So the website where you sell crafts online is an aesthetic success, but did you think about your customer during creation? It's easy to get caught up in the visuals and forget about the individuals who want to purchase from you.
Here are five tips to help you think from your customers' point of view when you sell your crafts online, and give you guidance on how to make their shopping experience easy and comfortable.
Put Your Products Front and Center
Nobody wants to land on a website thinking they can buy jewelry and find dog food for sale six pages down. Bottom line: When you sell crafts online, don't bury your products. The sooner people know what you offer, the more relaxed they feel about exploring your site and wares. This doesn't mean you have to sell your crafts online directly from your landing page. However, if you place a relevant photo there, visitors will get an immediate sense of the things you have to offer.
Have Clear, Identifiable Links
Consider all the times you've driven to an unknown location — without GPS! — and have not had a clear sense of where you are going. Irritating, right?
How To Build an Artist Website
Sign up for our newsletter and get the book How to Build an Artist Website for free!
Having an unmistakable link to your products when you sell crafts online avoids this kind of frustration. This is not a place to be clever or coy: Be direct. Use words like "shop," "buy products," "purchase." Plain, explicit language makes it easy for the customer to quickly understand where to go to make their transaction.
Include Additional Product Photos and Details
Have you ever seen a shirt for sale and felt the need to reach out and touch it? Customers, like you, want to know the weight of a product in their hand; the feel of it; how it looks from afar and close up. When they shop online, people lose these important sensory experiences which help build confidence for purchasing products.
Including distinctive shots which explore texture and material, as well as photos of your wares in use, helps your shopper build a better sense of what your product is like in person. Combine this with multiple details such as size, materials, and color, and your customer can feel confident they are getting what they want.
Put Your Products Into Distinctive, Appropriate Categories
Picture your local home goods store. Now imagine you had to find a throw pillow, but instead of there being a section for "pillows" or "home accents," throws were lumped in every-which-way with teapots, drawers, and picture frames. Suddenly the task becomes a lot harder. Similarly, when you sell crafts online, leaving products on your site uncategorized is a missed opportunity for an easier search.
Categorization can be by type, color, size, material, etc. Be sure to consider your customer's point of view when creating categories: Are they likely to look at your products by materials or colors? What would they find beneficial?
No matter the category, strike a balance between helpful and over-zealous. It's unlikely your customer will appreciate the difference of multiple categories such as "ecru," "eggshell," and "off-white"; they would probably like to see "white," "blue," and "yellow" instead.
Write Out Your Shipping and Return Policies
This is one of the easiest items to add or change to your website, and can have a huge impact. Knowing how and when items will ship puts a person's mind at ease-especially during busy holiday seasons. Similarly, knowing what the return and exchange policies are can lend confidence to a decision. Even if an item can't be returned, knowing that ahead of time actually helps make the decision easier.
For instance, when I shop at American Apparel, I know items can only be returned for store credit. This makes the purchasing decision simple: Buy only those products I love.
Considering your customer's point of view is crucial for giving them a good buying experience when you sell your crafts online. Look at your site objectively, and make changes so that it is easy and comfortable for people to purchase from your site. I'm sure they'll feel the difference.
photo by Rodrigo Nuno Bragança da Cunha
