When it comes to online selling of products, one does not sell luxury jewelry or vintage cars like they sell pocketbooks or baby diapers. Marketing techniques that work for mass consumer products do not work for luxury goods and services.
Do you want to sell luxury products online? This article is made for you. We will present you the 5 critical success factors of an e-commerce activity selling luxury products.
Do not neglect the basic rules of an e-commerce site
There are some common sense rules that you should not neglect in your work of creation or improvement of your luxury e-commerce site. Here they are.
Get a great website, hosted on a great server and web host
Needless to say that this is the most important point of this article! You can spend as much money as you want, get the best website built and designed and have the best products on the market, if your website is slow, unresponsive or worst DOWN, you won’t sell much.
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Visuals must always communicate emotions.
Some sites specializing in the sale of luxury products seek to convey the value of their brand and their offer solely by focusing on innovation. They seek to deliver a radically innovative user experience, but at the same time forget some elementary principles, some basic principles. What are they? First of all, navigation must be clear and consistent. Customers must be able to find answers to their questions easily, they must be able to access products, etc easily. Secondly, whatever the ecommerce site, images play a decisive role. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Imagine that a customer comes to see you to discover your products. What does he want to do? See your products, examine them, touch them.
Product descriptions must also convey emotions.
Images play an important role, both emotionally and informatively. They play a crucial role in customers’ purchasing decisions. The same could be said of the descriptions. Most ecommerce sites selling luxury products offer very poor, very cold, very dry, too technical, too short descriptions.
When you write your product description, you should try to imagine what a salesperson would say to sell the product in the presence of the potential customer. For clothing and jewelry, the salesperson would advise how to wear them, on their composition, on their size, etc. However, it has to be said that most descriptions of luxury products list the materials. It is apparently not enough to make you want to buy.
Your website must itself be a luxury product.
Images and descriptions are the two most essential elements. However, other elements play a role. The design of your site must reflect your positioning. You must propose a web site in adequacy with the products which you sell: a site “top of the range” Your site is the showcase of your activity.
How to create a luxury design? Here are some tips:
- Avoid commercial photos.
- Choose the typography carefully.
- Limit the use of elements that disrupt navigation: popups, banners, etc.
- Use few colors. Avoid bright colors. Choose matte colors.
- Use white spaces.
- Avoid displaying too many products in catalog pages.
Play to the full-on rarity and on the feeling of exclusivity
The scarcity effect always works, even in the field of the sale of luxury products. It creates a state of emergency. However, for it to work, this rarity must be real. In other words, do not indicate that there are only two products left when you have tons of stock. Second tip: present this cleanly and professionally. Avoid large red and fluorescent yellow animated banners. Also, avoid popups. This is not how you will generate more sales. The basic design rules associated with the sale of luxury products also apply here.
Don’t focus on what you sell, but on the experience, you offer your customers.
Earlier, we mentioned the importance of conveying emotions through images and product descriptions. Let us now go into a little more detail. The most critical point, without doubt, is this: in your way of selling your products and writing descriptions, you should not focus on the characteristics of your products, but on what your products will provide to their buyers, regarding experience, emotion… The best way to implement this point is to do qualitative research, such as customer interviews, customer questionnaires distributed on the site (or by email), interviews with store managers if you have physical points of sale.