There are two pages every Shopify store I’ve ever set up has: a Contact Page and an About Page. (If I can toot my own horn, we totally nailed our own Contact page. It gets more compliments than any other page on our site.) If you’re like many people, you’ve struggled to write an about page because you don’t know what to put on it. But more importantly, you don’t know what to put on it because you don’t really know the purpose of the page.
I’m going to clear up both of those things for you.
I was talking to my friend Jordan Gal from CartHook about some of his experiences running a wildly successful ecommerce store with his brothers, and he shared with me an anecdote that gave me an ah-ha moment.
Jordan had LiveChat on his site, and it let him track people in real-time. And by doing that, they quickly noticed a pattern: shoppers would find a product and add it to their cart. (At this point they’ve decided they want to buy that product.) Once in the cart, some folks would proceed to checkout, and others would do something strange: they’d visit the about page. This is because they were making a second and often overlooked decision: “Yes, I want to buy this item, but do I want to buy it from this store?”
Think about it, when you’re in a brick & mortar store, you know it’s a legitimate operation. Leases were signed, licenses paid for, etc. The web doesn’t have that same implicit trust factor. No matter how nice the website is, if the visitor hasn’t heard of it before, it inspires about as much implicit trust as a guy selling t-shirts out of a van in the parking lot.
So in lieu of any physical location to visit, some visitors may visit the about page to get a sense of how trustworthy you are. (And why not, your website is, after all, an anonymous stranger asking for their credit card number in the dim parking lot of the internet.) So the first and foremost thing to do on your About page is to introduce yourself. Get out of the shadows, and include your photo, and a little bit about yourself. How did you come to run an ecommerce store? What do you love about it? Things that personalize you. Then go a step further in building trust and include your store’s contact information. A toll-free number especially boosts trust. Being accessible is important.
After you’ve given the visitor a sense of who you are with your about page and how to get ahold of you, they may start to wonder about what a relationship is like with you. This is where you trot out everything you have that minimizes risk for the customer:
- Guarantees
- Easy Returns
- Free Shipping
- Guaranteed Fast Shipping
- And even Testimonials
When you offer all of the above, you’re going the extra step that your competitors haven’t. A customer choosing between two sites, may go with the more expensive site if it’s more trustworthy. So get out there and update your About page. It may only take you 15 minutes and it could boost your conversion rate.