The About page on your eCommerce store is critical to your success. Have a look at your website metrics and you’ll often see that your About page is one of the most popular pages in your store.
Prospective customers use the About page to get a sense of your company and its degree of professionalism. A well-constructed About page can assist you in achieving higher sales conversions.
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Raw Transcript
It’s coming up to Christmas and the festive season and the season of giving presents so what I thought I would do is just go through a standard search. I’ve typed in “buy headphones” into Google and all the various sites come up.
Sometimes, a lot of the customers will type in the actual brand name, or the actual type of headphone or the actual correct description of what they’re looking to buy.
I’ve just typed in “buy headphones” because what I want to show you is how the About page of your website will impact your sales. If you go and have a look at your web traffic, you might be using Google Analytics, if you go and have a look at the web traffic you’ll see that your About page is usually up in the Top 5 or Top 10 most trafficked pages in your website.
In my experience the About page is always right up there.
The About page allows the customer to understand who you are, where you’re coming from, why you’re selling and essentially to validate that they trust you. They will trust you with their purchase.
They trust that they’ll give you money and you’ll send them the headphones. The About page is very important for telling the customers–this is who I am and you can rely on me and I am going to send you the goods.
Let’s just go through. I’ve literally just done a search and just chosen some random About pages.
AV Australia
This is a very standard About page for an online store www.avaustralia.com.au. You can see here, there is one that says; this is who we are, we give good customer service, we’ve got manufacturer’s warranties, you can give us your feedback here, our business hours and our general contact numbers.
The one good things about what these guys have done is they have at least provided access to a Facebook page. That means that as a customer I might think that I maybe I’ll get a faster response by going to Facebook and asking a question there than I might through say the email.
Another good thing about this page is that they’ve got the business hours so if I have an enquiry, I can say that they’re open on a Saturday as well. That also indicates to me that they’ve got a retail store which could be useful if I wanted to go in and see them–depending where they are. It doesn’t actually say where they are.
Addicted To Audio
The next random site that I’ve pulled up is www.addictedtoaudio.com.au. These guys look like they’re not aiming at the consumer market but they might be selling more to businesses. But, you know, they’ve got long standing relationships.
They have got 25 years that they have been in business for a while. They’re committed to supplying premium products. They talk about their postage, you know, blah blah blah, all of this sort of stuff.
And here’s a photo of, I don’t know what, it could be their office? I would assume that it’s their office maybe and it looks a bit empty. It looks a bit, sort of I don’t know who I’m really dealing with.
They’ve said everything they need to. Here we are we’ve been in business for 25 years etcetera etcetera but that’s the base level for an About page.
You always say what you do, that you give great customer service, how you’re going to ship and you’ve been in business since 2005 and that’s the absolute minimum standard and that’s what everyone else does.
You’ve got to get the edge of your competitors by giving your customers a little bit more.
If your customers have got 3 stores open and they’re trying to figure out where to buy headphones from, what’s going to give you the edge to get that sale over your competitors and often it will be the About Us information.
Clear Beats
This site looks quite good – www.clearbeats.com.au. I found them in Adwords, so they’re paying for advertising. They’re paying a fair bit of money for advertising but their About page is empty.
It just says “Enter the About us information in here”. So, that’s not great. You obviously don’t want to leave unfinished pages on your site because it just brings down the quality of your whole site and also the inherent trust element.
Zappos
Here’s Zappos – www.about.zappos.com. They are obviously a market leader in E-commerce. You can always learn from the market leaders. You go and have a look at what the market leaders in your vertical segment are doing and you can borrow from their ideas.
These guys don’t have a lot of corporate information although they have got more here. This is just really a landing page here but they’ve got a video and we can see here all the people who will be processing your order and they look like they’re having fun.
They look like they’re interesting people because they’ve got lots of stuff all over their walls. Video is a very quick way of communicating and you know, getting trust from your customers.
Rush Faster
Rushfaster’s (www.rushfaster.com.au) About page says who they are, what they’re about. They’re quite a trendy retailer but what they’ve done is put their company history into the About page; how their company has progressed and then they’ve also mentioned all the other websites that they run.
So, perhaps they don’t have a 40,000 sq. ft warehouse like someone else, they don’t have a long eBay history or they have not been in business for 25 years. Instead they use other tactics to get some credibility and some trust.
Jaben Audio
As soon as you land on the homepage you will know exactly what they are selling. That is a great starting point for https://jaben.com.au/. The problem is that you literally have to search for the about page, which is a missed opportunity to tell the brand story.
Most web users are looking for an easy reading and browsing experience and would most likely not scroll up or down for this information.
Headphones
Here’s another one – headphones.com.au. This is a really sort of typical page that you see from a lot of eCommerce sites where the punctuation is wrong. It’s a really junky looking page that’s filled with mistakes. It doesn’t inspire trust.
Gazebos Australia
Here’s another store – www.gazebosaustralia.com.au. This company started out as an eBay store in 2005. They’re a titanium power seller looking after 29,000 customers. That tells me that they have a long history of building trust with customers on eBay.
They now ship directly to their own online store and that’s why. They’re located in Hornsby, this is what they’ve been doing and there’s a nice photo of the guy who actually runs the store in the warehouse. You can see that’s where he is and that is what he does.
There’s a “why buy your product” from these people. You can pick up from the warehouse.
There is a map showing you exactly where he is although he looks like he is in the middle of the forest. And then, a little bit about the company and what they do.
This section shows a screencast that talks about the order process. As soon as you order with this company, this shows a behind-the-scenes look at the ordering process and that makes the customers feel far more comfortable and then finally, a “need help email” to send when they pick and pack orders and a phone number.
So…
There are many different ways to inspire trust with your customers so that they are more likely to purchase from you. If you haven’t looked at your website’s statistics page, you’ll see that your About page is your most highly trafficked page.
If it’s not, there could be a problem but it’s an excellent conversion page.
You’ll often see that people go from an About Us page and subsequently go through with buying your products. It’s a very important page and these have been a few ideas for improving it.
