Totally Zenned
- Join Date:
- Jun 2005
- Location:
- Cumbria, UK
- Posts:
- 10,327
- Plugin Contributions:
- 0
Nobody ordering from my web site :( Please take a look!
diamond1:
Me, I'm convinced that it's the templates that sells...
Partly true, but not necessarily so. What "sells" are compelling products at good value. We operate around 10 ZC sites (largely "clones"of our main site), and we change only the logo header images, and some of the main colour schemes (through small edits to the CSS).
We have found that our customers really like the following:
- We DO NOT pester them with silly rotating banners, distracting links, sale items not relevant to their immediate needs, or other common "upsell"methods that are really very annoying to most shoppers.
- We are hyper-aware of category and product organisation, where the navigational logic of our shops are easy to understand, become rapidly intuitive, and take people quickly to products they are looking for,
- We focus on PAGE SPEED and quick ordering, using professionally-compressed JPG (we are moving to WEBP) images, well-written product descriptions, and a "clean and lean" page structure.
- We don't bug them to "follow, like, subscribe, write a review..." or plague them with irritating and unnecessary popups that get in the way of their shopping.
- We take them through OPC (One Page Checkout), with clear and logical options for shipping and payment, enabling them to checkout quickly and easily.
- After they have purchased, we DO NOT ever spam them with "newsletters", "sales", or plead for them to "Review" us. (In the 18 years we've been selling online, we have NEVER sent out marketing emails - even where customers have "signed up" for newsletters.)
In short, we do whatever is necessary to get the customer to the products they are looking for, and to checkout and pay quickly and easily.
Our template structure has not changed since 2007 - we configure (for desktops) a header,left column, main column and footer - following the tried and tested "F-Pattern" - SEE https://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/).
We use Responsive Classic (with a few structrual edits/modifications), and allow this template to render as-is on mobile devices.
Across our many sites, we get 200 - 300 sales a day in total - even on Christmas Day.
20 years a Zencart User