Writing copy for online shopping sites

Dad's sixtieth birthday was drawing close. I desperately wanted to gift him something nice. But it was appraisal time. The big boss from headquarters was in town. I was working crazy hours to finish the huge pile of tasks assigned almost every day. My husband as usual was of no help. Try as I might I just couldn't take out time to shop for a nice gift.

That's when my colleague Jane advised me to try buying something online. I don't usually trust Jane for anything. She can come up with the silliest of advices. But she sounded sensible for once. Dad's a voracious reader. He laps up anything from economics and management to literature and fiction. I ordered three books on management (the reviews on the site were good) and got them shipped to him. And you can bet it, he loved his gift.

Online shopping sites are technology's panacea to the modern day's hectic schedules and absolute lack of time. It's just so easy. All you need to do is log on to your favorite shopping site, select your item from the huge range of available products, feed in your credit card details and finish the transaction. The shipment will be made available at your doorstep on the committed date. Besides the convenience of sitting at home and shopping for stuff, online shopping has a number of other benefits such as the wider choice, comparison of products on a wider scale etc.

Books are one of the things bought most online. However, clothes, shoes, and accessories are all very popular things bought online. Cosmetics, nutrition products, and groceries are increasingly being purchased online. About one fourth of travelers buy their plane tickets online.

Advantage Business

For businesses too, online shopping is a much more acceptable solution. Some of the benefits online shopping offers to business are:
  • Reduced costs by reducing the space, infrastructure and manpower cost
  • Greater geographical spread
  • Easy to introduce new products or even entirely new product categories with reduced overheads


Starting an online shopping site

At the very beginning, you must prepare a clear business plan. The backend and front end operations must be clearly defined. A clear idea must emerge regarding a ton of things such as what are going to be the deliverables, how they would be showcased, what payment methods would be applied, how the products would be delivered, what the customer service techniques would be, etc. Based on the business plan, the homepage would be designed. This is the most important page and key aspects of navigation would have to be taken into account.

Now is the role of the content writers. Content writers are absolute key to attracting visitors to the site and also to get these visitors to end up making substantial purchases. When online shoppers have a good first experience with a certain website, sixty percent of the time they will return to that website to buy more. A visitor's experience with the online shopping site depends to a great degree on how the content is handled. The content has to be well-structured and attractive. The language has to be easy and help connect easily with all sorts of visitors. The various functionalities need to be explained in user-friendly language. Good copy on the site should be used to make attractive banners to lead the visitor to various relevant pages. Online shopping sites would also need writers to write creative marketing copy to pitch to online shoppers.

Most important, the content on the site has to be SEO friendly. This is the most crucial thing to be able to attract visitors to the site. One third of people that shop online, use a search engine to find what they are looking for. Various aspects of SEO-friendly writing such as identifying and using right keywords, keyword density, relevance of topics, uniqueness of content etc have to be taken into account when designing content for any online shopping site. SEO-friendly content will ensure that your site gets ranked high by search engines such as Google and Yahoo with the appropriate keywords.

Getting the Content Done

Taking into consideration all these factors when getting content done for your site may be a difficult proposition. Hiring a writer or a team of writers for that matter could be an expensive option. The best way to handle this would be to get writers on hire for the particular project or task. You could get these writers by searching offline on sites such as Elance or Short Task. These writers are able to deliver quality work at extremely affordable rates. The sites would also need regular updates. You could assign tasks at the frequency you choose for the sections you think need to be updated to such writers on a task basis. Hiring writers on task basis also offers you a great deal of budgetary flexibility.