Product pages can make or break an ecommerce site as they give consumers all the necessary information—images, product details, price, customer reviews—needed before clicking that ‘add to cart’ button. And in Frontier Blades’ case, improving product pages helped boost both online sales and conversion rates.
The online-only blades and knives retailer is about two years old and has grown as it learned what aspects on its ecommerce site worked and what didn’t, says founder Bill Joseph.
“We’ve been learning along the way and implementing as we learn, based on other retailers’ experiences and based on what we find,” he says.
Improving the website experience
Frontier Blades discovered it needed to improve the quality and content on its product detail pages to help boost sales. So, for two months from April 1, 2020, through May 31, 2020, it implemented strategies to improve its product detail pages.
Frontier Blades incorporated five major aspects to its product pages:
- Detailed images, titles and descriptions, such as specifications and dimensions: “This helps demonstrate the value and quality of the products and promotes its value to the customer,” Joseph says.
- Customer product reviews and trust badge icons to establish credibility: “People want to buy from a trustworthy company. How do we convey that? How can we show we will hold up our end of the deal of the transaction? Displaying the customer reviews on the product detail page validates the business as a genuine business,” Joseph says. “Trust badges can propel indecisive customers to lean towards making a purchase because it gives them a sense of contentment with any payment security concerns.”
- Adding payment options such as Apple Pay and PayPal: “This is another way to promote credibility and help customers feel more secure in using these trustworthy online payment systems,” he says.
- Offering an incentive, such as incorporating a free shipping banner for U.S. orders across the top of all product detail pages.
- Ensuring the checkout process is easy: “We remove pain points like forcing people to sign up for an account and ensure the purchase process is easy,” Joseph says.
After implementing these five strategies, Frontier Blades’ conversation rate increased 21% year over year—to 1.40% from 1.16%.
“Procuring and publishing reviews on our product pages has proven to be a very effective technique for increasing conversion,” Joseph says.
For example, after four consumers left reviews on a product, that product’s conversion rate increased 775% while another product had a 500% increase in conversion rate after receiving two reviews.
Within 60 days of adding customer reviews (June through August), Frontier Blades’ total orders increased 30%, revenue increased by 8%, organic search traffic increased by 9%, cart abandonment decreased by 2%, and bounce rate decreased by 1.37%.
“Through improving your product pages, you place your business in the best position to not only acquire more traffic from search, but also translate that traffic into conversions,” Joseph says.
COVID-19 effect
Frontier Blades was a new business ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic so it didn’t have much data to go off of to measure the pandemic’s impact. “While we were implementing ideas into our business planning, we could not really measure the effect of the pandemic on our business because we hadn’t matured that much,” Joseph says.
Its year-over-year revenue increased 91.7% to $115,000 in 2020 from $60,000 in 2019. And its net profit following all expenses shot up 95.2% to $41,000 in 2020 from $21,000 in 2019.
However, like many retailers, Frontier Blades did have supply chain and delivery issues from May through September and again during the holidays. To navigate that, the retailer chose to be transparent with its customers, as well as available 24/7. Frontier Blades’ employees provided customers with their own cell phone numbers, and they called shoppers preemptively to let them know their orders would be delayed.
Joseph says customers have sometimes called in the middle of the night, but someone from Frontier Blades always answers the call.
“Our customers feel great about us answering their call and that we could solve any problems they had,” Joseph says. “Sometimes they just want a refund and we promptly refund them, then they come back and make a purchase.”
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