Have some new goals for the new year? Want to give your website a boost? Here are some easy ways to elevate your Punchmark website.
Spruce Up Your Product Grid
In brick-and-mortar stores, the most expensive shelf space to advertise on is the space directly next to the checkout and cash register. The reason being that the shopper is the closest they’ll ever be to making a purchase, and are the most open to the idea of making an additional purchase.
This concept can be applied to your jewelry website’s product grid. The story telling that each store is trying to convey to the shopper is perfectly at home for category and brand banners, and in-grid ads.
Creating a template for your banners, building each one, and then exporting them is any easy upgrade your product offerings immediately. Watch this video to learn exactly how to do that.
Turning On E-Commerce
Your jewelry website will never be COMPLETELY done. You will always want to add more landing pages, update product images, and rewrite page copy. That being said, getting the necessities in place, launching your site, and turning on E-commerce are some major steps that will help build momentum for your store.
To set-up E-commerce on your site, you will need to set up a ‘Merchant Gateway Account’ with Authorize.net, which will help you accept different forms of payment on the site. If you already have a credit card processor that you work with, they can usually help facilitate this process for you. Once you have set up your account, Punchmark will need the ‘Login ID’ and ‘Transaction Key’ that can be found in your account settings.
The final step will be to set up shipping options for your customers, which you can do from Sitemanager under Settings > Shipping. Typical options include Priority shipping, Overnight shipping, and Free Pickup In-store, which is already set up. Order notifications will be emailed to you, and appear on the site.
Important Tips
- Ensure that your Authorize.net fraud detection settings are set up how you would like, you may need to enable Discover cards, or alter the required billing information from a customer.
- In addition to traditional E-commerce, your Punchmark site can also be set to allow customers to check out by phone, if you are unsure if your site can do this, please contact Punchmark.
- We also offer integration with Clearsale for additional fraud protection, to learn more, visit https://www.clear.sale/
Intuitive Product Categories & Tags
We’ve already touched upon the importance of good product categories in our blog “5 Takeaways From the Biggest Online Retailers OUTSIDE of the Jewelry Industry” but we cannot over-stress how important it is.
If you look at how products are categorized on other jewelry websites, you will find that they are more generic at the top (Earrings), and filter down towards the more granular (Diamond Chandelier Earrings).
Having alternative ways to categorize your products, such as tagging them by their respective brand, or discount a few products and then adding Discounted/Specials to your navigation, can help users find the same product from a variety of paths. It can also help shoppers widen what they would be willing to purchase, as shopping by Brand presents the shopper with a mirriad of jewelry styles, not just “earrings”.
You can categorize and re-categorize your products by logging into your SiteManager > Commerce > Categories and then structuring out your jewelry categories.
From there you will need to map your products to the new categories.
If you have the Edge Point of Sale, go to SiteManager > Point of Sale > Category Mapping. You can then map your edge categories to the web categories you already have set up.
For all other products that need to be mapped, go to SiteManager > Commerce > Batch Processor to begin remapping your products. The Batch Processor is very useful tool, and can be used to perform a variety of tasks. You can learn more about that in this video.
Good Product Photos
Jewelry is a luxury item, and part of what defines luxury is the desire to buy it, even if you don’t quite NEED it. This is why your jewelry product photographs are so important, they are the first thing that is able to sway your shopper into making that impulse buy.
Displaying your products is a matter of taste, though there are some guidelines. Having at least one alternative view is helpful to convince your shopper that the product is real and what they are looking for. We recommend cropping them into a square and setting them on a white background, as most people agree that jewelry looks best on a plain white background. We always recommend the Gem Light Box by Piccup Media, as their lightbox consistently yields the best product shots.
Finally, for the overachievers among us, showing jewelry on a model is extremely helpful as an alternative view. This requires a lot more time investment, but for major jewelry stores, it is well worth it.
Get Serious About Digital Marketing
Look, this isn’t about to turn into a sales pitch. But the fact of the matter is that Punchmark website clients who use some sort of Digital Marketing strategy make over 90% of the platform’s online sales. Whether you use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to boost your store’s search ranking, or Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to bid on keywords, or Social Marketing on Facebook and Instagram to drive clicks, increasing your sales volume tends to rely on an increase in traffic.
Have questions about this? Contact our SEM Manager, Katie Kinlaw for a complimentary, no pressure talk about your website goals.
This post was written by Michael Burpoe, Lead UI/UX Designer at Punchmark. He’s originally from Saranac Lake, way up in the Adirondack Region of New York State. He is detail-oriented and loves breaking down complex tasks into approachable pieces.