Website design: make it professional – use large photos and detailed descriptions
As every museum professional who has run an online shop knows, competition is fierce and customers are increasingly discerning about online retail.
They know what a good website looks and feels like and the standard is set by sites across all sectors, not just by what is offered by museums. To be successful a museum’s online shop needs to have the same high-quality design and user experience offered by the best websites around.
Large, high-quality and professional images, which can be zoomed in on from multiple angles, are essential. Customers want to be as sure as possible before they buy a product online and photography is the best way of showing a product off. Wearable items such as jewellery or clothing could be shown on a model to give a sense of size and how the item will look on.
Detailed descriptions and accurate measurements also help customers decide whether or not they want to buy the item. It’s difficult to get everything from a photograph, particularly if the item moves or is interactive like a toy for instance.
Showing video is great but is beyond the capability of a lot of online retailers. This means that writing engaging and detailed descriptions (including measurements) are important. Product descriptions also have the added advantage of enabling Google to index the site against a range of interesting or unique keywords.
Make the website as visible as possible by creating multiple landing pages
A lot of people will not see the homepage, which typically sees between 60% and 70% of website traffic. Customers tend to start their journey at a search engine and arrive at a site via a range of pages that have been indexed against defined keywords, which tend to be category or product pages (assuming that the text has been well written).
Therefore, creating more landing pages increases the chance of attracting customers, who may be searching for similar or related items.
Landing pages can be created to show off groups of products around a theme such as ‘birthday gift ideas for mum’ or event – Easter and summer holidays for instance.
These landing pages don’t have to be reflected in the usual navigation (but have to be reachable by Google) and can augment the product category pages by presenting products in potentially hundreds of different combinations, appealing to a wide range of audiences and customer needs.
Make it seamless – integrate
In addition to a shop most museums have a range of ways of generating income, whether that is from ticket sales or membership and donations. Often these activities are run by different departments and have separate back-end systems.
Although integrating the user experience into one seamless flow can be technically difficult (depending on which systems are used) it often brings a number of advantages. Encouraging ticket-buyers to become members; offering online shopping discounts to existing members; and selling guidebooks to ticket buyers can lead to significant increases in overall revenue and profit.
Use analytics to make sense of what is working and what isn’t
Make use of the data that is available through Google Analytics. It can be difficult to understand the reports in detail and draw conclusions and actions. However, the advantage of online retail lies in the opportunity for tracking users, whether or not they actually make a purchase.
The merchandise and product offers can then be amended accordingly. It is also important to consider how the experience of shopping in the museum’s on-site shop will translate online. Analytics will help to test these assumptions and incrementally improve the online shop based on what users actually do and the products that they actually buy.
Choose a good partner
E-commerce is increasingly complex and successful websites need the right technology, integration options, fraud prevention, payment partners, logistics, analytics, pay-per-click advertising and search-engine optimisation.
Even the largest museums can’t do all of these things well with an in-house team, so selecting the right partners to guide them can make a big difference to their confidence and ability to adapt to changing technical and business developments.
In our experience, the best projects are done when client and agency see eye-to-eye and understand that this can be a complex area but that the rewards are there for those who persevere. It's a marathon not a sprint and launching a new site is only the start of the project.
Getting the right team together is vital and the best projects are built on mutual respect and the ability to see setting up an online shop as a business challenge and not a technical one.
We find that small incremental improvements can sometimes make a big difference to a site and often be more cost effective than tearing down a site and starting again.
George Crabb is the managing director of Other Media, which designs and builds e-commerce websites for clients in the cultural sector and retail.
As every museum professional who has run an online shop knows, competition is fierce and customers are increasingly discerning about online retail.
They know what a good website looks and feels like and the standard is set by sites across all sectors, not just by what is offered by museums. To be successful a museum’s online shop needs to have the same high-quality design and user experience offered by the best websites around.
Large, high-quality and professional images, which can be zoomed in on from multiple angles, are essential. Customers want to be as sure as possible before they buy a product online and photography is the best way of showing a product off. Wearable items such as jewellery or clothing could be shown on a model to give a sense of size and how the item will look on.
Detailed descriptions and accurate measurements also help customers decide whether or not they want to buy the item. It’s difficult to get everything from a photograph, particularly if the item moves or is interactive like a toy for instance.
Showing video is great but is beyond the capability of a lot of online retailers. This means that writing engaging and detailed descriptions (including measurements) are important. Product descriptions also have the added advantage of enabling Google to index the site against a range of interesting or unique keywords.
Make the website as visible as possible by creating multiple landing pages
A lot of people will not see the homepage, which typically sees between 60% and 70% of website traffic. Customers tend to start their journey at a search engine and arrive at a site via a range of pages that have been indexed against defined keywords, which tend to be category or product pages (assuming that the text has been well written).
Therefore, creating more landing pages increases the chance of attracting customers, who may be searching for similar or related items.
Landing pages can be created to show off groups of products around a theme such as ‘birthday gift ideas for mum’ or event – Easter and summer holidays for instance.
These landing pages don’t have to be reflected in the usual navigation (but have to be reachable by Google) and can augment the product category pages by presenting products in potentially hundreds of different combinations, appealing to a wide range of audiences and customer needs.
Make it seamless – integrate
In addition to a shop most museums have a range of ways of generating income, whether that is from ticket sales or membership and donations. Often these activities are run by different departments and have separate back-end systems.
Although integrating the user experience into one seamless flow can be technically difficult (depending on which systems are used) it often brings a number of advantages. Encouraging ticket-buyers to become members; offering online shopping discounts to existing members; and selling guidebooks to ticket buyers can lead to significant increases in overall revenue and profit.
Use analytics to make sense of what is working and what isn’t
Make use of the data that is available through Google Analytics. It can be difficult to understand the reports in detail and draw conclusions and actions. However, the advantage of online retail lies in the opportunity for tracking users, whether or not they actually make a purchase.
The merchandise and product offers can then be amended accordingly. It is also important to consider how the experience of shopping in the museum’s on-site shop will translate online. Analytics will help to test these assumptions and incrementally improve the online shop based on what users actually do and the products that they actually buy.
Choose a good partner
E-commerce is increasingly complex and successful websites need the right technology, integration options, fraud prevention, payment partners, logistics, analytics, pay-per-click advertising and search-engine optimisation.
Even the largest museums can’t do all of these things well with an in-house team, so selecting the right partners to guide them can make a big difference to their confidence and ability to adapt to changing technical and business developments.
In our experience, the best projects are done when client and agency see eye-to-eye and understand that this can be a complex area but that the rewards are there for those who persevere. It's a marathon not a sprint and launching a new site is only the start of the project.
Getting the right team together is vital and the best projects are built on mutual respect and the ability to see setting up an online shop as a business challenge and not a technical one.
We find that small incremental improvements can sometimes make a big difference to a site and often be more cost effective than tearing down a site and starting again.
George Crabb is the managing director of Other Media, which designs and builds e-commerce websites for clients in the cultural sector and retail.