How to optimize the ecommerce website?

One of the biggest challenges in the online business doesn’t really differ much from the more traditional bricks and mortar stores. The amount of turnover you generate in a particular category can be determined by the way you merchandize your products within e-commerce digital shelves.

In offline stores we know product placement on the shelf plays a big role. When it comes to online store and question – to optimize the ecommerce website the merchandizing is the same or even more important.

Furthermore, the decision how you merchandize products and optimize the ecommerce digital shelves in your online shop is crucial for the success of your shop.

Nowadays customers don’t want to spend too much time searching for products they want to buy, hence you should always have digital shelves optimized in order to help customers to find products they want to buy as quickly as possible.

Here are some tips & examples that helped me to optimize the ecommerce website and increase online sales by more than 125%!

Firstly, make sure your top seller are at the top of your page/shelves

Probably, it seems so obvious (I mean even the name includes the word TOP), but you would be surprise how many people (including myself when I first started my journey in e-commerce) forget this very basic rule.

Your top seller products are products that typically represent more than 40% of the total sales in a certain category. The reason why you want to keep them at the very top is actually quite simple.

If they generate 40% of your sales the majority of the customers in your shop are buying these particular products, hence make sure these products are easy to find.

Let’s take a look at an example: you are selling cat accessories and let’s say you have four categories:

• Cat Beds
• Cat Litter Boxes
• Cat Trees
• Cat Toys

Now, the question is how to sort these categories.

Well, sorting by sales is one way. However, there is a small caveat when you consider sales. Don’t just consider which category is bringing you the highest sales but also consider the amount of pieces that have been sold in the category and sort according to this.

Why is it important not to sort only by sales?

In this particular example, Cat trees are usually 5-10x times more expensive than cat toys. So, it might be you will sell two cat trees and you will make the same amount of sales as if you had sold 10 or more cat toys. In this case I would recommend ranking cat trees below cat toys just because cat toys represent a higher demand.

First example:

• Cat Litter Boxes (amount of sold products: 100 products, amount of sales: $500)
• Cat Toys (amount of sold products 200, amount of sales: $400)
• Cat trees (amount of sold products: 2, amount of sales: $200)
• Cat Beds (amount of sold products: 50, amount of sales: $250)

Sorting (top to bottom):

1. Cat Toys (amount of sold products 200, amount of sales: $400)
2. Cat Litter Boxes (amount of sold products: 100 products, amount of sales: $500)
3. Cat Beds (amount of sold products: 50, amount of sales: $200)
4. Cat trees (amount of sold products: 2, amount of sales: $250)

Once your sort your categories it is important you do the same for the products within each of your eCommerce digital shelves. This will help you to fully optimize the ecommerce website!

Second example:

• Pink Cat Litter, (amount of sold products 300 amount of sales: $300)
• Yellow Cat litter, (amount of sold products 600 amount of sales: $250)
• Green Cat litter, (amount of sold products 280 amount of sales: $340)

Sorting (top to bottom):

• Yellow Cat litter, (amount of sold products 600 amount of sales: $250)
• Pink Cat Litter, (amount of sold products 300 amount of sales: $300)
• Green Cat litter, (amount of sold products 280 amount of sales: $340)

This is one way you can sort the categories within your ecommerce website. But, of course it isn’t the only way!

Certainly, you will find a lot of online stores that use different ways of sorting categories/products. The most successful way to see what is working the best for your shop is via testing different approaches.

To summaries, you want to have your top seller products at the top because:

1. Customers can quickly find what they are searching for. Highlighting the bestselling products at the top will definitely help customers not waste time by scrolling down. A similar approach has been used in the offline world for decades. Think about the first thing you see on the shelf when walking into a brick and mortar store?
2. Placing top sellers at the top is important for retention too. Retention (unless you have a ‘one time purchase’ business) is extremely important for the ecommerce business. I will come back to the topic of retention in one of my later articles as well. However, for now, remember that if a customer comes back wanting to buy the same product. Then she will expect to see the product in the same position as she had bought it previously. Think back to a time you went grocery shopping and how annoying it was when the milk or butter you buy on a weekly basis had been moved to a different section of the shop! Hence, you want to ensure that all subsequent purchases go as smoothly as the first one. You might want to upsell them at this stage, however this is again another topic for another time ;).