9 Shopify Apps to Boost Your SEO Engagement Score

Posted on January 31, 2024 by Stylaquin1

Wondering how to get visitors to stay longer, view more products and come back more often? Here are 9 Shopify apps that can help

If you have done the work to get more visitors to your site, well done! (Here’s a post about getting more traffic, if you haven’t.)The next step on the path to online success is getting visitors to stay longer and come back more often. Getting them to look at more products will increase sales, so yah, that’s good too. Engagement is one of the most important metrics in SEO. Increasing engagement will not only improve your site rank, and get you more organic traffic, it will also lower the cost of ads. Win, win, win!

Let’s look at nine of the best apps to jumpstart your engagement.

Stylaquin:

Stylaquin is the only app that increases engagement by transforming the online shopping experience. If you are looking for real, long term engagement, the best way to stand out and get visitors to stay longer, view more items and come back more often, is to make your store more fun to shop. Stylaquin is an excellent tool for Shopify store owners looking to enhance the user experience and increase engagement on their site, especially for stores where visual presentation and customer interaction play a crucial role in the shopping process.

Strengths: Stylaquin is designed to make online shopping more engaging and fun. It features a Look Book for easier browsing and an Idea Board where customers can collect and curate all the items they are interested in. They can also change options like colors and sizes right on the idea board. This can lead to shoppers viewing more items, staying longer on the site, and potentially increasing purchases. Its mobile-friendly design ensures a consistent user experience across devices.

Weaknesses: Stylaquin’s unique approach might be more suited for stores with visually appealing products or those that benefit from mix-and-match style presentations. It might not be as effective for stores with less visual or more standardized products.

Does Your Site Do This?

It can with Stylaquin! Stylaquin is the easy to add Shopify app that transforms your website. Stylaquin makes shopping faster, more engaging, and more fun. Stylaquin shoppers stay longer, view over 85% more products, come back more often, and buy more when they do. Find us in the Shopify App Store.

Omnisend Email and SMS Marketing:

This app is great for email and SMS marketing, offering features like automated campaigns, easy-to-use analytics, and SMS marketing tools. It’s known for its ability to recover abandoned carts and learn more about customers through analytics. While email doesn’t directly create engagement, it can remind customers of your brand and get them to return to the site which will improve your engagement score.

Strengths: Offers automated campaigns, easy-to-use analytics, and SMS marketing tools. Effective for recovering abandoned carts and learning more about customers through analytics.

Weaknesses: May require a learning curve to fully utilize all features. You must create emails to send regularly, so there is work for you or your team. The free plan is limited in terms of email contacts and monthly emails.

Loox Product Reviews & Photos:

Loox is great for showcasing customer reviews and building trust. It automatically gathers photo and video product reviews and displays them in customizable widgets, enhancing social proof and encouraging purchases Reviews don’t directly impact engagement, but increasing trust is a good way to get customers to browse and often return to the site.

Strengths: Automates the collection of photo and video product reviews, enhancing social proof and encouraging purchases. Customizable widgets are a plus.

Weaknesses: Some users may find the customization options limited, and it might not be as effective for stores with fewer products or lower traffic.

Boost Product Filter & Search:

This app enhances the shopping experience by providing advanced search and filtering capabilities. Features like spell-check, synonyms, auto-suggestions, and stop-words help refine search results. Making it easier for shoppers who know what they want to find what they are looking for improves the overall shopping experience. Avoiding spelling errors makes the brand look professional, which is important for building trust.

Strengths: Enhances the shopping experience with advanced search and filtering capabilities, including spell-check, synonyms, auto-suggestions, and stop-words.

Weaknesses: The advanced features might be more than what smaller stores need, potentially adding unnecessary complexity.

Justuno:

It leverages AI for conversion optimization, offering pop-ups, banners, and other tools to capture leads and increase conversions.

Strengths: Uses AI for conversion optimization with pop-ups, banners, and tools to capture leads and increase conversions. Versatile for various marketing strategies.

