Optimize luxury ecommerce websites
Optimize luxury ecommerce websites
1. Communicate feelings using imagery, descriptions, and website design.
Design your website to feel luxurious by avoiding stock photos, minimizing interruptions, clutter, and cheap tactics, and using more white space. Convey what a store clerk would say about your product through images and product descriptions. Imagery and descriptions should impart what your customer would want to see, touch, and feel if they were looking at the product in person. For example, Farfetch provides pictures of the items, and allows customers to zoom in to communicate the texture of the item.
2. Minimize your use of pricing tactics like discounts and price-based promotions to avoid reducing the perceived value of your brand.
Have very few sales per year to avoid training your customers to only buy when items are discounted.
3. Offer value-based promotions to incentivize your customer to buy now.
For example, offer additional value to the customer’s non-discounted purchase in the form of free shipping, engraving, personalization, or gift wrapping.
4. Focus on the scarcity of your product.
Scarcity should always be real and professional. For example, information-based scarcity is commonly conveyed by a limited quantities available message.
5. Communicate the exclusivity of your brand through the influencers your brand works with, the prices of your products, or limiting product availability using limited edition collections or waitlists.
Exclusivity is the common denominator for all four types of luxury buyers. It is key to emphasize that the product being sold is not for everyone.
6. Concentrate on what the customer is getting from your product, both in features and in feeling.
Imagery encouraging touch, or “ownership imagery” increases the perceived value and encourages ownership of the product. When selling clothes, jewelry and personal goods, use pictures of a model wearing the item to show fit, and pictures of the item without a model to encourage the customer to imagine owning and wearing the product themselves.
7. Match the price to the perceived value of your product.
Selling based on emotions will create friction and possible post-purchase rationalization. It is important to use alibis, the logical justifications customers can use to convince themselves to buy a product, and reassure them they are making the right decision. For example, alibis for a Louis Vuitton bag could include exceptional craftsmanship, the finest leather, a warranty or a mention that the bag will stand the test of time.