Merchandise Your Shop for Success
'Brick and mortar' stores rely on their window displays to attract window shoppers and passersby into their shop. Likewise, you want to pique the interest of potential customers with a preview of what they'll find inside your shop. As a CafePress.com shopkeeper, you can do this by creating an interesting, attention-grabbing window display. Put your best and most relevant products and sales advertisements upfront for the greatest visibility and to entice shoppers to explore your shop.
Once inside, these buyers should be able to find merchandise in relevant, easily accessible groupings. If you own a grocery store, your shoppers don't expect to find kiwis on a shelf next to laundry detergent - so you as a store manager probably shouldn't put them there.
The same principles apply to your online storefront. You want your customers to be drawn in by your storefront, and ultimately compelled to purchase something. You customers should have an easy time finding what they want and even want items that they didn't expect.
Use these great tips to increase your sales potential:
1. Open or upgrade to a Premium Shop
It's important to have a Premium Shop to achieve maximum success in our system. Premium Shops provide you with more control of what you can do and sell 10X more on average as Basic Shops. The following points pertain to what you can do with a Premium Shop to optimize your storefront. If you're unfamiliar with the features of a Premium shop, check out the Premium Shop tour. We have a ton of Premium shop templates, so you can have a well-designed, well-organized storefront without coding.
2. Organize by design line
This is where we go back to the grocery store analogy. Your grocery store has a Produce Section so that you know where to find the kiwis, and a Household Section with a sign telling you that laundry detergent is in that aisle. Your buyers need these kinds of navigation signs.
Our product drop-down menu allows people who simply must have an infant creeper to see all your infant creepers in one view. We recommend putting this at the top of your (vertical) navigation. The code for it is: <cpstore:producttypedropdown> (Simply insert the code in the Custom HTML page in the appropriate section.)
Most buyers are buying your message/artwork, not your white T-shirt. So, under the product drop-down menu, you can add a "browse by design" bar, and start listing your separate design lines.
If you have a ton of designs and will end up with 50 links in your global navigation, consider bigger buckets (categories). Think of the top-level sections, and add sub-sections to those. Just as the grocery store has an entire section for produce, they also have a fruits subsection and then a smaller apples subsection. We'll talk more about "Scalable and Sane Navigation" in point number 5.
Our Premium shop templates are built for you to organize your shop like this. Here's an example of someone with a single level of design lines, using one of our shop templates: http://www.cafepress.com/math_shirts
And here are two examples of shops that have organized a lot of different designs as sub-sections in larger, top-level sections:
Using template - http://www.cafepress.com/affable_atheist
Using custom coding - http://www.cafepress.com/iloveshirts
3. Keep Storefront Dynamic
Adding new and hot products to your storefront helps create a fresh shopping experience for new and existing customers. Some ideas for featured sections: What's Hot, Featured Designs, Top Sellers, and (when appropriate) Holiday sections.
Even without using a special featured section as such, periodically adding and featuring new design lines - as well as keeping your shop updated with all the newest products - is a good way to keep your customers engaged.
4. Image thumbnails vs. product thumbnails
As a general rule, we recommend that you use image thumbnails on your shop homepage. Why? Because it's hard to see an image when it's shrunk down to fit on a product thumbnail, and generally shoppers are usually shopping for an image - not necessarily a mug, or a ringer T.
Some folks with custom shops like to highlight certain new products, or have a model that they think spices up the storefront, and so they do a mix of design and product thumbnails. This is a personal preference, and it's up to you. If you're using a template, our advice is to err on the side of design thumbnails, and let the product drop-down menu guide the folks looking for a Doggie T.
Even with a template, you can dress up those section thumbnails to draw in your buyers by picking your most popular design, or using a collage of popular designs, as we saw in the two shop examples shown previously.
5. Scalable and sane navigation
If you're using the product drop-down menu and you're organizing by design line, you're well on your way to scalable and sane navigation.
Parallel structure is important when you're organizing your shop - shoppers will probably be confused to find a global navigation link labeled "Dog Breeds" at the same level that one is named "Tabby Cat Mugs," or even "Tabby Cat."
If you have 50 designs, you probably want to think about how to organize them into sub-sections. The produce department doesn't throw bananas, apples and oranges into the same bin for shoppers to pick through, and neither should you.
Again, think about those top-level buckets. Not only will this help avoid an out-of-control scroll, it also allows you to play with featuring "new" or "featured" designs on the homepage to help keep the storefront fresh. Who says that you need to make a new design to feature it? If you have a ton of great designs, rotating them out on the storefront is a great way to encourage shoppers to return, keep things dynamic, and give some airtime to your own favorites.
Sometimes, less is more, especially on your homepage. And this leads into my all-time favorite...
6. Above the fold
For those who are unfamiliar with the term, here is a definition from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The phrase "above the fold" refers to the location of an important news story or photograph on the front page of a newspaper. Most papers are delivered and displayed to customers folded up, meaning that only the top half of the front page is visible. Thus, an item that is "above the fold" is usually one that the editor feels will entice people to buy the paper. The term can be used more generally to refer to anything that is prominently displayed, such as an item near the top of a web page, which can thus be viewed in a browser without scrolling.
Even with blogs training more Internet users on the scroll concept, keeping as much relevant information as you can above-the-fold is a Best Practices Web concept. For you, this "information" is your own fantastic designs.
Highlighting your best and most promising designs in the prime real estate spot of your homepage is important. Not everyone scrolls (or uses drop-down for that matter), so grabbing your buyers' attention where their eyes are most likely to land is more likely to draw them into your shop.
While anchor text is important (that's a Search Engine Optimization tool), most shoppers are going to be drawn to an image rather than text. So, giving priority to your sellable art instead of a chunk of header text (or a static logo, banner or other graphic) is a good idea.