Best sellers

[gail]

Having just discovered the delights of In Page Analytics it makes some interesting reading.

Taking for instance our tea towels, obviously some prove more popular than others (as sales prove). What is the opinion on moving the most popular to the top in descending order?

Would this generate more sales or simply mean the less popular ones are never even reached?

Is this a well known sales technique that I've been missing out on?

[saucysal]

Make Best Sellers called Featured

Slightly off your topic, not a direct answer, but we have found that telling our competition which products are our best sellers is not a good idea, especially as we used their best sellers to know what to stock when we first started. Instead we have changed the name of Best Sellers to Featured Products. We then select what products we want to appear, by entering them in the Best Sellers and locking them.

In a similar way, for New Products, we have kept the name new products, but we select which new products that we want to appear, and lock them.

Best Sellers (Featured products) and New Products appear on our homepage. Then we have a New In section in our shop sections in the left sidebar, and in this section we manually copy all our new products when putting them on the website, not using the New Products feature, so that we can have a longer list and in the same format as the rest of the site, and with more control.

Sarah

[Mike Hughes]

In a nutshell, yes. Raising the visibility of your best selling items will increase your sales. There will always be people leaving your site before they've seen everything and the best chance of them becoming a customer will for them to have seen the items that sell the best.

People also like to know which items are popular with other buyers. It gives them greater confidence in making their purchase.

Amazon are a good example of this in action with searches appearing in order of popularity (even when relevance is set as the display order it's 'relevance' sorted by popularity).

As with all these things, apply a little intelligence to it. As you say, slow moving items will gravitate to the bottom of the list so at times you might want give higher visibility to items that you want to push for a while. Maybe to clear stock, or push an exclusive item, etc.

As Sarah says, it's useful to have a few places to show new and interesting items. New items will never be 'best sellers' so you need a place to give them some exposure so you can judge their sales potential.

Mike

[saucysal]

Featuring on homepage increases sales

Yes, we have found that whatever products we feature on our homepage (in the main area, with pics) whether they are best sellers, new items, featured items, clearance offers, they will sell better than anything else. We therefore select a few items that will attract sales (such as a best seller or a sale item) or which we have our own reasons to promote, a mixture, and attracting a range of different customer types, so not all the same type of product, not same brand, etc., and making them visually aware of what sort of thing we sell before they leave the site. We change the selection frequently, but not necessarily changing all the items.

The "also bought" feature is very beneficial, appearing with the products, as it gives confidence to customers who are unsure, and with too many things to choose from (we limit these to 3).

Sarah