Waiting for customers to find the products they are looking for is not the only model, but another approach gaining popularity is putting the right product in front of the right people at the right time.
According to a report by Inc., people like finding new products that they did not know existed, citing a Facebook survey conducted in Dec. 2020 that found 63% of global shoppers like discovering products they were not looking for.
A second trend is supplier diversification, which means expanding your network of suppliers to avoid disruptions.
A third option to explore in your e-commerce store is local delivery, meaning same-day delivery which has become a more common option, not just two-day delivery. This requires spreading inventory to different fulfillment locations. Same-day delivery may not be possible for many dropshipping stores, but quicker delivery options improve the customer experience.
The fourth trend mentioned is the increased amount of returns after purchasing products online. Citing the National Retail Federation, online returns more than doubled in 2020. The best way to deal with this trend, according to the report, is to minimize returns by carefully shipping items and making accurate descriptions and high-quality product photos and videos.
An investigation by Marketplace, of the Canadian media outlet CBC, found that some cheap online clothing retailers sell products that have high levels of chemicals.
Out of a sample of 38 clothing and accessories, one in five had high levels of chemicals, including lead, PFAS, and phthalates, that experts said were worrying.
The investigation found that a jacket for toddlers bought from Shein had nearly 20 times the amount of lead that Health Canada says is safe for children. A purse from the company had five times the limit, according to the report.
Shein responded to the report by removing the products and stating it would stop working with such suppliers until the issue was fixed.
The investigation found clothes from Aliexpress, Zaful, and Shein that had high levels of chemicals. All of them removed all the questionable products from their websites as a result of the investigation and said they were investigating the matter.
“There were clearly products that were intentionally using lead and intentionally using it in a way that was well above what should be considered responsible — or even safe,” JoĂ«l Mertens, a product environmental impacts expert at the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, told CBC.
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all are not functioning across the world affecting e-commerce advertising on the platforms.
Security experts said the outage was likely due to a configuration error having to do with Facebook servers, reported Reuters. A cyberattack on the company was deemed as less likely.
Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp.
The Facebook ads manager is also down.
The outage has lasted more than three hours and Facebook’s employees are unable to access the company’s internal system which is also down, the AP reported.
According to CNBC, this is the longest outage for the company since 2008 when Facebook was offline for around a day.
TikTok is the biggest threat to Facebook and Google and threatens their lucrative e-commerce dominance, according to a report in the Motley Fool.
Snapchat was also seen as a threat to Facebook in the mid-2000 but Facebook then started Instagram Stories, slowing Snapchat’s growth. Snapchat is again gaining users after years of slow growth reaching 186 million users by the end of 2018 and this year reaching 293 users.
To counter TikTok, Facebook initiated Instagram Reels last year and Youtube and Snapchat have each launched their own TikTok-like functions.
However, according to the report, TikTok has continued to grow around 43% even after these attempts by its competitors and the average TikTok user spends more time on the platform than on Facebook, Instagram, or Youtube.
“If TikTok drives social commerce sales better than Facebook or Google, it has a big opportunity to steal away lucrative e-commerce advertising spend from the two giants,” the article said.
How To Increase Your Online Store Sales By Adding Trust
One of the most important aspects of an online business is if it’s trustworthy enough to keep our information or money safe & secure.
Not every business out there is as big as Amazon or Ebay which we can completely trust. There are a lot of small businesses too that sell stuff/provide services, and sometimes we have no choice but to purchase directly from them.
And just before we purchase anything from these unknown online stores, we usually search for some guarantees that our money is safe and our information is secured.
We look for SSL certificates, TrustPilot reviews, regular reviews, etc, before we decide to make our purchase. If the online store doesn’t give us any guarantees, most chances we will not make any purchase.
So it’s really important for us, the store owners, to have all that information displayed in order to get the maximum amount of sales possible.
In this week’s article, I’m going to show you exactly what you have to do in order to increase your online store’s trust and get more sales.
Make sure you read the whole article and implement it all so you don’t miss a potential customer just because he didn’t trust you enough with his money.
You’re Not Shopify…
One of the many reasons so many online store owners choose to create and host their store on Shopify is the security and support it provides to its users.
