An e-commerce store for digital products: increase the conversion rate in 4 steps

The market changed a lot since the coming of online sales and e-commerce marketing.

Other than just new mechanics, the possibility of selling digital products such as images, videos, books and software became available.

Selling this kind of product has a lot of advantages such as:

• No shipping fees – You won’t have to hire one or more people to take care of shippings, which will reduce the managing costs and imply no issues with lost items, other countries laws etc…
• Sell worldwide – Your product can be bought in one click from anywhere in the world, all customers need is an internet connection.
• No production costs – Or should I say: no further production costs. Once your product is created, you can sell it an endless amount of times with no further costs for materials or labor, which creates a passive revenue.

However, just like in any other kind of shop, it’s not enough to simply have uour product ready to be sold and just wait for our sales to increase: you need to take action.

So this is how to increase sales on your digital products store in four easy steps

Use a digital mockup for your product

Whether you sell music or ebooks, customers need some kind of visual recall to the physical product they would have searched for in the store next door.

A simple image doesn’t represent a product, it doesn’t tell its history and doesn’t give people an idea of the amount of work it took to be made.

Specifically, you should try to avoid making customers think: “Since I’m not buying anything physical, then why am I paying this much?” which is still deeply ingrained into the average customers’ mind.

Using a 3D cover of your product may boost sales up to 43%!

Offer a trial version

Offering a trial version or demo is one of the most common ways to spread knowledge about products and thus encourage customers to buy the full version.

It’s a system that may apply to any kind of digital product, for instance in the gaming industry, playable demos have been many new titles’ forte, from free demo cds on dedicated magazines to free downloadable demos these days.

Whatever your product is, you can offer this service: a few lines from an e-book (maybe ending on a cliffhanger in order to encourage customers to buy the whole product), a song from a specific album, a one-week trial for a program or online course.

This service is an effective catalyst of sales because of two reasons:

• Customers are not forced to buy a product before trying it, they are in fact able to test the quality of the service/product you are offering.
• By “donating” a part of your product, you will trigger the Principle of Reciprocity: one of the most powerful subconscious processes in the human mind is the one that makes us feel in debt when we receive a present, which makes us willing to reciprocate (often with something of higher value).

You can easily integrate this function on WooCommerce thanks to the WooCommerce Featured Audio & Video Content which allows you to upload video and audio files (just like you would with image files).

Give a present to your customers and wait for your own!

Use high definition images

I just mentioned that offering a preview for the product we intend to sell is very important.

A demo version is the best way to display a program, book or online course, but what if we deal in prints, pictures and images?

In this case it’s essential to display the best image you can offer, directly in the product page.

Let’s make this part clear: this is a good piece of advice for any kind of product. Thanks to big names such as Amazon, people are getting used to higher standards when they buy online.

They look for the best description, positive reviews and obviously, the best image.

If this is true for any other product, then imagine how much more important it is for products that are exactly the image you are displaying!

It would be pointless to sell a very high resolution picture with a bunch of pixels as a preview image.

You should aim for the opposite of that: show high resolution pictures, allow for customers to look at every detail of it and understand that we are selling high quality products and have nothing to hide.

The best way to do so is to provide customers with the appropriate tools, such as allowing them to zoom in and focus on a detail however they like.

Pro tip: if you use WooCommerce, you can easily add this function to your e-commerce store by using the WooCommerce Zoom Magnifier plugin.

One last piece of advice on this topic: sadly it’s easy to run into thieves and scammers on the internet, who could use your images for themselves (sometimes for illegal purpouses).

In order to protect yourself from these kind of situations, I recommend you apply a watermark on the images you display, in order to prevent it from being users elsewhere with no indication of its origins:

You can use this function automatically, in case you own a WooCommerce based e-commerce store, thanks to the WooCommerce Watermark plugin.

This allows you to display your product in the best way with no fear of it being copied or stolen!

Offer a refund policy

Digital products don’t always have refund policies, since these products cannot be damaged during the shipping or production processes and what we are selling is generally very clear.

That’s why showing that you are open to refund policies in case of issues of any kind can be a great way to obtain customers’ trust with very little effort.

You are going to look professional and open to customers and, even in the unlucky case you may actually have to refund someone, you won’t have to lose money on shipping fees.

This step is particularly effective when selling online courses: think about the trust an online course that comes with a “satisfaction guarantee” policy could inspire!

These were the 4 steps to take in order to drastically improve your sales starting today.