save the forum posts and emails that I create and log the results. It helps for the future, I can chop and change posts/emails completely, or modify them slightly to try and yield a better response. We all know how important analytical data is, so make sure you monitor results one way or another.

Here’s what I do!

If I called a forum post “Forum post 18^th July.doc”, I’d log results for that in a spreadsheet like so:

File Name	Response rate
Forum post 18th July.doc	2.4%

Direct via Google search

Searches to try:

• Guest post “name of niche” – You will obviously have to write an article or pay for an article to be written.
• Link directory “name of niche”
• Links “name of niche” – Brings up sites with related links pages)
• Resources “name of niche” – Brings up sites with related links pages)
• Use a back link checker – Check where competitors are getting links from (OpenSiteExplorer is also good for this)

Email proposals

Change the way you contact owners consistently and log results as mentioned above. I actively buy websites if I can see them having future value. The best response rate I had for obtaining back links was an email I wrote asking if they would sell, but if they wouldn’t, if they would give me a back link. My intention was not to get any links, but instead, to buy the sites in question.

Since then, I’ve been emailing people to “buy” their website rather than specifically asking for back links. I’ve gained quite a few links using this method. Think about similar but unique & creative ways to word emails.

Remember this; we all delete “link exchange request” emails – they are spam! Just because you write in good, solid English does not mean someone will suddenly think “Oh its not spam, I’ll reply”. You need to change your tact!

Here is the part of the email relating to asking the owner to sell the site that I believe generated the response; it’s something different to the plain old “do you want to swap links” – it gets them talking/thinking.

“Firstly, if you ever consider selling the site, please could you contact me? Depending on the price I could be interested.”

Remember; the title is just as important. When testing/logging, use the same email a few times, but change the title in creative ways to see how response rates vary.

Forum networking

This is quite easy. Visit some webmaster forums, forums in your niche and get some posts going. As a content writer, I might start a post – say “Free content in exchange for links”. If you are web designer then you’d go with “Free web design in exchange for links” and so on. Just try and get creative, but work in the same way as the emails mentioned above; change your posting tactics and measure the results.

Another tact I went with was “Networking with website owners”. The aim was to have a bit of a chat, then hit them with a back link proposal. That being said, I genuinely did want to network with these people, as I knew I could gain some valuable information (and offer the same) from people that had experience in the field.

Business contacts

I tell you what I love about SEO? Previous contacts – nothing beats them! I’ve not been doing my own SEO for a massive amount of time, but I still know that previous contacts, people I have already arranged link deals with are the best people to deal with. They convert nearly 100% of the time after a quick email and they provide some great back links.

Happy linking!