In this day and age one thing is clear: consumers want features, specifics, numbers and as much nitty-gritty details as they can get before making purchases online. After all, aside from a few pictures and recommendations from friends, it’s ultimately the information – more importantly, how you present it - on your site that determines the fate of the sale. Now, back at the infancy of e-commerce, most stores handled information about products with a brief paragraph generally labeled “Description”. Description was essentially a Wild West of information; if you wanted to know: item contents, weight, availability, warranty, material or any other specification/detail you were expected to peer through the description. Their really were no standards for item descriptions so the best shoppers could hope for were bulleted lists separating sections of information. To make matters worse, most stores varied the format from product to product even when the items were nearly identical! Sadly even today for about 98% of current e-commerce sites, description fields/areas still remain the same gumbo of information where store owners expect shoppers to go in exploring product descriptions without any sense of direction. Stores owners also continue to assume customers will “call in if they need help”; effectively killing the “e” in e-commerce.
What if things we could change the way things have been done? How about organizing information so that it’s easy for you to manage, maintain, and also easier for shoppers to understand while being consistent and uniform through out your site? At Simrun, we feel we have the answer: Attribute Manager. Attribute Manager is an out-of-the-box approach to tackling the dreaded description problem by allowing store administrators to create separate fields or attributes which define specifications and details for each type of product in your store. Think of it as having separate fields for information the same way price, shipping weight, and availability have traditionally been kept separate form the description.
Here is an example. if you want to sell sunglasses and you should specify:
- Brand
- Style
- Material
- Lens Type
- Frame Color
Here is an example displaying attributes in a easy to read tabular form. Image courtesy of Visioninstyle.com
It’s highly unlikely your e-commerce cart has built in fields for these attributes; at best it might have color or size. The Attribute Manager on the other allows you to create a sunglass product type with the attributes you specify making sure your shoppers always have detailed information for all of the sunglasses you sell. You can even group attributes together and specify unit types such as “$” or inches. Now not only will all of your sunglasses have accurate information but it will also be consistent through out the store making it a lot easier to shop; e.g. if a customer knows they can only wear a certain “Lens Type” they will look straight at the Lens Type column and skip to the next product if it doesn’t meet their requirements.
The Attribute Manager is built into the Admin and resembles familiar ASPDNSF components
The Attribute Manager eliminates the cluttered, unorganized, and out-dated description handling with a modern concise, consistent, and efficient way of displaying information. Adding Attribute Manager to your store is sure to make your bounce rate drop and increase Sales. Contact your Simrun representative for more information about Attribute Manager to see how you can push Attribute Manager to the max with our Power Search w/Filters and Product Compare enhancements.