Many of you longtime readers may remember the year I decided to move the ACA Success Store to its own store-based platform. I thought it would make things nicer and easier for our customers.
It was a disaster.
People hated it and sales plummeted.
I only know anecdotally, but it appeared that people really didn’t like having to go through multiple clicks to browse the products available.
And they REALLY didn’t like having to create an account in order to purchase.
It didn’t make sense because having to create an account to make a purchase is common practice (e.g., clothing/retail stores, Amazon, etc.).
But it really does come down to knowing your audience and the specific industry/market you’re in, as well as the kind of products you’re offering. You can’t just blindly follow conventional (i.e., generic) best-practice advice because one size does not fit all. And as they say, test, test, test.
There’s a big difference between info/training products and, say, retail clothing.
What we found was that our Success Store customers prefer having ALL the products on one long page.
And once we reverted back to that, sales started coming back up.
So, what got me musing about all this is because I have a new product that I need to add to the store, which is going to add to the length of the page even more. And I wondered if there might be a better way to do this that would bring more ease to our customers without negatively disrupting sales.
Here’s what I’d like to know from you…
I was thinking that on the individual products, where the descriptions are really long, it might be useful to have just the basic description and purchase button and then a link to take those who want more info to a separate page for that item with the longer description.
If you were shopping, would that be helpful to your experience and make scanning/purchasing easier for you?
Or, would having to click through to a separate page for each individual product get tiring and annoying to you, and I should leave things as they are?
Lemme know. I would sure appreciate your insights and advice. Thank you!
PS: Here’s the Success Store page in question. Is it too long for you? What other suggestions do you have for improving the usability/readability of the page?