Weaknesses: The AI-driven approach might not be as customizable as some store owners would like, and there could be a learning curve to fully exploit its capabilities. Not all customers want popups and banners interrupting their shopping experience.

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

The Stylaquin Idea Board keeps customers engaged in two ways: it’s an interactive styling board where shoppers can collect and curate all the things that interest them; and it also acts as a wishlist that shoppers can return to. Find us in the Shopify App Store.

Candy Rack | All-in-One Upsell:

This app integrates upsells at various points in the buying process, using AI-driven recommendations to optimize mobile shopping experiences.

Strengths: Integrates upsells at key points in the buying process using AI-driven recommendations. It has a mobile-first approach and quick loading times.

Weaknesses: Some store owners may find the AI recommendations don’t always align perfectly with their specific product mix or customer preferences.

Pinterest Integration:

The Pinterest app can turn your Shopify store into an inspiration hub, offering real-time catalog updates, organic discovery, and shoppable ads (source: Plerdy).

Strengths: Offers real-time catalog updates and organic discovery. The app includes shoppable ads and detailed tracking with the Pinterest Tag.

Weaknesses: Its effectiveness heavily relies on the visual appeal of products and may not be as beneficial for stores with less visually-oriented products.

ReConvert Upsell & Cross-sell:

This app optimizes the checkout and post-purchase experience, boosting average order value with one-click upsell offers and revitalizing the thank-you page.

Strengths: Optimizes checkout and post-purchase experience, boosting average order value. Includes a drag & drop editor for custom upsell strategy.

Weaknesses: Might be overwhelming for new users or smaller stores due to its extensive customization options and features.

Infinite Options:

This app is ideal for stores offering customized products, allowing endless product options and dynamic add-ons.

Strengths: Allows for unlimited customization of products, ideal for stores offering personalized items. Includes options for engraving, monogramming, or custom printing.

Weaknesses: For stores with a simpler product line, the app’s extensive customization options might be underutilized.

How to Bust Out Your Google Engagement Score!

Posted on January 22, 2024 by Stylaquin1

Transforming Online Shopping

Using engagement to improve your Shopify site's Google rank

Last week’s post was about how to get more traffic to your Shopify site. Once you get some traffic coming in you need to engage it. Google’s key metric for Google is happy searchers. (If you want to understand how Google really works, download our free e-book “How to Outsmart Google”.) Google determines how happy searchers are by measuring engagement. In this post I’ll take you through how Google measures engagement and how to dial that in. Google fields 8.5 billion searches a day. They can’t send all their traffic on any one search to just one site. It would crash the site. So, moving up in the ranks is like starting a bike in tenth gear. It’s really hard and slow at first, but once you have momentum it gets easier and it goes faster.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is a bit of the snake eating it’s own tail. Click-through rate is the percentage of people who click on your website’s link in search results after seeing it. Yup, you need to have created ads or high ranking content for this to come into play. It’s mostly for ads, and yes, Google rewards you when you buy ads. Adding CTR to the engagement score is Google putting a big fat finger on the scale for ads. Google believes that a high CTR suggests that your content is compelling and relevant to users. It can also mean that you have a knack for creating good ad copy. Read on, because there’s more to the story.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate measures the percentage of users who leave your site shortly after visiting a single page. This is why having a compelling home page is so important. A lower bounce rate indicates that visitors are finding what they’re looking for and engaging with your content. Getting visitors to view a second page is the only way to reduce bounce rate. There are three questions you need to help visitors can answer quickly when they visit your home page.

What are you selling?
Why should your customer care? (What’s in it for them?)
What should they do next?

Go ahead and take a moment to visit your site’s home page and see if it answers those three questions. It’s harder than it looks, and crazy important. I’ll wait.

