In this article about website and sales credibility, you'll learn:

When it comes to improving your CVR (Conversion Rate), website credibility is key. Website credibility can also mean a lot of things. Sometimes to make your website look more credible, you need to adjust the text, graphics, layout, product images, or add more information.

The smallest details can sometimes go overlooked and make your website and brand look non-credible to some online shoppers and cause them to not purchase your products. For example, many consumers feel uncomfortable purchasing products from a merchant when they see typos. Just one single typo in a product description can be perceived as a large enough red flag to absolutely crush your conversion rate! As silly as it may sound, it matters.

Why are product pages important?

Your product pages are the lifeblood of your conversion funnel. If your product pages have not gone through multiple revisions and refinements, you’re leaving sales on the table. A good product page serves several goals:

It’s important to note that your product pages should achieve these goals in this specific order.

Show your product

This step is simple. Have a product image carousel that includes at least 3 product images. If you have a wearable product, show people wearing it. People like to see people! If you have a product that is supposed to be used to do something specific, show that in action.

For example, if you are selling cooking knives, you need to have a video of someone chopping vegetables with your knives so that shoppers can see the product in action. The largest mistake that merchants make when showing off their products is not being thorough enough.

The only warning that we’d give with your product images would be to not upload images that are over edited or under edited. What we mean by this is that you should edit your images, they should not just be raw image files that you took on your phone with bad lighting. They can be edited and done with studio equipment. If you sell apparel, spend the time to take pictures of actual people wearing your products. Don’t just edit stock images of people with your logo superimposed on the image. Customers will notice and this will make your brand look uncredible. Take time on your product images and if you have to, spend a little money. It will be worth it!

Product Name

The first step to explaining your product is picking a product name. The largest mistake that merchants make here is being too abstract with their product names and assuming that customers will figure out what the product is via the product description. Cosmetics brands tend to make this mistake the most often. They’ll choose product names that they think are “cute” but detract from the customer's understanding of the product.

If you go and look at a few top cosmetics brands’ websites and look at their product names, they are short and descriptive. If they do have a “cute” name, it is followed by descriptive, generic terms that are easily understandable.

Here’s an example:

Nondescript, cute product name: Fairy Moon Dust

Descriptive product name: Fairy Moon Dust Eyeshadow Palette

Never make assumptions about what your customers will and won’t comprehend about things that are so vital to your sales performance!

Product Description

Your product descriptions should be brief. We’ve seen far too many that are three paragraphs long and we don’t even want to read the whole thing, so imagine how your customers must feel. Keep it to 2-4 sentences. This is not the place to be salesy and start listing reasons why your website visitors should buy this product. This is an opportunity to give your customers as much information as you reasonably can while also making the description brief.

If you try to do too much selling and not enough informing, you’ll have a lot of customers left with questions about the product. Some of them might reach out and ask you for clarification, but most won’t. For most customers, the lack of information leads to a lack of trust in you and interest in your product and they just won’t buy.

Your website is a sales ecosystem

There are many parts to selling your product. If you try to use one element of your site to do the selling, it will always come off as salesy and overbearing. Your site has to work together in order to win over customers through subtle gestures and optimizations. No one can be forced into buying.

If we were to pick the area where most merchants need improvement, it’s with social proof. With the rise in popularity of User Generated Content being used in ads, people love to see people, and read comments written by people just like them.

Social Proof is the best salesperson

Online shoppers feel more comfortable spending money with brands that have social proof. This can be in the form of traditional product reviews, videos, testimonials, or places where your brand or product has been featured (i.e. in a magazine). Seeing someone like you enjoy a product is a more powerful selling tool than anything that you could ever put on your website or in an advertisement.

The reverse is true as well, customers are distrusting of merchants that are selling products that have no reviews (or reviews that look suspiciously fake!)

Don’t know what social proof is or how to get more of it? No worries, click here to read the Preflect Academy article about social proof!

Here’s an example of a great looking product page template that we’ve seen work extremely well in different product markets:

The reason why the home page section comes after the product page section is because your homepage is something that most people see after your product page. Most ads go to (or at least should go to) a product page or collections page. After browsing that page, a customer either 1) buys, 2) goes to your homepage 3) leaves the site.

Your homepage should be simple. It should be a snapshot of your brand and your products. Unlike product pages, you do not need to provide specific product details or include tons of information.