Yes, your store is now hosted on one of the best platforms out there but this is something only the store owner knows. 99.9% of your customers won’t even know it’s hosted on Shopify so you have to make additional changes for them to trust you.
And no, the “Powered by Shopify” text in the footer isn’t going to make it…
Most of your customers won’t even check the footer to see this text.
If you don’t touch a thing and leave it as it is, the only place that guarantees a safe transaction is the Payment page:
This is just to show you that Shopify doesn’t do nearly enough to make sure your customers know that your store is secured. You will have to add your own stuff to make sure your customers know right away that your store is 100% trustworthy.
There’s also other must have pages to add that have nothing to do with the payment, and without them your customers will be less likely to complete their purchase.
So please, Don’t take this lightly and implement all the steps you see in this article.
1. Adding Must Have Pages That Increase Trust To Your Online Store.
As I already said, the trust isn’t just about payment & information security. You have other things to add as well to your store that will make your customers feel better about their purchase.
So in this part, I’ll show you the must have 7 pages you should always have on your store. Three of these pages are auto generated in Shopify’s settings and the other four are created manually.
Let’s begin with the 3 auto-generated pages:
These pages can be easily created on Shopify’s Legal section and with just 1-click you can auto-generate these pages and add them to your store.
Once you’re in the Legal pages section, just auto generate the Privacy Policy, Refund Policy, and the Terms of Service pages.
Shopify automatically adds details like store name, address, and contact email to these templates. You can always edit this ready template and edit the text or the details.
Once you have these pages saved, go to Online Store and click on Navigation:
Choose the Footer menu because that’s where we want these auto-generated pages to be displayed:
And from there click on Add menu item, give a name to your page(keep it the same as the original policy name), and choose policies to see your newly created policy pages.
Choose the right policy page and click on Add:
Repeat x2 times and that’s it! The policy pages you just created will now appear in your store’s footer menu. They will also appear on your checkout pages as well.
Why Footer Menu and not Main Menu? That’s because we have other more important pages to put there.
IMPORTANT:
There’s another policy page we can generate in Shopify’s Legal settings which is the Shipping Policy page:
We recommend creating your own Shipping page where you write how much time in average it will take any item ordered on your store to arrive.
Make sure to let your customers know the countries you ship to, and the time to arrive per country + possible delays. Contact the shipping company/Aliexpress seller you’re working with to know the exact numbers.
This is the 4th page you have to create and you can place it in the Footer Menu as well.
Next are the three super important pages that you have to create and place in your store’s Main Menu:
The first page you should create is the About Us page – Tell a short story about your store and your mission.
Most dropshippers write something about their store being the “only one” that finds helpful products from around the world for the best price possible + a quick explanation about what they sell and their niche.
There’s nothing wrong with generic About Us pages, but if you can be a bit more creative that will always look better.
And of course, add your support email and let customers know they can always contact you if they have any questions. If you’re extra creative, you can even add a discount banner to promote a collection/product.
How to create an About Us Page?
Go to Online Store and click on Pages:
Then click on Add page to create a new page:
And now you can use Shopify’s editor to create your About Us page and other pages if needed:
Click the green Save button and you’re done. You have now created a new page in your store and you can display it in the Main Menu or the Footer Menu.
The About Us page should be displayed in the Main Menu, so now we will have to go to our online store’s navigation and place our newly create page in the Main Menu.
The same as we did with our Policy pages, but instead we now choose the Main Menu:
And from here we click on Add menu item and pick the page we want to be displayed:
Repeat the same process with the second Main Menu page which is the Contact Us page. Luckily for us, Shopify has a ready template for us to use so we don’t have to install any app to create a contact us form.
The only thing you have to do different this time is to choose a different Theme template. Instead of a Default Page template, choose the Contact template and Shopify will do the rest.
A simple contact us page will be created on your store and all you have to do now is to add it to your Main Menu. This is how the Contact Us page looks like on Shopify:
You can add 2-3 lines of text like we did in the example above for your customers to know how much time it takes to get a response.
And last but not least is the Track Your Order page:
To create this page, you’ll have to install an app from Shopify’s App Store – There are many tracking apps available so feel free to choose the one you like the most.
Most of these apps have a free limited plan which charges you after a certain amount of orders/tracking requests so you don’t have to pay right away.