Dwell Time (Time on site)

Dwell time is the amount of time users spend on your site. Longer dwell times suggest that visitors are finding valuable content, which tells Google that your site provides a good user experience. This is a simple time measurement metric. You can’t fake it and even a few seconds longer will move you up in the ranking. Getting shoppers to stay longer is not easy. You are competing against life for their attention. Lots of moving, flashing, things probably won’t help. Who is your target customer? What matters to them? Putting together tight collections and having compelling photography really helps with this. If your customer is cheap, offer lots of discounts. If your customer is chic, offer a sophisticated design. Here’s a post on leveraging cheap and chic as a differentiator.

Pageviews and Events per Session

This metric measures how many pages a user views during a single visit to your site. The more pages visitors view, the more it shows Google that visitors are engaging with your content. Pageviews are part of what Google counts as events. Events are the sum of all the things visitors do when they engagement with your site. Clicking a link, visiting a page, adding to cart all count as events. Getting visitors to view more pages and do more things that cause events to be counted is a big deal. It’s hard to get visitors to view even one more page, so getting lots of page views is gold. Shopify sites can add recommendation apps to their site. But I think it’s easier to make shopping faster and more fun. (Biased toward Stylaquin for this one.) You can’t increase the amount of time visitors have to shop, but you can make it faster to shop, so they have time to see more items.

Does Your Site Do This?

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

Comments and Engagement on Site

User-generated content, such as comments on blog posts or discussions in forums, count as engagement. Meaningful interactions on your site will signal to Google that your content is valuable and fosters a sense of community. Blogging about your products and linking to them is a good way to do that. Making it easy for customers to leave reviews is another way.

Instagram and Facebook are online fashion’s best friends when it comes to social engagement. Creating a real community of people you connect with, and offer valuable content to, takes time and focus. This is just another example of why having a very targeted audience is key to creating connection. Here’s a link to our free e-book on creating personas so you can focus your brand on your target customer. I don’t want to knock blogs and content. This is after all a blog post that you’re reading. But if you are a Shopify Store, you’re selling products. You don’t want them to go to your blog, you want them to go to your store. In the time it takes to create a blog post that will rank, you could created a boat load of instagram and Facebook posts that just show what you sell. Make them interesting, uplifting, pretty, funny and so on to get followers as well as click throughs.

Social media takes time to learn and master. Don’t try to get every channel going. You need a team for that. Pick the one that is most important to your customers and just do that one to start. If you already have a channel or two working, then branch out. Any channel can work, but it takes months to get it going and years to make it big. The TV show “Emily in Paris” is actually a good example of clever social marketing. It took our fictional hero a while to get the ball rolling even though she’s adorable, has a FABULOUS wardrobe, is a social media professional, and she lives in Paris. Work with what works best for your personal style and privacy needs.

Repeat Visitors

Returning visitors may be the ultimate signal to Google that users find your site valuable and are coming back for more. How do you get more repeat visitors? You have to create a compelling experience, and you have to have products that customers want. Wish lists can help. Setting up a good email program is another great way to get the same customers to come back. New items, sales, interesting info about the products all work. If you want to see a great example of how a family owned business can create quality email about their products, sign up for the emails at Cross Jewelers. Every email tells a story about a product, and they rarely are offer any sales, so they aren’t giving up any margin. It isn’t flashy, but it’s consistent and they’ve grown quite a bit over the years, so something is working.

Is there an easier way to improve your engagement score

Honestly, this is where Stylaquin is head and shoulders above anything else out there. It makes shopping fun AND it has an idea board that let’s shoppers save all the things they liked but didn’t buy. We’ve seen Dwell time go up 70%. We’ve seen product views go up over 180% when visitors shop with Stylaquin. We aren’t sure if visitors come back because it was just more fun, or if they wanted to see if what they left on their idea board was still there, but Stylaquin shoppers come back up to 28% more often, and they buy more when they do. Stylaquin is the total package for increasing engagement. Check it out.

