The Advantages of Using Templates for Your Cyber Monday Store
Cyber Monday is nearly here now, but it’s not too late to get a store set up if you have a good idea for taking advantage of the boom in sales that happens on the Monday after Thanksgiving. After all, last year, stores brought in revenues that showed a 108 percent boost over the year before, according to Internet Trailer. Even if you are late to the game, using templates from sites like Shopify are a great way to get it done with a minimum amount of stress. Here are a few reasons why.
Speed
Chances are pretty good that you have a lot of other things to do between now and Cyber Monday. Normally, you might think that you just don’t have the time to set up an online store to sell something, even if you have a really good idea about exactly what you can sell. However, you can easily set up an online store in no time flat if you make use of a template. This is because, without templates, you run into the problem of needing to make a hundred choices about where exactly to put items on the page, where to add the shopping cart, where to add the call to action, and so on.
You can still change the content and the color schemes and other details, but the basic layout is taken care of for you when you decide to use a template. This means that you potentially save a huge amount of time since you don’t have to code or even decide anything major to just get your store setup post haste. As you might imagine, this is pretty important when it comes to trying to take advantage of the biggest shopping day of the year online that was responsible for billions of dollars in revenue in 2013, according to Search Engine Watch.
Traveling the Well-Travelled Road
Obviously, making your online store your own is important. But this doesn’t mean you have to reinvent the wheel. The basic way an online store works is going to be pretty similar from one store to another, especially if you plan on selling similar things. So if you go with a template that’s been used successfully by other stores, you’ll know for sure that the same could work for you. All you have to do is change it just enough to make it your own, after all. And even if you do change the template significantly, at least you’ll learn something in the process that you can use to increase your sales from year to year once you have more data to crunch.
For example, perhaps you can ask yourself exactly why the template you’re looking at for audio equipment has the pictures it has on it in the background and what about that picture made the template successful. It could be the case that even if people visiting the site don’t buy the particular headphones being modelled by a celebrity in the background of the template, the very fact that this picture is there could lend a certain amount of professional credence and trustworthiness to the page that viewers can appreciate, sometimes even just on a psychological level.
Familiarity
Since conversion rates for online store are so psychological, it makes sense to try to take advantage of this fact. It’s true that standing out from a crowd is important, but you don’t want to stand out so much that you seem strange and uninviting. Customers like the sense of familiarity, it tends to draw them in which will make them more likely to think about going forward with a sale, even if they don’t necessarily realize this right away. The familiarity of the layout is an important indicator of how easily the users will locate the key aspects of the page as well.
One of the most important concepts on the Internet is the idea of trivial inconvenience. If it takes a potential customer more than a few seconds to locate your shopping cart, or information about a product, or some other aspect of your site, they are going to in all likelihood move on to the next site that will have all of these things in easy to access areas. This is why templates are so important. They are engineered to help with conversion rates with aspects like clean designs or carousel image rotators that are espoused as useful by sites like Big Commerce. You can copy from ideas that are already known to work. And if you just want to get your site up and running fast, you really don’t want to sweat all of the little stuff.
Overall, templates are just an effective way to get your store rolling when you’re new to online retail and just want to see what happens if you put yourself out there on Cyber Monday. You can add some spice to your templates by using some spicy icons for e-commerce websites.
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