Feedback on my store please

[BHuhman]

Hi, my name is Brandy and I'm completely new to this.  I have spent a lot of unnecessary money to people who claim they can help me but returned no benefit to me or my shop.  I need some honest help.  My shop is www.thegoldbranch.com.  I have a long term vision for this but for now, I am drop-shipping from AliExpress.  I need honest guidance on my shops appeal, layout and anything that may be holding me back.  I have been running ads and the only sales I have are family.  I research and work all of my free hours (I do have a full time M-F) but I want to make sure that my work on my site is productive.  Any guidance is greatly appreciated.  

[Growave]

Hi @BHuhman !

Welcome to Shopify and I wish you good luck!

1. Clear CTAs - help to show what to do next. Hero banner on your homepage is a key to make a connection with every visitor. You should clearly communicate what your website is about.
2. Branding - clearly show your company branding. Logo, brand colors, brand fonts - should be the same across websites, emails, and social profiles. A key part of building your brand is making it recognizable. 
3. Social proof - an incredibly powerful sales and lead generation tool. 
4. Engaging images - you need them on your homepage to give visitors a sense of what your business is about. Images help you to tell a story and show visitors what they can gain from your product. For a product website think about how images can convey the value of your product and help your visitors to achieve their goals.
5. If your website doesn’t have a blog already, make creating one a priority. But if you have a blog, it gives people a reason to keep coming back. Blogs also help improve your SEO because you’re constantly adding new content to your page.
6. Try adding SEO related high search keywords in your title and product description so that it will be very easy to market your products and display them at the top in google search.
7. Homepage designs guides your visitors around your website. To engage visitors you need to work on homepage layout design.  Include trust indicators on the homepage. Homepage content should be strategically decided.
8. 90% of people read reviews before purchasing an item. I personally do not read the description too much, I go straight on to the reviews section because that is social proof. In my opinion that is essential for every site. I highly recommend (almost insist) and adding that feature on your site. You can use Growave for that, it offers automated emails within the Reviews feature as well.
9. Imagine if you saw something that you quite like in the store, however you want to browse more, get more options, and then choose the best one. That often happens to me, because I am indecisive. That is when Wishlist comes in handy. Since you have a lot of products on your site, I recommend adding that feature to improve the user experience on your site. Besides, if the items on the wishlist have not been purchased, automated emails will be sent out as a reminder.
10. Social media has become a huge thing nowadays. I highly recommend taking advantage of that and adding Instagram galleries on your homepage. It will help drive traffic from your site on to your account and vice versa.
11. Implement an opportunity to log in and sign up using Social Media account. We all have accounts at least in one social media. And if I have an opportunity to create an account just with one click, I will do it. having an easier way to Sign in will help you gather customer base. The most valuable thing for a company is the customer

12. Use a referral program that will encourage your existing customers to share your products with their friends by giving discounts if the latter have purchased something from your store. With referral programs it is important to carefully set up so that you are not giving huge discounts and not getting anything back. [I recommend using one by Growave., because it is safe and it is integrated with 6 other marketing features (Reviews, Wishlist, Rewards, Social Login, Instagram, Discounts, Referral, VIP tiers) for better performance. 

    Hopefully, I managed to help you. If so, please let me know by liking this post.

[RichardNguyen]

Hi @BHuhman,

I’m Richard. Welcome to Shopify community. I have 2 comments on your cart page. You can consider it.

1. Display only static logos for the 3rd party payment options in the cart.

Do you realize your cart page has too much button, which will make users be distracted and overwhelmed? Displaying multiple buttons, all styled as primary buttons and each calling for attention, is very likely to cause choice paralysis for users. User can click one of the payment button instead of clicking Check out button while in fact many user don’t know or fully understand the many 3rd party options.

When users click one of 3 payment buttons, a pop up shows that requires to sign in or create an account. Users can feel uncomfortable and forget that they want to check out.

I suggest you to display a static and subdued logo for each of 3rd party payment method logos at the cart page, which only shows users payment methods your store has and they can select one of them in the check out page. If user don’t know what these payment methods are or they only want to use the standard site checkout, they will ignore these payment options.

You can see an example of Walmart. They have a small logo of Paypal in the cart page. The users who had a PayPal account often noticed this logo, and then assumed this meant they could pick PayPal later on. Users that didn’t know what PayPal was or didn’t want to use it, simply ignored it.

2. Design “Continue Shopping” button same style as “Check out” button

In case user want to buy more than one product, they can find easily “Continue Shopping”option and continue to choose other products in your store without back the page.

You can put “Continue Shopping” button under “Checkout” button or above “Shopping Cart”.

You can refer this article to get more tips about personalizing your cart page. May it help!