11 ways to get more free organic traffic

Posted on January 17, 2024 by Stylaquin1

How to get free organic traffic to your Shopify store

One of the questions I get asked most at Stylaquin demos is “Does Stylaquin bring traffic to a website?” The answer to that is yes and no. Stylaquin engages and delights the traffic you have, so new visitors are more likely to become repeat traffic, it also brings in referral traffic from shoppers who enjoy shopping with Stylaquin, but it isn’t a good source of traffic for brand new stores. If you are a new store, just starting out, with little or no traffic, I want to help you get past 500 visitors a month so that Stylaquin will be able to help you grow. Here are 11 ways you can get free organic traffic to your website.

Just for kicks I asked ChatGPT how to get more traffic, and it spit out a decent framework, which didn’t include enough specifics to be useful. Then I asked Google Bard to see if there was anything that Google, lord of internet search, could add. Not really. Which made me realize that the question new and struggling business owners should be asking isn’t, “How do I get more free organic traffic?” The question should be “How do I get more free organic traffic in a way I can fit into my incredibly busy life, so that I can comfortably grow my business without losing my sanity.” There’s a time, and results interconnection that needs to be addressed, and you need to factor in what skills you have, and what skills you may need to develop or buy.

Where should you start?

I’m giving you a list of 11 really good options for getting more traffic. You’re probably getting excited, and then the spin starts. Which should I do first? How do I know which is the best for my website? Which will get the best results? Which will get the fastest results. Okay, hit pause, stop and breath. The worst thing you can do is bounce around from one to the other looking for a magic fix that will give you the power of a Kardashian. There is no magic fix. But the path to building your business can be fun and rewarding. You can also do it at a pace that won’t make you crazy and won’t keep you from doing the things that matter. I’m going to break down the list in the order you should work through. Some things are just basic marketing and some are more nuanced.

This easy to understand seven page guide will teach you how to create useful personas so that you can market more effectively and truly engage your customers.

Download your copy today!

1) Find the right customer for what you sell

The pros call this Market Research. Every successful business has a target customer who will be excited about what the company sells. It’s much easier to target a specific segment of customers than it is to do what we call “Spray and pray”, that is throwing everything you can think of, at as many people as possible, and hoping something catches on. If you want to get free organic traffic, it’s easier and more effective to define a narrow niche audience, say people who love lighthouses, people who wear bow ties, people who collect baseball cards or people who own scooters. The narrower your audience is, the easier it is to target them with content, keywords and ads. Here’s a link to the Smart Shopify Persona Builder which will get your started.

2) Create a product selection that appeals to your target customer

Once you know who you’re targeting, and you have a persona or personas, you’re ready to collect the products that will interest your target customers. The advent of drop shipping has made putting together a good product assortment easier. You don’t have to go to shows, visit vendors, an spend a lot of money on stock merchandise. You just have to pick out products from an online catalog, or add your designs to existing products. There are a ton of youtube videos where folks tell you how they made $25K per month selling teeshirts or gadgets. The one thing they all have in common is they started with a narrowly focused target audience and designed products for that audience.

3) Create a professional online presence and website

In order to sell your products to your target audience you’ll need to create a professional website that is visually appealing, easy to navigate, and optimized for search engines (SEO). Shopify makes this easy and comes with 12 free themes. Any of them will probably work for what you’re selling. All Shopify themes are based on the free Dawn theme with some alterations. If you’re on a tight budget, consider starting with a free theme, and once you have money coming in, switch to a paid theme. You can use the money you save for advertising when you get to that phase. To start, your site needs to look professional and be easy to shop. You need to have high quality photographs of your products and they must be a high enough resolution that they don’t look blurry.

If you’re not a professional artist, or a gifted amateur, don’t try to reinvent your theme’s design. I’m saying this as an art director with over 30 years experience, who has worked for billion dollar companies. The design is the least important part of your website. WHAT?!?! Yup, unless you have the skills to create a memorable brand at the start, just build your site with the design elements provided by the theme and be consistent. Don’t spend a lot of time trying to redesign something that a highly trained professional has already created and Shopify probably spent real money developing. Here’s a tip from art school: Art is theft. Every great artist stands on the work of the artist that came before. Look for inspiration in other stores that you admire and copy what they’re doing. You don’t need to start new trends, just keep things clean and tidy. When in doubt ask yourself “What would appeal to my target audience?” It’s always about your target audience, it’s never about you. Write that one down and tape it to your computer.

