Tagline

A tagline helps users immediately understand the store is all about. It’s typically short, just a few words. You can often see it right below the logo, or in a row above the logo. While most people treat taglines as an afterthought, you need to take your time. A bad tagline can do more harm than good. Make sure yours is eye-catchingly good.

USP

Blending in is the worst thing that you can ever do in business. Beating the competition requires something that sets you apart from them. A USP (unique selling proposition) differentiates whatever you’re offering from generic product 123. A USP is more than a slogan, it’s a guiding philosophy.

Death Wish Coffee claims to sell the world’s strongest coffee while Saddleback offers 100-year-warranties on its leather products. These may be pretty grandiose claims but the brands are safe as long as they prove true to their hype.

What matters is that they get to stand out from a sea of competitors and capture those sweet customer dollars for themselves while their less imaginative rivals languish in obscurity and irrelevance. In business, irrelevance is death.

This comes with a natural disclaimer: do not make claims you can’t live up to. I believe the legal types call that fraud.

Other famous USPs include:

Zappos’s free returns policy
Toms Shoes’ charity model
Robinhood’s commission-free trading
Amazon Prime’s expedited shipping

Satisfaction Guarantee

“Goods once sold cannot be reaccepted,” was a common disclaimer on many receipts of yesteryears. While this is a pretty reasonable policy to have in a brick and mortar store, it won’t cut it in a web store.

People can’t see or touch the product, and naturally mistakes will be made. An item of clothing may not fit, or it may be the wrong fabric, or maybe it’s just made to fit the bodies of models rather than normal humans whose bellies aren’t as flat.

Sometimes a product simply fails to meet expectations. A satisfaction guarantee eliminates that risk for the customer and encourages them to try your product. It’s the reason why free trials are so popular with software vendors. Slack converted 30% of their free users to premium in 2014.

Some data:

37% of online shoppers want a ‘try before you buy’ option
74% feel a ‘try before you buy’ option would eliminate a major drawback from online shopping.
A 2012 study found that free returns can boost sales by 357%

Remember: Ecommerce return rates stand at around 20% so you should take steps to protect yourself from abuse because this will totally happen. You can limit the return window to a reasonable period of time after purchase and offer only partial guarantees for items like clothing which have displayed the most cases of fraud with the practice of wardrobing. You can also flag customers with higher than normal rates of return.

Offers or promotions

Everybody loves a sale so offers or promotions should be placed in the first row, at the top of the page. Visibility is important as they are effective ways of driving short term sales. A 20% discount range has been shown to be adequate but 50% is the sweet spot if you can afford it.