Summary of Jam Session:
In this session we did 3 critiques. Terry Foster – Cosmetic Store. Jim – General Store. 3rd store is a Phone Case store. Additional Topics Covered: Copywriting, Right Number of Products.
Critiques:
Critique 1
0:11:40 – Critique number 1 is for Terry Foster’s store, https://noirdor.com/. This is a Cosmetic store selling acne products.
Homepage: Starting with the header, there is a grey bar along the top that serves no purpose. It has no text within it. There is too much padding above and below the logo, this pushes everything further down the page. Reducing the white space and increasing the font size of the navigation so it stands out more will increase readability.
Removing half of the links in the navigation and putting them in the footer. Only have links in your header that make you money or direct people to a collection that will. Shipping, blogs, faqs, should all be in the footer.
Collection Page: Remove the large image on the collection page. It takes up too much space and provides zero value, you could replace this with a title to let your customers know what collection they are on.
Product Page: Matt talks about his experience with an Amazon seller and was told that 20 reviews is the magic number, anything more doesn’t really do anything, but anything less hurts. Try and get your products 20+ reviews as quick as you can.
Critique 2
0:31:45 – Critique number 2 is for Jim’s store, https://sutmm.co/. This is a large general store.
Homepage: Trying to categorise the collections under broader collections will reduce the amount of links you have under your ‘Shop’ dropdown menu. Also making the search feature more prominent with autofill to help customers find what they are looking at. Visitors who use the search are much more valuable.
Collection Page: Having every product on sale with reduce the trust of your store. Ensure you don’t discount every product.
Product Page: Do not use too many thumbnail images, especially if they are very similar. The less the better. This can impact your site speeds also it is not beneficial. Changing the icons below the CTA button to black and white will make your CTA pop more and will draw the eye to your CTA over your icons. You want your CTA to be the most prominent button on your product page. If you have very old reviews, we suggest removing the date from the reviews. If your customer see’s the last review is over a year old, this may cause friction.
Checkout: Remove the paypal button from the first page of checkout and put it on the ‘Payment’ page. This will allow you to capture your customers email before they possibly abandon from Paypal checkout.
Critique 3
0:31:45 – Critique number 3 is for https://www.hulacases.com/. This store sells unique phone cases for the Apple range. Covering multiple versions.
Homepage: Improving the value proposition in the header image. Team suggests replace the image with a close up of a product with a unique value, e.g deep crystal glass. Add a header above the phone selector tool to let your customers know they are clickable. They look like images as they are.
Product Page: The product description is incredibly hard to read as it is light grey text on a white background. The images are too large and the site speed is incredibly slow. There is a section in ‘The Brain’ that explains how you can reduce your page load speed. Typically it isn’t good to show your customers a bunch of other products on the product page as this distracts the buying process and will kill your sale.
Noteworthy Topics:
0:46:15 – Copywriting: If you write your copy as if you were talking to Homer Simpson, you won’t have any issues with your customers understanding you copy. Avoid using big and technical words/phrases to sound sophisticated. It will hurt your conversions more than improving it.
1:08:55 – Number of Products – How many products is too many? There’s no set answer for this but if you have 25+ products and your are only consistently selling 3-5 with a couple upsell products on a weekly basis, then you have too many products. Reducing the amount of products on your store will reduce distraction.