Don’t get mad at Google, outsmart it! Having trouble getting your site to rank well? Wondering how to get to the top positions without paying for placement? Google is just an algorithm, once you understand how it works, you can learn how to outsmart it. Download your copy today!

P.S. It’s free and we will never share your name. You can unsubscribe at any time.

4) Build free organic traffic with good SEO

If you’ve already gotten your Shopify website built, and chosen products, you may have to back track a bit. SEO, like everything else, starts with the target audience. I’ve added a link to our free e-book How to Outsmart Google that will go into more detail on how Google sees your site and how to use that to your advantage. In order to be successful, you’ll need to start with a narrow target audience, and choose products that customers in that niche are interested in. At the start, because you don’t have a list yet, you’ll be out in the web in a crowd with millions of others. That’s the equivalent of starting a store in Wyoming, on a dirt road, far from town and hoping that putting a sign on the building will bring in traffic. Your friends are gonna show up, but that’s about it.

The purpose of SEO is to make it easy for your target audience to find you. You do this by determining why each product will appeal to your target audience, and then writing copy that will include the words they will type into Google or Bing when they’re looking for that product. I’m going to say that again again, it’s crazy important. Determine why each product you sell will appeal to your target audience, then write copy that will include the words your customer will type into Google or Bing when they’re looking for that product in the copy. You can download our free e-book titled Smart Shopify Copy Builder to get detailed help on how to write good product copy that will work for search engines. If you don’t get the words your customers will type into Google in your product copy, Google will not send searchers to your product. It’s that simple.

5) Get free ad placement

In the Shopify App Store there’s a Google app. The app makes it easy to create a Google ads account and get the proper tracking set up on your site. You should do this even if you never run a Google ad.

Setting up a Google Ads account manually is not all that easy. The interface was designed by people who understand how tracking and analytics work and there is a huge amount of assumed knowledge that mere mortals may not possess. Installing the app makes the setup less painful.

The big win is you can be certain that your site is properly tagged for Google AND, once you get your products added, they will appear in the band of images at the top of the Google Search screen for free as long as Google deems them relevant to the search query. You don’t have to pay for placement, but you do need to make sure Google knows what the products are, and why someone would be interested in them. Google does what’s easy for them and not what works best for you. There are lots of Youtube videos that will walk you through how to set up the Google app. It will take longer than you think, so wear comfy clothes and bring a tasty beverage.

6) Keywords are the key

Sorry, I know that’s obvious, but if you want free organic traffic for your Shopify site, keywords are how you get it. They aren’t sexy, they aren’t always obvious, but they aren’t rocket science either. Hopefully you’ve downloaded and read How to Outsmart Google and now you understand how keywords work and how Google “thinks” about them.

There has been a lot of talk about AI and how that will improve search. The truth is Google has been using AI for years. Without going down the AI rabbit hole, just know that keywords, relevant copy and content are the pillars of your SEO strategy and they will be for a long, long, time.

Here’s another important reason to put real time and energy into Keywords, content and copy—It will save you money when you do start placing ads. Paid ads that don’t lead to a site with good SEO actually cost more than ads that go to a store with good SEO. Yah, Google does that. Because Google’s customer is the searcher (read How to Outsmart Google, it will change how you see the web.) Google promotes sites that have a targeted audience and keywords that will appeal to that audience. You don’t just get a good discount, it also improves your ad placement. Seriously, good SEO will save you real money once you get to placing ads. Don’t even think about starting ads till you get the SEO basics nailed down.

7) Use AI to help with keywords and content

It is a battle of the bots. Google’s AI reading copy written by Bard and ChatGPT, how very sci-fi! For many bits of online copy it’s faster, and with some practice it works quite well. You have to build a base of content in order to rank with Google and get free traffic. That’s a good bit of content. As of this post you can still get free versions of ChatGPT and Bard. If you decide to pay you’ll get more options and more detailed output for about $20/month. You can pay for companies who have developed scripts for ChatGPT that dial in the copy, but you can do that yourself. Here’s how.