The way these apps work is that they create automatically a tracking page on your store and all you have to do is to add this newly created tracking page to your Main Menu.
The same as we did with the other pages, your tracking page will now have a form inside just like the example tracking page I showed above.
Now that we have all these pages ready and displayed on our store, our customers will feel a lot more safer to purchase anything from our store.
The policy pages + shipping page will answer all of our customers questions regarding their order, and the other 3 pages are there to show that we’re a serious business capable of delivering the ordered goods.
2. Adding Badges & Guarantees To Your Product Page To Increase Trust
In most cases, dropshippers that advertise a specific product send their traffic directly to the product page. This means that your product page needs to look clean, have all the needed information about your product, and have all the necessary stuff to make your customers trust your store.
First things first, we need to add payment trust badges as you see above to ensure our customers their money is safe with us. You can do it with an app or by adding a picture manually to each product you have listed on your store.
I usually use the Ultimate Sales Boost app for that – Their trust badges are included in the free version, so you don’t have to pay a dime for it.
After that, we should add our store’s guarantee:
Our store’s guarantee text is always at the end of our description and it includes our shipping times, return policy, and a quick word about how to contact support if needed.
I recommend adding your support email address or phone number to make it look extra professional. You can also add a few more trust badges as you see in the picture above.
Bonus:
You can add these badges somewhere in the middle of your description just before you go over what is included in each package. We add this arrow to let people know they can scroll down to also see our excellent reviews.
Feel free to download the picture above and use it on your stores(with or without the green arrow).
3. Adding Reviews To Your Product Page & Main Store Page To Increase Trust
Having product reviews significantly increase your store’s trust and quite a lot of customers tend to check reviews before making a purchase.
Fortunately for us, we don’t have to work hard to get reviews and we can import them directly from Aliexpress. There’s plenty of apps you can use to choose the one you like the most. I personally use Ali Reviews and it’s getting the job done.
You should also use reviews on your main page:
It doesn’t matter if it’s a one-product store or a general store… Just add a few reviews to show customers that you’re a legitimate business that delivers its goods.
Note:
Always look for photo reviews you can import and make sure the best looking ones are the first to appear. If you don’t have good photo reviews to import, it’s better to stick to text only.
4. Optimizing Your Cart Page To Add More Trust
It’s important to stay consistent with what you advertise and making sure it’s the same on every page of your store. If you advertise Free Shipping, your cart page should have Free Shipping text displayed as well.
I’ve seen a lot of dropshippers that use Shopify’s default “Taxes & shipping calculated at checkout” text when they offer free worldwide shipping.
This can confuse your customers as they don’t understand why they suddenly have to pay for shipping when it was advertised as free on the product page + the ad.
So the first thing you have to do is to make sure the promotion you advertise is the same on EVERY page of your store.
Once you have this done, you can edit the cart page a bit and add a few icons or even reviews again as a reminder for your customers.
Adding reviews to the cart page may require some coding or a special theme installed, but don’t worry about it too much. This isn’t a must have so you can keep the default cart page and later upgrade it to a better one once you get sales.
5. Adding Badges On The Checkout Page To Increase Trust
This isn’t really necessary but if you really want to you can add a few trust badges next to your store’s logo. You can do the same thing as you see in the picture above, just make sure the badges you use are legal and not false advertising(like BBB accredited business badge).
You can always just use the same logo and get done with it, but I personally think that trust badges around your logo makes your store look more professional.
And as I told you in the first part, the auto-generated policy pages will appear automatically at the bottom of the checkout page. There’s no need to add them manually 🙂
To Sum It Up
Unlike other big brands, small dropshippers like us have to work extra hard to get traffic and sales. We can have the perfect winning product and ad in our hands, but it doesn’t mean we can just neglect everything else.
Having our customers to trust our store is not less important than having a winning product, and by implementing all the stuff shown in this article, you’re almost guaranteed to have the maximum conversion rate possible.
So don’t be lazy and take 15 minutes to optimize your store for it to be ready for Q4.
Good Luck!
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Then Ecomhunt is what you need! Find hot winning products that are added daily, spy on their ads & stores and import them into your store in 1 click and Start Selling Today!
TikTok is trying to find a way to boost its revenue and announced a new plan on Tuesday to achieve this.
