1. Put a picture at the top

    Pictures grab more attention than text. Since a usual bounce rate for a starting store is around 90% and even for established stores it’s easily above 60%-70%, adding a picture can help your sales. How?

    The bounce rate is the percentage of vistors leaving your store right away, without interacting. This happens mostly within a few seconds. They open your store and close it right away. People decide in split seconds if something is interesting for them or not. It’s human nature. When you walk in the desert, you have to decide if the thing before your legs is a snake or a stick as fast as you can, otherwise you might be dead.

    A picture is just a little more interesting and processable than text, so it can capture the visitor’s attention just a notch longer. If the picture is interesting, they might even stay and interact with your store, meaning they scroll down and look at your items.

    Videos (=moving pictures) grab even more attention than pictures alone, but beware. Videos are often bigger in file size and bigger size means your website (store) loads slower. The slower a website loads, the higher it’s bounce rate. You can test a few things. Add nothing to your store for a week. Add text for a week. Add BIG text to your store, add a picture, a video, text and a picture, a picture and a gif animation. Just do something.

    Did you know? In my dark room (paid section) of the site, you can find a long article about how to add pictures, gifs, even linked pictures to your store.

    I have changed my store significantly about 40 times in 3 years. I always try new things after a few weeks. My bounce rate has been as low as 50% and as high as 85%. I aim for 60%-65%.

    It’s important to leave any changes for a few days / weeks. Give it time. That is important to get a good sample on which you can base observations and it’s also important so your visitors can get used to it. We like to get used to things. The more we get used to things, the more we like them. In fact, the more often we merely see/hear something, the more we start to like it. It’s called the mere exposure effect.

    It is very important that you set up your google analytics beforehand, so you can actually track the bounce rate.

  2. Contrast / color

    Just like we pay more attention to pictures, we also see things more easily when there is contrast. Use this to your advantage. Introduce contrast in your store by choosing contrasting colors. See here for some examples from nature that you can take over. If you want to know which hex codes you need to enter these colors in your clipstore, install a browser addd on like ColorZilla (Chrome and Firefox, both browsers I recommend as well). I recommend installing it either way, because it’s useful like all the time.

  3.  Featured clips

    Clips4sale has a featured clips “feature”. It used to be in the CLIP STORE tab, where you can still see the link, but it has been changed recently. You have to go to “list clips” now and then there is a black star all the way to the right of each clip. If you click that black star, you can add that clip to your featured clips list.

    The clip will then appear at the top of your store, next to your top selling items table. I have found out that using it increases sales. I would recommend not to put too many clips in though, otherwise it will counter the effect of featuring certain clips. I don’t change the price or anything. I don’t choose certain clips either. Simply the fact that it’s a c4s site feature makes it have credible value to the customer. YOU can put up anything on top of your store, you know? But THIS can be seen in many stores, so it’s coming from c4s. So it can be trusted. That’s about the train of thought visitors could have, which makes this feature increase your sales.

    I have tested for months with and without and I recommend using it. Whether or not you only put your most expensive clips there or only your best or maybe the ones that didn’t sell yet – it’s up to you. I only ever put 4 clips up, because the space holds 5 and I wanted to make these 4 stand out, but since the recent changes, all of the clips I ever added are in there. I guess it’s a current bug. Anyway, use that featured clips option to your advantage.

  4. Email / feedback / contact opportunity

    In my opinion, you should add either your email, or the c4s built in feedback option (find it in CLIP STORE -> STORE ADD ONS, although it doesn’t seem to work at the moment) or any other means to contact you (like your twitter) at the top of your store. Some producers don’t want to be bothered by customers, but my personal opinion is that it’s mandatory. If you have broken clips, customers tell you. If you build up good relations, you can increase sales. If you hear about ideas, you can make better clips. If a customer wants a custom clips from you, they can easily find you. It makes you approachable.

    Be careful though. It’s easy to waste a lot of time chatting when you should be working. Customers can be charming but not spending, customers can be assholes and everything in between. There ARE pro’s and con’s to being available for contact. To me, the pro’s outweigh the con’s. So I recommend adding a contact option.

  5. What do you offer / what makes you unique?

    This is also tried and tested by me over several years. The customer should immediately see / read what makes you special. There are so many clipstores! You HAVE to have something that only you have or that you can do especially well or that you are famous for or… find something to advertise yourself.

    Preferrably something you also use in your clips. If you make foot fetish clips and you have large feet, tell them: “Good that found my foot fetish store, because I have extra large feet”. Or small feet. Or crazy toes. Or wrinkled soles. Or anything else that does not even have to be unique or special, but you just state it as if it were. Like gluten free plastic toys for kids. Or vegetarian tomatoes. Look around. The industry is always advertising things that make no sense. Just to give us the feeling that it’s special. Do the same. Be ordinarily special if you have to.

    If you have something really special, use that to your advantage. Make it immediately clear to your customers that your store holds something special.

 

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