Tell ChatGPT to act as the head of marketing and copywriter for [your site].
Tell ChatGPT who your target customer is.
Give it information on the product you want to get copy for. [product name, what it does, why that matters to your target customer, as well as any relevant specifications]
Ask it what the best keywords for that product would be to rank well with Google.
Ask it to write a copy block that will appeal to your target audience using the keywords provided.
Be sure to tell it not to make up anything.

Important Safety Tip: Be sure to pay attention to the output. AI hallucinates, AKA makes stuff up. It can make up quotes and cite references that don’t exist. Telling it not to make things up usually works, but check anyway. It’s a machine designed to tell you what you want to hear.

You can ask AI to use the same style as copy you have already written and like. You can ask it to write copy that’s sassy, or calm, or funny. Try different prompts till you find ones that get you copy that fits your brand and appeals to your target audience. Write down the prompts you used so you can continue to use them later. This will help create a consistent voice for your brand.

8) Create Content that resonates with Google

One of the time honored ways to get free organic traffic is to set up a blog and create relevant, engaging content that showcases your expertise and provides value to your target audience. But really, who has time? You can outsource blog posts and social media, or take it on yourself. If you decide to outsource, there are folks on Fiver and Upwork as well as online services that can get the job done for $50-$100/post.

If you decide to take it on yourself, you must be consistent. It’s better to write one good post a week and share it on social media than to write a whole bunch and have gaps of weeks in between. Why? Because Google crawls websites at a rate that is dependent on how often it finds new content. Big sites write three posts a week. But since posts take (me at least) a couple of hours to write without AI and slightly less with AI, (I only use it for outlines and research) then I have to come up with images and get them posted; that would be a full day of my time just to write three blog posts. I don’t have that kind of time, so I post once a week.

I’ve trained Google that their bots need to crawl my site every week in order to keep their search results accurate. In order to be the most successful search engine, Google needs to be accurate. Google is also tasked with crawling the web, which is massive, so they have to be strategic. Google only crawls the things that change often. If I post three times a week and then skip a couple of weeks Google may not even notice until it crawls my site and, seeing changes, it may crawl the next week, but once I stop posting, Google stops crawling. Consistency is the secret to success and, even posting twice a month will work better than posting in fits and starts.

To change the frequency that Google crawls your site, you need to add new relevant content every week. Why does that matter? Because Google considers “freshness” very important and gives precedence to sites that have fresh content. Here’s a link to a video about the importance of keeping your copy fresh.

9) Make sure that your Shopify site is mobile friendly.

In order for Google to send you free organic traffic, it requires, yes requires, that your site is mobile friendly. All of the Shopify themes start out mobile friendly. Since the paid themes are all built on Dawn, they are also probably mobile friendly. So if you’re on Shopify, you’ll start out mobile friendly, but you can still mess it up. Your mobile score will be impacted by five main things.

Slow, or out of date theme.
Photos that are too large to download quickly.
Photos that don’t have alt text.
Too many photos on a page, which makes the pages take a long time to load.
Poor contrast between type and background.

You can check your site’s Lighthouse score (Google controls Lighthouse) to see if there is anything you need to fix. It will give you a score for mobile and desktop and tell you what needs to be fixed. Here’s the link to a free Lighthouse test from PageSpeed Insights.

Why does having a good mobile score matter? Well Google has prioritized mobile and, if your site isn’t mobile optimized, it won’t serve your site up in the organic search as high as similar sites with better mobile scores. Since over 50% of all online traffic is now mobile—it matters.

10) Social Media

Social media can get you free traffic, and it has been very successful for oodles of new stores. Social media is a bit like waving your arms in the air and shouting “Hey look at me!” online. The idea is to get attention and be interesting enough that people want to spend time with you. There are plenty of social media experts online who can guide you through the best practices, take a few minutes to google who the top players are for your niche and follow them for inspiration. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to get traction. As with content creation, you do need to be consistent. Social media is a lot of work, especially if you don’t enjoy being on social media. Do a little every day and don’t let it pull you away from all the other things that matter.

11) Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t

Make a point to check your site’s analytics weekly so that you know what’s working and what isn’t. Google provides detailed information about where traffic is coming from. Once you added the Google App to your Shopify site you started the data flowing. You can get most of the info you need in the app, or you can deep dive by going to your Google Analytics page. Nothing happens overnight, it will take a few months to see progress. Once you have been consistent for a couple of months you should start to see movement. If you don’t see improvements from week to week and month to month, it’s a good bet that what you’re doing isn’t resonating with your audience, or isn’t being understood by Google.

Checking your stats weekly lets you see where to focus your time and effort. You only need to find one good channel to get the ball rolling.

Then what?

Once you’ve created a steady stream of traffic to your site, then it’s time to delight and engage them with Stylaquin! Shoppers who use Stylaquin will stay longer, view more items, come back more often, and buy more when they do. Stylaquin is the easy and inexpensive way to add an engaging online shopping experience that makes your store stand out in the crowded world of e-commerce.

Does Your Site Do This?

Shopping fast and slow

Posted on January 8, 2024 by Stylaquin1

Shopping is incredibly complicated and how we shop determines how we buy

Imagine you’re shopping for a birthday gift. Are you going to shop fast or slow? Who is it for? What do they like? How much do you want to spend? How much time do you have to choose? All of these questions factor into what you buy. Now imagine you are buying an outfit for date night. Who is it with? What mood do you want to set? Does it have to double as a work outfit? Now imagine you’re shopping for new bathroom tile, fabric for a hobby, a new game, lipstick, or hosiery. Your thought process shifted with each shopping scenario. It takes a lot of brain power to shop well.

Online shopping is designed for people who already know what they want.

There’s a world of difference between buying something you use often and have run out of, and buying something that you aspire to own. There’s a big difference between buying something that will last 10 minutes (dog toy) and something that will last years and also needs to coordinate with other things you own (fine jewelry).

Does Your Site Do This?

When displaying products in a brick and mortar store, merchants spend a ton of time thinking about where and how the product will be displayed. In catalogs there are hot spots both across the catalog and on individual pages. A great deal of thought is put into how much space each product gets and where it goes. But online—you get what you get. You can add collections and filters, but not much else that makes the actual shopping experience better. Today’s websites are set up to shop fast. It’s like the folks who designed shopping online weren’t really shoppers at heart. They were computer programers looking for efficiency and speed. I remember sitting through so many presentations about reducing the number of clicks it takes to buy a product and how important that was to developing a clean purchase path. I haven’t been to one about how to actually make online shopping more fun. (Fun fact: the architecture used by today’s websites was invented in 1957.)

Stylaquin transforms online shopping by adding a series of virtual spaces to a website. The bar acts as a portal to the spaces. One space let’s shoppers flip through Look Book pages so there’s more visual excitement without all that clicking. There’s also the Idea Board space that acts as an interactive styling board, so shoppers can collect and curate all the things that interest them without committing to the cart.

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

What space would you add to your website if you could?

Let’s get back to shopping fast and shopping slow. The truth is sometimes you want to shop fast. Life comes with time constraints, and we don’t always care about getting a bargain or finding the perfect [insert noun here]. Sometimes we just need to get it done. But other times you want to shop slow. Look at all the options, imagine yourself wearing it, eating it, giving it, or just reveling in it. So in order to have the perfect shopping experience online, you need to be able to shop both fast and slow depending on your mood, time constraints and what you’re shopping for. The Stylaquin bar is the portal to the place where shopping slow makes sense. It’s there if you want it, and out of the way if you don’t.

Can AI solve the problem?

Ai can provide better guesses as to what we will like based on our purchase history. I think there’s a big opening for AI to be an online stylist. I asked Chat GPT what would make a better online shopping experience for someone who loved to shop. Not surprisingly, it provided a list of all the best SEO practices. But it didn’t come up with anything to make online shopping more fun.