Value Proposition

The best homepages stick with one theme and one value proposition of your entire brand that is true for all (or a majority) of your products. This is because many users click back to your homepage multiple times while surfing your website, but they don’t spend a lot of time there. That’s why it’s important to keep it brief and make it catchy too. It is wise to take your best value proposition and condense it into something called a brand slogan. This is a one sentence slogan or phrase that you can use everywhere on your site, including your homepage.

Too often, we see home pages that are super long, super complex and try to serve too many purposes. This results in customers feeling overwhelmed and instead of having a singular, resonating image of your brand, they have a feeling of information overload.

Keep it Relevant

We recommend that you use the space on your homepage, that every website visitor can see without scrolling, to show a single, fantastic product image. Make sure that this image is extremely high quality so that it looks crystal clear, even enlarged.

Reference Your Best Value Prop

When writing the text on your home page, start by writing down why you think your brand is special and why visitors should buy from you (your brand slogan/value proposition). Write as much as comes natural to you when addressing those points. Then, spend some time editing for length. You’ll find that a majority of what you wrote was the same thing, just repeated several times.

Here’s an example of a value prop that can be simplified for “Clothing Store”:

Long version: Clothing Store has been making quality sweaters for 10 years. Every sweater that we make is handmade and every single year we create new designs so all of our production runs are unique and limited. For every 10 sweaters that we sell, we donate a sweater to homeless kids in need. We give jobs to homeless teenagers to make sweaters and learn life skills that they can take to other jobs.

Short Version: For the past 10 years our handmade, seasonally designed sweaters have brought warmth to our customers and to the hearts of children in need.

Social Proof

Sometimes it just makes more sense to forgo including a detailed value prop and just condensing it into a brand slogan. With that saved space on the page, we recommend adding some social proof. Only do this if you have at least one funny, unique, or eye-catching review that you want to show off to everyone that enters your site.

In the homepage example below, we chose to condense the value proposition into a company slogan and use the extra space to feature a unique review:

Use your home page to highlight sales & promos

Lastly, if you have any special offerings that you currently are running, your home page is the best place to really push them. For example, during your New Year sale in January you could change the background image on your site to highlight the discount and maybe even add the promo code to the offer to that image. Will it be huge? Yes. Will customers notice it? Absolutely and that’s the point. Sometimes highlighting your current sale at the top of the page in tiny little text isn’t enough to grab the attention of website visitors and creates a layer of friction that can easily be avoided.

How your website looks is largely subjective, even to your customer base. There’s so many options when it comes to picking how you want your website to look. Here’s one thing to keep in mind: if you aren’t a design person, find someone who is and get their honest opinion. The easiest way to have a bad conversion rate is to have a website that doesn’t follow basic web design principles.

Considering how subjective this topic is and how difficult it is to describe exactly how to fix specific problems, we’d love to offer you a free web design audit done by our team to give you a professional opinion and actionable advice on what you can do to improve. If you’re interested, email us at [email protected]!

Red Flags

When you’re just starting out, there are a lot of things that you may be tempted to do on your site that are major red flags to shoppers. Some of these mistakes are still made by large brands that make lots of money, but could be making even more if they were to wise up.

Fake reviews

The first red flag is buying/writing fake product reviews or endorsements. This is not only wrong and unethical, but in some cases can be illegal. On top of that, if Shopify catches you or Facebook catches you, they’ll ban you and you won’t be able to operate your business. Do not do it, it’s not worth it. If you need help getting more reviews and social proof, click here to read our article about social proof!

Incomplete Website

The second red flag is having a website that looks incomplete. There is a big difference between your website being minimalistic and being incomplete. A minimalist web design will keep a lot of buttons and tabs hidden until you need them, a website that is lacking content won’t have those buttons at all. Specifically, we’re talking about an about us page, a terms of service, a terms and conditions page, a contact us page with form, an FAQ, and a Shipping/Returns information page.

Every credible business must have all of these pages. If you’re missing some of those, chances are that you’ve lost some sales because certain shoppers have been scared to hand over their credit card information to you. Scammers often don’t take the time to add this level of detail to fraudulent websites and if you don’t have that info sometimes shoppers can get a bad feeling.

Trust Buttons

Last but not least: do not overly use “trust building” buttons. If you aren’t familiar with what I’m talking about, here’s an example:

We cannot express how often these are abused. If your product is not certified by a real and credible organization to be organic, gluten free, vegan, sustainably sourced, ethically manufactured, etc., do not use a button. In some cases it may be appropriate to have a button that says “100% money-back guarantee” or something like that, but to be honest in most cases these buttons do the exact opposite of what they are intended to do. They create suspicion rather than build trust and end up backfiring. Our recommendation is to leave these in the past.