Avoid Confusing Your Customers

Have you ever had that experience where you go into a store to buy something and are faced with so many options you turn round and leave having chosen none of them? The same phenomenon happens online. It’s a condition known as ‘analysis paralysis’  and will happen for certain if you present your Magento visitors with too many possibilities. There just is a limit to how many options people are prepared to juggle, how much headspace they are able to keep open for long enough to deal with the conflicting questions your spread of product options opens to them.

So, let’s get a first thing straight. Your landing page is not the place to present everything all at once. That’s a recipe for increased bouncing. And unless you’re selling trampolines… Avoid overloading customers in that first step into your store – the space above the fold. You don’t want to frighten them away from taking the next step, you want to show them that you care about their wellbeing and are just offering sound purchasing information that you know they’ll welcome. Interest them in those first impressions and they’ll be ready to come looking for what they want beyond the shop window, especially if you have some carefully chosen calls to action to guide them affectionately and respectfully through the journey.

Want to know the impact your site has on the unsuspecting eCommerce visitor? Then watch them. You could do this easily by asking those you know to wander around your site while you actually check out their online behaviour. Where do they tend to click first? What do they tend to ignore? What drives them mad? Another option is to use heat maps to find out where people tend to click when they visit your site. Through a bit of patient analysis, you might just find that the helpful and impactful video you put on the landing page is too much to swallow first off, but if you put it on a different page further into the site it gets masses of attention and creates more conversions.

So spare a thought for your overloaded Magento customer base and avoid giving them too many fish to fry. Serve one or two up ready made and on a plate with chips instead, and they might just join you for dinner.