What else makes a great online shopping experience? Is it finding new things? Having a large selection, getting a killer deal? If you’ve had a great online shopping experience recently, let me know in the comments!

Do women shop differently than men? Yikes—Is that sexist?

Posted on January 1, 2024 by Stylaquin1

Or is that missing the point entirely?

History is so littered with the bones of misogynist “truths” that typically we either take them as gospel, or take them for granted. But sometimes there’s a hidden nugget of truth that is genuinely helpful. You can see it in “Women shop differently than men”, but only if you don’t fall into old tropes that no longer fit.

Change the phrasing and uncover it’s true power

Every woman doesn’t shop differently than every man, but power shoppers do shop very differently than item shoppers. Power shoppers love to shop, shop often, and typically buy more when they do. Item shoppers can’t be bothered looking around at things they don’t need yet, they get what they came for, and they get out. Item shoppers look at shopping as a chore that needs to be done efficiently and infrequently.

Does Your Site Do This?

Online shopping is still designed for item shoppers

The online experience was originally designed to replace call centers for catalogers. Anyone remember “Open 24/7”? Primordial e-commerce used quick-shop codes so you could buy things by number. The web was too slow for many images back in the 90’s, but over time it got faster. And then nothing really changed. Nothing. Which is surprising since the pandemic changed where we shop and online is now a much bigger channel than it was in 2019. Think about how odd it is that after 40 years the online shopping experience is still designed for item shoppers.

But what about the power shoppers?

Yes, why aren’t power shoppers getting their needs met? They love shopping, they spend more time shopping, and they buy more than item shoppers. Well, until Stylaquin arrived, there was no way to have both experiences, the one that works for item shoppers, and the one that works for power shoppers, on the same website. (Actually there has never really been anything designed for power shoppers, but letting that go for now.) With Stylaquin, both kinds of shoppers can have their ideal shopping experience on the same website, without re-engineering.

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

What do power shoppers want?

Have you ever watched people shop? Really spent some time watching and thinking about the actual process of searching, sorting, trying/imagining, curating, selecting and buying? There’s a lot of brain engagement that goes into making a purchase for those who care about how things will look, fit, coordinate, delight, and fit into a budget. (Power shoppers!)

Browsing

Power shoppers like browsing and they want to have fun doing it. It’s that simple—power shoppers like looking at things they could buy. You’ve heard the phrase “Retail therapy”, it’s just a human thing to enjoy looking at things you can buy. Some clearly find it more therapeutic than others. Power shoppers LOVE browsing. Stylaquin’s Look Book feature lets them flip through a site like they flip through a magazine. It’s faster and more fun. It’s also intuitive and makes the experience more engaging. We are all slaves to the pleasure centers in our brains. We do more of the things we enjoy. Make the shopping experience more fun and engaging, and shoppers will come back for more.

Collecting and curating

One of the biggest problems power shoppers have is that it’s hard to collect and curate all their options before committing to the cart. Power shoppers will create lots of open tabs, one with each item they’re interested in. This isn’t an ideal shopping experience, but it gets the job done. Stylaquin solves that problem with the Idea Board. It’s both an interactive styling board and a wish list. Power shoppers can add all the things that interest them, move them around to see them together, change colors and sizes, and if they make the cut, add them to the cart right from the Idea Board. The items on the Idea Board remain there as long as the cookie is active so when shoppers revisit the site, they can pick up right where they left off. That’s why Stylaquin shoppers come back more often and buy more when they do.

Make your store power shopper friendly

If you’re on Shopify, it takes less than 15 minutes to add the Stylaquin app. The Look Book pages are created automatically, and the biggest decision you’ll have to make is what color you want to make the Stylaquin bar so it matches your website. (Of course you can change it whenever you want to.)

Power shoppers are the backbone of the e-commerce world, it’s time they got the love and shopping experience they deserve!