The launch of TikTok World is meant to help brands and marketers enhance their experience on the popular social media platform.
“So when businesses of all sizes come to TikTok, we’re excited to help them connect with their community, market their products, and build their brand in a way they can’t do anywhere else,” said Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s President of Global Business Solutions, according to a statement.
Part of this effort includes customized landing pages for brands and TikTok Shopping, which includes features for advertisers.
TikTok and Shopify announced in August a pilot to test TikTok shopping with some Shopify sellers in the United States, U.K., and Canada. In addition to Shopify, TikTok also partners with Square, Ecwid, and PrestaShop. Partnerships with Wix, SHOPLINE, OpenCart, and BASE are expected to be available on the platform soon, the company said.
Orbit Media Studios created a checklist of 10 web design standards and checked how many of the top 50 marketing websites use them.
All of the websites had a clickable logo in the top left corner.
Having contact information in the top right corner of every page was practiced by 44% of the websites surveyed, with 56% not doing it. While it is considered common, it is not a standard, according to the article by Orbit.
An overwhelming 88% of the websites had the main navigation located in the header at the top of every page, making the horizontal navigation a standard for web design.
Only 32% of the top websites used a slideshow carousel with rotating pictures. Orbit designers see more sites preferring a static feature image.
A value proposition at the top of the home page is practiced by 80% of marketing websites.
A call to action was high up on the page of 78% of websites.
Social media links were present in the footer of 72% of websites and 26% had them in the header.
Shopify listed the top trending product categories on the platform from February to August and the top spot went to toys.
Toys grew sharply in the first half of 2021 which included action figures, arts and crafts, building sets, dolls, games and puzzles, infant and toddler toys, youth electronics, plush toys, miniature vehicle replicas, explorative toys, and outdoor and sports toys, according to the Shopify blog.
The global toy market is valued at $110.97 billion and the top country was Canada.
The second most popular category was shoes, with the top market also being Canada.
Interestingly, drills were number five, and GPS navigation systems seven. For drills, the US was the top market and Brazile was best for GPS systems.
Here is the full list by Shopify:
Toys
Shoes
Pens and pencils
Decorative bottles
Drills
Cutters
GPS navigation systems
Bras
Motor vehicle parts
Office chairs
Projectors
Kitchen towels
Digital artwork
Eyebrow enhancers
Neon signs
Tablet computers
Water bottles
The top market for bras was in the Philippines.
The top market for motor vehicle parts was France. Vehicle parts include tires, batteries, brake parts, filters, body parts lighting components, wheels, exhaust components, and turbochargers.
Facebook said on Wednesday that due to Apple’s iOS update which makes tracking conversions more difficult, it is underreporting website conversions by about 15%.
“The cost of achieving your business outcome may have increased and it’s also gotten harder to measure your campaigns on our platform,” Graham Mudd, vice president of product marketing at Facebook acknowledged in a blog post.
Mudd recommends taking certain steps to maximize Facebook ad campaigns. He says that one should wait a minimum of 72 hours or the full length of the optimization window selected before coming to conclusions about a conversion campaign.
Further, the senior Facebook official said that one should analyze at the campaign level and not adset or ad level because some of the conversions may be reported with a delay.
Set up the Conversions API to optimize ad campaigns to more accurately measure results, he recommends.
“Over the coming months, we’ll continue to introduce new tools to further help with delivery effectiveness and measurement,” said Mudd.
Shopify Markets is the new hub where all the tools will be accessed to manage global commerce, which will be activated by default.
“We believe the future of retail is retail everywhere. And with Shopify Markets, we’re making it even easier for merchants—no matter size or budget—to turn their global aspirations into a reality,” said Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify, in a statement released by the company earlier this month.
Shopify Markets is making it easier to sell in new markets and to manage everything from a dashboard.
When stores are in local languages and currencies, conversion rates increase. Shopify Markets is going to allow customization for local currencies and payment methods, pricing and rounding rules, product availability per market, local languages, local domains with automatic SEO optimization, automatically show the local currency and language based on the buyer’s country, and duties and import taxes upfront so that these are clear at checkout.
Shopify Markets is already functional and rolling out to merchants in the coming months. Learn more at shopify.com/markets.
